Terror for Beija-Flor director

And the ugly side of Rio rears its head. Laíla, the revered director and carnavalesco of Beija-Flor, was carjacked and kidnapped by 4 armed thugs tonight. He'd just been leaving the Beija-Flor & Imperio party at the Cidade de Samba, and was preparing for Beija-Flor's victory parade in the Parade of Champions tomorrow night, when, in a classic Rio carjacking, a silver car cut off his own car and forced it to stop, and 4 armed men leaped out and jumped into his car.

Later, a still shaken Laíla described: "I asked them to let me live. That's all I said." They put him in the back seat between 2 men who kept their pistols aimed at him while they drove to a nearby favela. "It was all so fast. I was so nervous that I don't remember the model of the car and I don't think I could describe the men." [Interesting.] The men stole his Chevy Blazer, his cell phone, and... a set of tickets for the Parade of Champions.

They didn't recognize him, so he told them he was the director of Beija-Flor. To which one of the criminals replied the dread words:

"Sou Mangueirense." [I'm a Mangueira fan.]

Oh no!!!

And yet somehow he convinced them to let him go. (You've got to wonder about the bit about "I can't describe them or their car"...) They actually gave him thirty reais and put him in a taxi. Laila told the cabdriver to take him straight to the Cidade de Samba.

Meanwhile, reporters from O Dia had, quite coincidentally, been trying to reach Laila about some Beija-Flor news. And somebody answered Laila's cell phone. O Dia routinely records their phone calls, and so, there's an extraordinary recording, with transcript of the following conversation on the O Dia website:

Reporter: Laila?
Robber: Hey! I'm not Laila, no! I robbed him!

Reporter: Is this a joke?
Robber: What do you mean? Are you crazy? I told you I robbed him!

Reporter: Where is he? What did you do with him?
Robber: We let him go on the Avenida Brasil. We wanted to kill him, though!

(connection dropped. 2nd reporter calls.)

Robber: Hello! Who do you want to talk to?
Reporter: Laila.

Robber: Laila's taking care of a little problem, ok? I'm the one who stole his car.

(connection dropped again. 3rd reporter calls.)

Reporter: You wanted to kill Laila?
Robber: Laila's fine, I put him in a cab, ok? He already left, he was robbed, ok, idiot?

Reporter: Was it you that robbed him?
Robber: No, it was my mother. My mother went down the highway to rob him.

Reporter: You wanted to kill him?
Robber: The bastard ... I would have killed...

Reporter: You knew who he is?
Robber: I knew.

Reporter: You're a mangueirense, right?
Robber: Yes.

Reporter: You saw him and you recognized him? Seriously?
Robber: Seriously, man, I scared him to death, I said "Hey you're Laila, but I root for Mangueira... you're going to die!"

[transcript continues... it got so slangy I can't translate all the rest of it]

What leapt out from this transcript to me was the joy and rage these guys took in scaring Laila half to death. Their pride in being able to terrify and kill at whim. And their absolute disregard for human life.

I've been so lucky in Rio that I forget sometimes how brutally violent it can be. Cidade de Deus doesn't show the half of it.

Laila attributes his escape to the saints, and the saint's beads that he always wears around his neck. "I'm not a devotee of any specific one. I pray to them all. The catholics and the candomble ones too." He says he will continue to travel through Rio without bodyguards, though he adds he'll also pray to "Papai no Ceu" (Father in Heaven) for this to never happen again. And tomorrow he will put it all aside and do the Parade of Champions.