The Best American Crime Writing (49 page)

Some of the men brought their motorcycle helmets to Santana. Others had cut their wives’ and mothers’ pantyhose to make masks. Rubens, 20, had gotten use of his boss’s boat, a twenty-foot wooden
catraia
, the most common kind of boat on the Amazon. The men pooled their money, bought five reals’ ($2.15) worth of gas, and then pointed the boat toward the ocean. At close to ten o’clock, Rubens drew the
catraia
flush with the far side of the
Seamaster
, away from the lights of Macapà so that only the monkeys and birds of the jungle could have seen the men climb on board. He killed the motor and lashed the
catraia
to Blake’s boat. As always in Macapà, it was hot and windy, and the water, which carries so much silt it looks like roiling, molten peanut butter, was covered in baby whitecaps. The six of them sat quietly for a few minutes, observing the crew. Everyone on the
Seamaster
was listening to
what Ricardo called “loud foreign music.” Some of them were dancing, and many of them were talking in loud foreign voices.

The first two aboard were Ricardo and Isael, each with a 7.65-millimeter pistol; Reney, Josué, and José followed. Rubens stayed in the boat and waited for the getaway. Almost immediately, things got complicated. “This is a robbery!” Ricardo screamed. “Everyone get down on the floor!” But the crew did not speak any Portuguese and didn’t seem to understand what these men were doing on their boat, wearing stocking masks and waving guns. One of the crewmen tossed a can of beer at the intruders. Someone else threw a jar of mayonnaise at them.

Later, none of the crew would talk specifically about what happened that night; they were worried about the effects it might have on the trial, which, when this story was written, was still in progress. According to one person on the boat, “The crew were totally out of their depth. When someone comes on board with a gun, there’s a certain script you’re supposed to follow, and they didn’t follow it. It could have been worse than it was.”

Rodger Moore, 55, decided to fight. He pushed Ricardo, and Ricardo shoved back. The operation seemed on the verge of chaos, so Ricardo pistol-whipped Moore and knocked him out. While Ricardo herded the rest of the crew together, he saw a tall white man run downstairs. He figured the man was going to radio for help and sent Isael to follow him.

As soon as he saw Moore being pistol-whipped, Blake had turned and gone downstairs. One of the crew members heard him saying, “Is this for real?” Blake was going for the Winchester .308 rifle he kept in his cabin. Before he and his wife, Pippa, had left on their honeymoon, sailing around the pirate-rich Red Sea in 1979, Blake had trained on a rifle range so he could protect them.

David Alan-Williams says, “Peter was always quick to identify a problem, and he’d often fix it himself. If something was wrong at
the top of the mast, he was the first to go up there, even if the boat was pitching back and forth in storm conditions.”

Leon Sefton had been below deck reading a book when he heard the commotion. He got up to investigate, and as he neared the stairs he saw Isael, short and taut, with a mask obscuring his face. Isael pointed his pistol at Sefton’s head and Sefton got on the ground. Then Blake’s cabin door opened, and he came out. He leveled his gun at Isael and said, “Get the fuck off my boat.”

Sefton watched Isael break for the deck and, in a moment, Sefton heard shots. He can’t say who shot first; he doesn’t know the sounds of guns well enough. A spokesman for the federal police says, “Probably it was Peter Blake who shot the first time. Maybe if Mr. Blake did not shoot, maybe if he did not have a gun, maybe the criminals would not have shot anyone.” But the prosecutor trying the case says, “Isael behaved as if he were leaving the boat, and Peter Blake followed him. Then, once he got to the top of the stairs, Isael turned and shot at Peter Blake.”

One way or another, Isael and Blake began shooting at each other, Isael at the top of the stairs and Blake behind the wall at the bottom, turning to shoot upward. Rubens, in the
catraia
, heard the gunfire, jumped into the river, and hid beneath his boat. In the confusion, the Brazilian cook got into the control room, locked the door, and radioed for help, but the radio was still tuned to the wrong frequency and he could raise only the harbormaster in Manaus, nearly a thousand miles away.

Isael’s bullets made holes in the aluminum walls of the cabin, and shots from Blake’s Winchester tore through the canopy. Blake hit Isael in two places—piercing his forearm and blowing off two fingers. The prosecutor says this was a show of both Blake’s restraint and, as he would write in the indictment, “utmost precision.” A defense lawyer says that Blake shot at Isael point-blank, and would have killed him had he been sober. After Isael was hit, Ricardo ran to the stairway and began shooting into the cabin.

Sefton saw Blake banging his gun against the floor. He tried to give him some extra ammunition, but Blake said he didn’t need it—his gun was jammed. Sefton went back down the hall again, and when he came back a minute later he found Blake on the floor, shot in the back. The police say Ricardo confessed to shooting Blake, but he later denied it.

A few of the criminals kept watch over the crew, who were lying on the deck, while Ricardo and Isael gathered what they could—some cameras, a couple of Omega Seamaster watches, CDs, and Blake’s Winchester. They took one of the
Seamaster’
s dinghies, a rigid-hull inflatable Zodiac, and made their escape in two boats. They fired back at the
Seamaster
(they claim someone was shooting at them with a second rifle) and grazed Geoff Bullock across the back. As they were making their getaway, Reney said to Ricardo, “Why did you shoot [Blake]!” and Ricardo said, “It was either me or him.”

Peter Blake lay at the foot of the stairs, bleeding from twin holes in his back. The boat was quieter now, and the movement of water was audible. At its mouth, the Amazon is tidal, and the river was now flowing backward, raising the
Seamaster
five feet an hour. Sefton found Blake with his head cocked awkwardly to the side. He straightened it and watched as Blake took a few labored breaths. One bullet had traveled through his left lung and superior vena cava and come to rest just under the skin of his armpit; the other had pierced his lungs and aorta, and remained in his upper right chest. Either one would have been enough to kill him, says Dr. Carlos Marcos Santos, who arrived on the
Seamaster
at 10:40 and tried to resuscitate him. He estimates that it took Blake about fifteen minutes to die. He says that Blake had alcohol on his breath (though the crew says he wasn’t drinking on the boat), and that the others seemed very drunk—unsteady on their feet, bleary-eyed, slurring.

“When I got there, Mr. Blake was faceup, below deck,” Dr.
Marco says. “He was wearing shorts, either blue or khaki, I can’t remember. And no shirt. You could tell he had a great deal of strength for a man his age. But he was out of shape. He had a prominent belly. His face had seen the sun, you could tell that. There were many deep, permanent lines around the eyes.”

At near 11:00
P.M.
, Marcos pronounced Blake dead. As they were taking the body off the boat, Rizaldo, the cook, said to the doctor, “These guys have no idea what they have done. He is a national hero, like Pelé is to this country. Everybody loves him. They have no idea what they’ve done.”

The news of Blake’s death reached the rest of the world in the morning. In England, where Blake had been knighted for his accomplishments,
The Daily Telegraph
wrote that “Blake towered over the sport” of sailing. In New Zealand, Parliament was canceled for the day and the government flew at half-staff a pair of red socks—Blake had worn red socks nearly every time he raced. The prime minister, Helen Clark, speaking at a memorial two weeks later, said, “He put New Zealand on the map.”

I asked Robertson if he had any regrets about the way things happened that night in Macapá. “No. There’s no way any of us can replay the scenario and say, Well, we were responsible, or, We could have done more. Or could’ve done less. I’m sure people must have horrible experiences when somebody dies and the last thing they remember is that they had an argument. But we were having such a good time.”

One well-known character in the yachting world, who didn’t want his name used, says, “Blake was a tough guy. A very tough guy. The kind who wouldn’t have handed over his wallet without a fight. Hearing the circumstances, it wasn’t surprising. Like a lot of Kiwis, he didn’t take a lot of crap. It was part of his skill as a leader, but it was also part of his downfall.”

A week after the murder, when all six suspects have been arrested, Marcelo, the translator, takes me driving through the neighborhoods where they grew up. They are suburbs that have evolved organically, small wooden houses with which the electric/water/civil-service grid is struggling to keep up. The men are mostly in flip-flops and soccer shorts. But the women wear very stylish and sexy clothes. One girl looks particularly elegant, sitting sidesaddle on the back of a bike in a sheer black skirt, black shirt, and black stilettos, heading down a dirt road under the waning equatorial sun.

Another thing you notice is the kites. Big red kites and little black kites and even those cheap plastic bags dispensed at every shop the world over. Telephone wires holding the skeletons of old kites, frozen in their death like inmates zapped while trying to climb the electric fence. Maybe it’s just that the conditions are perfect: It’s always sunny, warm, and windy, and there are always plenty of little kids and plastic bags to go around.

José, one of the two so-called pirates who didn’t have a record, lived in one of the better neighborhoods. His parents’ house is just a few blocks from his, and they’ve agreed to be interviewed because they don’t want people to think José is a hardened criminal.

We sit on the concrete patio in front of their house. There’s a little plastic Christmas tree on a table in the corner, and the family Volkswagen has been pulled up onto the patio, blocking the front door. José’s parents, a teacher and a retired government worker, sit on metal rocking chairs. His wife, Milene, leans against the car, holding their two daughters, Isadora, one, and Isabela, five, who has drawn a rainbow tattoo on her forearm. Across the street, some neighbors are building a brick wall around their house because someone keeps stealing the light fixtures on their porch. José’s mother says she will not discuss anything about the case, because she is afraid of saying the wrong thing, but that she’d like to talk about José as a regular person.

“He treasured the motorbike his father gave him,” his mother
says. “And his collection of Conan the Barbarian comic books.” Isabela runs inside and returns with a Conan the Barbarian comic book written in Portuguese. “No one was allowed to touch them,” his mother goes on. “And he had over a hundred magazines.” On the cover of the comic book, Conan is swinging onto the deck of a ship with a sword between his teeth.

José, Ricardo, and Reney were arrested on December 6 after they were given up by Isael, who was the first to be picked up, since he was walking around with two stumps where fingers should have been and was easy to identify. They found Josué and Rubens the following day, hiding out at a house in the jungle. At Ricardo’s mother’s home, in the ceiling, they found a Canon camera, an Omega Seamaster watch, a pistol with a fitting for a silencer, a .38 revolver, a bulletproof vest, and, as the police report indicates, thirty-seven “foreign music” CDs. José was arrested while having sex with his wife, dragged naked out into the street, and beaten in front of the neighbors. They discovered another of the watches at his home, where he’d shoved it inside a little red teddy bear in Isadora’s room.

The first four, as well as three others who were eventually released, were arrested by the local police before being turned over to the federal authorities. While still in local-police custody, these four were beaten in the presence of one of their lawyers (though the police denied this). Later, in a cell, José claims, the officers played a game called telephone, which involved smacking both his ears simultaneously. A man named Jânio, a suspect who was later released, says that they put a bag over his head until he almost passed out, and then took it off. “And when we were in the car, the policeman, he put a bullet in the gun and spun it,” Jânio says, “then pulled the trigger right in front of my face. I could see the bullet, that it wasn’t yet in the chamber, but I was still scared. They were saying, The president of Brazil told us he doesn’t care if you’re alive or dead. He said, “Do whatever you want to them.”

“I shit my pants.”

In the few hours after they were arrested, the pirates came to
realize that they’d been involved in an event of completely different proportions from what they’d thought. They left the boat having robbed and murdered a tourist, an anonymous victim, but they soon discovered they’d killed a person who might inspire large-scale consequences. And realizing this was, they all say, pretty bewildering.

“If this had been some regular guy,” one of their lawyers says, “they wouldn’t have even made arrests at this point.”

The Amapá State Prison is on the outskirts of town. It’s not a hulking, high-tech campus, like American prisons are. There are no monolithic sliding gates or remote locks or video cameras. It’s just a few single-story buildings separated from the highway by a series of concrete walls. Between the buildings are a couple of bald fields where prisoners play soccer.

Marcelo, the translator, lives just across the road and says that every year a few inmates are killed by other prisoners or guards, and another half-dozen escape. “It’s okay, I guess,” Marcelo says. “They usually run into the woods and not toward my house.”

A Franciscan friar who runs a mission at the prison agrees to take us to meet the six suspects. We arrive just after lunch. When you’re done with your meal at the Amapá State Prison, you simply throw what remains out through the bars of your cell, so the hall is covered with rice and what appear to be bits of chicken. Beneath that odor is the funk of food rotted into concrete and the stink of fifty men in equatorial heat. Some of the inmates make noises as we walk past—quasi-menacing laughter, unintelligible grumbling, a convincing pig squeal.