Rio reporters risking all to shine light on the city's underworld

A brutal killing in 2018 has inspired journalists to probe the links between police, politicians and mafia

- Tom Phillips

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.

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."

But despite this, over the next three years the now 33-year-old reporter decided that Lessa's story - and that of the underworld he inhabited - still desperately needed to be told. Soares embarked on a quest to understand the hitman and to fathom how Rio's police force had managed to churn out highly trained rogue cops who were being recruited by organised crime.

The journalist's findings can be seen in Milicianos, a new book that is part of a growing body of work investigating Rio's mafia-infected underbelly.