My hands went cold’: Rio’s reporters risk death to reveal criminal ties between police, politicians and mafia

The killing of councillor Marielle Franco has inspired a generation of journalists to probe the city’s dangerous underworld

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Sun 28 Apr 2024 06.00 EDT

Rafael Soares’s phone rang and his blood froze. “Ronnie Lessa Googled you,” a federal police contact on the other end of the line told the Brazilian reporter as he stood in his newsroom one morning in 2019.

Any Rio crime journalist worth their salt knew that being investigated by such a man was extremely bad news. Lessa was reputedly one of the city’s most in-demand contract killers: a battle-hardened police combatant turned assassin whose crimes had enabled him to buy a speedboat named after a Belgian machine gun called the Minimi.

Some called Lessa “Perneta” – one leg – because of a bomb attack in which he lost his left limb. A former colleague called him “a killing machine”.

“I freaked out … my hands went cold,” Soares said of his source’s telephone warning. “I didn’t tell anyone. Not my mum, not my wife. No one.”

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