Alex Cuadros - Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil

Brazillionaires

ALEX CUADROS is a freelance journalist and writer based in New York. He spent six years living in So Paulo and has written for the Nation, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Slate and Bloomberg, where he was a dedicated billionaires reporter. This is his first book.

ALEX CUADROS

BRAZILLIONAIRES

THE GODFATHERS of MODERN BRAZIL

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London WC1X 9HD

www.profilebooks.com

First published in the United States of America in 2016 by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

Copyright Alex Cuadros, 2016

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Design by Barbara Backman

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 78283 125 9

To the memory of my godfather,

DAVID SULLIVAN

Why deny it? I had a passion for showiness, for billboards, for pyrotechnics. Perhaps the modest will reproach me for this defect; I trust, however, that people of discernment will acknowledge my talent. Thus my idea, like a medal, had two sides, one turned towards the public, the other towards me. On one side, altruism and profit; on the other, thirst for fame. Or rather, let us say, love of glory.

MACHADO DE ASSIS,

Memrias Pstumas de Brs Cubas
(trans. William Grossman)

PROLOGUE

THE CRASH

O N A STRETCH OF HIGHWAY NOT FAR FROM RIO DE JANEIRO, a silver SLR McLaren idled on the shoulder, its futuristic door hinged open at the top like a wing extended toward the evening sky. The warning lights blinked yellow. In the drivers seat, a twenty-year-old kid named Thor sat spattered with blood. The windshield sagged inward, weirdly limp, spiderwebbed with cracks, half-detached from the roof, and in the cars nose, a perfect round hole gaped where the Mercedes-Benz symbol had been dislodged. Along the hood, a zigzag of thin, dusty tread marks traced the improbable dance of a bicycle tire.

Thor and his passenger had been driving back from a steakhouse in Petrpolis, the old summer retreat of Pedro II, the Brazilian emperor. They were on a highway that winds south toward Rio from mountains blanketed in rain forest so dense the trees look heaped on one another. Coming into the lowlands, shacks of dull red cinderblock cluster along the road. Landslides during the summer rains sometimes carry these homes away; once the ground hardens, their residents rebuild them.

Wanderson Pereira dos Santos was from here. He unloaded trucks for a living. His bicycle lay in a gully by the road, the red frame bent up, back tire curled in on itself like a wilted flower. Hed been pedaling from the store, on his way home to celebrate his wifes birthday, when Thors car struck him. The impact tossed his body two hundred feet down the road. His left foot was torn off, his left arm too. His chest split open; police would later find his heart inside the McLaren.

As Thor and his friend sat dazed in their seats, a med student in a Ford pulled up alongside them and said, You just killed that guy back there. He had no idea then that Thors dad was Eike Batista, the richest man in Brazil. The McLarens license plate read EIK-0063; sixty-three was Eikes lucky number.

Other drivers stopped at the scene. Someone called an ambulance. Thor felt steady enough to emerge from the McLaren, and his bodyguards, whod lagged behind in their pickup truck, took him and his friend to a first aid station a couple of miles down the road. There a nurse looked at Thor and sent him on his wayapart from some nicks from broken glass, the blood on him wasnt his. But he didnt go back to the crash site just yet. Instead he went thirty miles into Rio proper and stopped at home before returning to the highway with his dads lawyer Flvio Godinho. A bodyguard drove them now.

Two miles from the crash site, Thor stopped at a roadside police station where the lights of emergency vehicles flashed. He blew zero on a Breathalyzer and gave a written statementhed been rounding a curve down an unlit hill when all of a sudden in the middle of the road this cyclist appeared, dragging his left foot inexplicably on the ground; Thor braked right away, but it was too late. The officers asked him to go downtown for questioning, but Godinho wanted to avoid the circus of reporters who would show up. They relented. Though theyd spent just a couple of hours examining the McLaren, Godinho even persuaded them to let him tow it away on the condition he wouldnt alter or destroy any evidence. Wandersons body was removed from the scene just as quickly. His widows lawyer later said, Ive never seen the state work so fast.

That was March 17, 2012. The next day the crash was all over the Brazilian press.

THIS EVERYDAY TRAFFIC DEATH became national news because Eike Batista, Thors father, was more than just a major businessman. When he wasnt making headlines for some new ventureand he always had new ones in those days, whether in oil and gas or microchips or goldthen you found him in the gossip pages. One day hed host the president at his Manhattan-size port project, the next hed be on TV talking about the thirty-five-thousand-dollar treatment that restored hair to his balding head. His ex-wife, Luma de Oliveira, was a carnaval queen and Playboy cover girl. He was so big that Brazilians knew him just by his first name: Eike. He seemed at times everywhere at once in his bright pink tie. Paparazzi would shoot him jogging, flanked by bodyguards, around Rios Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoonwhich hed paid to depollutenot far from the mansion where, before passing it on to Thor, hed kept that silver McLaren in one of his living rooms. One of a dozen of its kind in Brazil, the car cost him 1.2 million euros.

In a deposition a few days after the crash, Thor insisted hed obeyed the 110-kilometer-an-hour speed limitabout 68 miles an hour. Thors lawyers touted an autopsy revealing alcohol in Wandersons blood. But the med student whod been driving behind Thor told investigators the McLaren had zigzagged past him like in a police chase. Reporters discovered that Thor had racked up eleven traffic violations in the previous eighteen months, most for speeding, and enough that his license should have been taken away, if not for Brazils sluggish bureaucracy. Even more damning, it turned out that Thor had driven his Audi into an eighty-six-year-old cyclist on a Rio street a year earlier, breaking his hip. Eike had paid the medical bills and the family had kept quiet until now. One of the old mans children said, We were just worried about saving our father, who didnt want any confuso. In Portuguese the word means confusion, also trouble.

Eike paid four thousand dollars for Wandersons funeral. The burial took place on a gray day in the cemetery in the village of Xerm, not far from the length of asphalt where Wanderson had died. A half-dozen friends, none wearing suits, some in shorts and flip-flops, carried the lacquered casket up a concrete walkway, past proper stone tombs, to an empty grave on a muddy slope. A throng of reporters followed them snapping pictures. Wandersons aunt gave interviews. Shed raised him. Hed never met his dad, and his mom, a drunk, had abandoned him when he was a kid. A mortician, the aunt said, had reconstructed his face for the funeral. News stories often ran two photos together: Thor, with fair skin and a highlighted flop of hair, and Wanderson, skinny and black, his shaved head sometimes covered by a baseball cap.