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Blood Wood (Cont.)


	Bulletproof disguise: Paulo Adario at Fort Greenpeace (Seamus Murphy)

ONE OF THE BODYGUARDS BRINGS a paper bag to the Manaus airport. Adario and a half-dozen young volunteers are heading for Belém, the port at the mouth of the Amazon, to crash an industry mahogany conference. Whatever's inside the bag, it looks heavy.

The pudgy guard follows Adario, and I follow him, watching as he puts the bag on the ticket desk with a heavy thud. Airport security looks inside, staples the sack closed, and checks it with the bodyguard's luggage. In Brazil, they do this all the time.

This is Adario's life: a 24-hour security detail. Five days after "Partners in Mahogany Crime" was released, the phone rang at his home in Manaus. A voice said, "You deserve to die, and will die." A few nights later, a dark-colored van pulled slowly past the house, three times; a passerby said that the men inside were holding guns. It was only six weeks after Dema Federicci's murder. Within days, federal police confirmed that there was a price on his head.

When Adario says, "Life in the Amazon costs nothing," he's scarcely exaggerating. Brazil's murder rate has quadrupled

They don't charge much to kill someone here: about $200 for Jose Nobody or a few thousand for a troublesome judge. Paulo Adario's bounty? "It's a good price!"

since 1980, largely because of organized gangs from urban slums, with names like the Red Commando or the Third Command, who deal drugs and offer assassinations for hire. During my visit, newspaper headlines called one gang the "Exterminators" for blowing away a policeman in Manaus. They don't charge much to kill someone: about $200 to whack Jose Nobody, a few thousand to eliminate a troublesome judge. This is nothing compared with the losses incurred after the "Partners" report: One wood company, which Adario declined to name, lost $25 million in fines, mahogany, and seized equipment. The math is obvious.

At first Adario declines to specify the size of his particular bounty. ("I don't want to talk about how much," he boasts, "but it's a good price!") Later, over late-night beers with the Manaus staff, he can't resist. The figure he reveals isn't that much, about half the price for killing a judge, or one-third the cost of a mahogany table in New York. It would be a fortune to one of the unemployed assassins living under a tin roof in the backstreets of Manaus.

The first thing Adario did was lodge



	Amazon's most wanted: left to right, Rio Xingu defenders Maria Deteeilene Monteiro, Tarcisio Feitosa Da Silva, Idalino Nunes De Assis, Hely Soares Barbosa, and Georg Roling (Seamus Murphy)

his family in the Manaus Holiday Inn under an assumed name. The federal police were sympathetic and lent him two bodyguards, but eventually Greenpeace had to hire its own. The Adarios moved from hotel to hotel until that got too expensive, and then began shuttling from house to house, friend to friend. In early November, after a fresh round of threats to other members of Greenpeace Amazonia, the Adarios fled to Rio. When they finally returned to Manaus in the spring, Adario took to wearing an Israeli bulletproof vest and disguising himself in a stringy black wig that gave him an eerie resemblance to Ozzy Osbourne.

"My life is all mixed up with Greenpeace," Adario's wife told me one day during a nervous interview at Fort Greenpeace. "It's difficult," she said. "Now I don't feel afraid, but tomorrow, I don't know. If the pressure increases, I don't know..."

Adario himself is worried enough about his family members' safety that he asked that names and details about them not be published, but that doesn't mean he's backing down.

"Life is not white and black," he explains. "It is very simple to be an environmentalist in the north. You are a good guy fighting bad guys. Here, bad guys and good guys change sides all the time. It is a chess game, and you have to be a good player."

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