The drug barons have found their way into many walks of Brazilian life. They serve the favelas of Rio and Sao Paulo as rhythmic Robin Hoods, taking what they can from the rich and distributing what they please to the rest. They are faithful customers for illegal firearms, a booming commodity. They practically run the prison systems. But less celebrated is their role in the entertainment business.
The drug lords are present at every favela ball. They serve as hosts, security and managers rolled into one. They pay the DJs and sound crews, keep an eye out for the police or the “Germans” (rival gangs) and do a bit of business in the shadows. You might call it vertically integrated, enlightened corporate self-interest. Criminals bankroll the bailes as a pro bono offering to the communities where they hide and operate. And with 3,000 or more hormonally charged teenagers tripping the strobe-light fantastic, return on investment is handsome. “Sure we sell drugs, and that’s wrong. But we also make sure to keep things cool,” reasons one field marshal, packing a nickel-plated pistol at his hip. He waves a mobile phone at the undulating youngsters who have jammed Rio’s biggest favela. Perhaps 20 of his soldiers, armed with machine guns and walkie-talkies, are keeping the peace at tonight’s dance at the Complexo da Mare.
As a genre, funk has got a bad rap. But from samba to soul, most popular music was born on the “wrong” side of town. A handful of honest artists, Moog masters and entrepreneurs have made a handsome living (and some, a killing) out of the funk delirium. Funk’s rapacious impresarios haven’t helped matters. The early balls featured lascivious choreography and ultra-X-rated lyrics, but especially violence. At their worst, funk balls became fight clubs, where two rival galeras squared off, separated by an imaginary death corridor. Venturing into it meant certain punishment and, occasionally, death. Promoters, with their eye on ticket sales, energetically exploited the viciousness.
Then a band of courageous police and prosecutors probed the brutal world of funk, often at high peril. Civil Police detective Cristina Lomba de Araujo, who went undercover to investigate the powerful funk underworld, has lost count of the number of death threats she received. Even today, on other assignments, she never goes anywhere–not even to the bathroom, says a fellow detective–without a gun. After outsmarting an ambush plot last year, Lomba quickly moved out of her apartment and transferred her daughter to another school. “A lot of people would like to see me gone,” she says.
Thanks to the work of Lomba and her colleagues–who inspired lawmakers to ban the “corridor of death”–the gratuitous violence in the funk clubs is history. Now even the sons and daughters of the comfortable classes seek out the balls in Daddy’s car–though usually in safer neighborhoods than the favelas.
Even the cops avoid funk in the favelas. But if, by chance, any of the more privileged fans stray into the slums, where funk fever runs hottest, not to worry. “Nope, there’s no trouble here,” says one guard-cum-PR man for the Third Command, the drug gang that makes the rules in the Complexo da Mare. “If someone starts a fight we go over and have a word with him, and maybe ask him to leave.” Tall and tidily dressed, with an AK-47 on his shoulder and a heavy toolbelt–holding a silver 9-mm pistol and an M3 grenade–he doesn’t look like a man you’d want to argue with.
