Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)

Outside Magazine May 2002

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Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)

MORE THAN ONE PERSON had left the boat bleeding that night. Alu'zio Botelho da Cunha Jr. is the local police detective who led the hunt for Blake's killers. Junior, as Botelho is called, looks like a tough cop: short, stocky, with several-days' growth of beard neatly contouring his face. His tight T-shirt shows off a powerful torso; his thick, hairy arms taper surprisingly to small, manicured fingertips, the nails lacquered with an opaque pink varnish. We met over coffee in a café, and I asked him how he had caught the killers.

"That was easy," he said. One of the assailants, Isael da Costa, had been wounded: The tops of two fingers on his left hand were shot off and his right arm was laid open by Blake's bullets. As soon as they got ashore after the robbery, Ricardo Tavares called a friend who had a taxi. They gave the driver Blake's rifle, which they had taken from the boat, as payment, and the three of them drove around to hospitals and doctors' offices looking for treatment. But Isael, who was out on parole for another robbery, wouldn't tell the doctors what had happened or fill in the forms, so no one would treat him. The cops caught him the next night, about 24 hours after the shooting. Shortly afterward, they caught Ricardo getting out of a taxi at his house.

The death of Peter Blake was the biggest thing to hit Macapá in years. The town was awash in rumors, each more creative than the last, all more exciting and movie-like than the stark reality of what happened.

That same night, the police arrested Cardoso and Macedo. Isael's brother Josué and Rubens Souza were caught a few days later on one of the jungle islands out on the Amazon. Somebody had spotted Seamaster's stolen dinghy on the shore.

On January 7, I visited the defendants at the Complexo Penintenciário do Amapá, where the men awaited trial. Charged with latrocinio, armed robbery resulting in murder, all six prisoners had confessed to taking part in the crime. (As this article went to press in early March, Tavares's lawyers, who'd previously argued that their client had been on drugs or drinking when he shot Blake, claimed that Tavares was mentally ill. The judge in the case announced he would consider the new medical evidence, and was expected to deliver verdicts in the nonjury trial by late April.)

Above the guarded entrance to the older of the prison's two concrete buildings, a braid of small Christmas lights still read, "Copen Feliz Natal." My translator, Francisco, and I were shown into a small, hot room. All six men were sitting at a table. I recognized Isael da Costa: The two middle fingers on his left hand had healed to purple stubs; a large scab covered his right forearm. He looked stunned by the enormity of it all.

Tavares, with the good looks of a bratty young actor, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of a little girl—his daughter, he said, age one. Hunching over the table, he did most of the talking. The others sat quietly, responding simply to my questions. The guards got bored and left.

Tavares had seen the yacht anchored off the beach, he said, and readily admitted that he, José Irandir Cardoso, and Reney Macedo had decided to rob it and recruited the others. Tavares claimed that the crew was drunk and on cocaine. (The crew members I spoke with denied that the crew had been drinking to excess, or had any drugs aboard.) When the crew realized what was happening they began throwing beer cans, Tavares said, but then they saw the guns and stopped resisting. The thieves started collecting watches.

Meanwhile, Tavares continued, "Peter" (as he called Blake), who had escaped below, suddenly appeared at the bottom of the wheelhouse stairs and started firing up at them. "He was firing fast and very skillfully," said Tavares. He made the motions of working a rifle bolt. "Like a soldier. And then he shot him," he said, nodding at Isael da Costa. "Twice."

Da Costa was quiet. I asked him who had shot first.

"Peter," he said.

"And where were you?"

"Standing above."

When one of Blake's shots knocked da Costa's pistol from his hand, Tavares said he shot down the stairs without looking. He stuck out his arm and demonstrated how he'd fired blindly while trying to keep out of the way.

The pirates left quickly because Isael was hurt. They took Seamaster's black inflatable dinghy, with its outboard. They didn't know that Blake had been killed, Tavares said, or even shot, until the next day. He said they'd only meant to steal a few watches. They had robbed before, and nobody had put up any resistance. It was just a robbery that had gone very wrong. They were all sorry Blake had been killed.

When the judge granted me permission to see the killers, he offered to let me read the federal indictment and look over the official paperwork in the case. So back in the justice building, I asked an assistant for the federal prosecutor's report. A fat file was handed to me, titled, "Indictment prepared by the Federal Prosecutor's Office of the State of Amapá."

I found the autopsy report, complete with photographs of Blake laid open like a side of beef, and the findings as to the cause of death: "One of the bullets penetrated the upper part of his left shoulder, crossing his body, causing fatal wounds to the lungs and ascending aorta; the other shot penetrated below the left shoulder, fatally crossing the left lung and upper vena cava, where it lodged, under the skin, near the armpit." Blake had bled to death in less than a minute, the report concluded.

There is a Russian saying: "He lies like an eyewitness." It's applicable here: Ozimael Mendes could not have seen Blake alive that night, half an hour after the shooting. But this was typical. The whole town was swirling with tales of the night Peter died. Some were innocent, and true, firsthand accounts. At the Bar du Bizerra, where Blake and a few of the crew had dinner and drinks, their compact, whiskered waitress told me and many others how she'd danced with Peter, as he was now known everywhere. But the air was also full of wildly creative rumors, and even Junior, the police detective, was trafficking: "They were waiting for women," he told me of the crew. But when I spoke to the local madam and she emphatically dismissed Junior's claim, he merely shrugged and admitted, "I must have been wrong." But still he peddled: "There were drugs on the boat," he told me; his friend was the local forensic technician and had read the federal report. The same report I saw. It made no mention whatsoever of drugs.

Blake's death was the biggest thing to hit Macapá in years. It had turned everyone into an authority, and each of their accounts was more exciting and movie-like than the stark reality of what really happened.

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