The man behind Brazil's mobs

Marcola

The gang that has terrorised Brazil's Sao Paulo state for four days has used discipline, technology and business alliances to gain a near monopoly on organised crime.

The First Command of the Capital gang, or PCC, has orchestrated around 50 prison uprisings and more than 150 attacks on police and civilian targets since Saturday, using clandestine phone banks that allow imprisoned leaders to communicate using smuggled cellular telephones. At least 155 people have died.

Willians Herbas Camacho, or Marcola, the PCC's leader, ordered the uprisings to protest his transfer and those of five lieutenants to a super-maximum security prison, partly because the shift would sever or impair their ability to communicate, and run the syndicate.

Many crime experts declared the PCC dead in 2002 after heavy police repression and an internecine war that killed 15 of its directors. But since his ascension in 2003, Marcola has reorganised the PCC and won a reputation as a savvy innovator.

"Marcola was the mind that put the new structure together," said Bruno Paes Manso, a crime researcher and author of a book about Sao Paulo hitmen.

Born in the crowded state prison system in 1993, the PCC in the past three years has heavily invested outside the jailhouse walls.

Having perceived how power struggles between criminal gangs in Rio de Janeiro interfered with business, Marcola uses alliances to thwart the creation of major rivals. That has turned the PCC into a crime monopoly in Brazil's wealthiest and most populous state.

- REUTERS