Surprised when he was on the terrace of a hotel in Budapest, Hungary, at a time when the security that accompanied him had gone to the bathroom, the former Brazilian major Sérgio de Carvalho, known as the ‘Brazilian Escobar’, was captured this fair Tuesday. For the police. The news is being advanced by Jornal de Notícias and Correio da Manhã.
The former commander of the Brazilian Military Police is considered one of the largest cocaine traffickers in the world and had been a fugitive from the Portuguese authorities for about two years. In 2020, the Portuguese and Brazilian authorities seized 11.7 million euros in a van in Lisbon and about 40 planes in Brazil, launching an investigation into the drug trafficker. Now he was found in Hungary with a forged Mexican passport. The arrest was the result of a collaboration of police from different countries, including the Portuguese PJ and Europol.
Before going to Hungary, Sérgio de Carvalho, 62, lived in Lisbon for almost two years without being detected, despite having international arrest warrants. In the Portuguese capital he used three false identities and lived in two apartments, between 2019 and 2020, which would be worth about 2.5 million euros -on Avenida da Liberdade and Avenida da República-.
In late 2020, he again slipped under the radar of the authorities in a search and arrest operation carried out by the Brazilian Federal Police and European police. JN says that rumors have since circulated that the drug trafficker, a Brazilian national, had been to the Azores or Dubai.
Correio da Manhã said, in turn, that Sérgio de Carvalho should be extradited to Brazil, but tried in Portugal for money laundering. The former commander had already been arrested twice in Brazil for drug trafficking. The Federal Police believe that the drug trafficking network has sent, since 2017, 50 tons of cocaine to Europe, worth 360 million euros.
Early last year, JN reported that after serving time in Brazil, Sérgio de Carvalho was living in Spain, where he assumed a false identity: Paul Wouter, a businessman from Guyana, with a Surinamese passport. There he saw the business grow, but it did not go unnoticed for long: the Spanish authorities would come to investigate it and he was sentenced to 13 years and six months in prison. But the investigation came to an end after the news, falsely given by his lawyer, of the drug trafficker’s death from Covid-19. At that time, says the newspaper, the “elder” would already be in Portugal.
Sérgio de Carvalho also made headlines in March of last year because the Brazilian Judicial Police and the Federal Police believed that the more than 500 kilos of cocaine seized in Brazil aboard a private jet, which was followed by the former president of Boavista, João Loureiro , belonged to the former commander’s network.
Authorities believe that the drug from João Loureiro’s plane would come from “Brazilian Escobar”
Source: Observadora
