RIO KINGPINS MEET THEIR MATCH

Ms. Maggessi Wins Acclaim As She Takes on Brazil's Drug Bosses

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Once every few months, the sky above this city's
sprawling Rocinha slum is lit by phosphorescent red trails of
crisscrossing bullets. Residents know that yet another battle has
erupted between cops and local drug lords.

As Brazil's best-known city continues its decades-long war on drugs,
Rio police are having a harder time arresting drug bosses because the
new breed of bosses operate among the densely packed residents of the
city's 500 slums, home to nearly one of every five of Rio's six
million people. Police raids often produce bystander casualties.

But Marina Maggessi, the chief investigator of the Rio police's
antidrug division, is getting better results through less violent
means. Using a mixture of high-tech espionage and psychological
tactics, she has helped the police arrest -- or occasionally kill --
nearly 80 drug bosses in the past three years. Her record of nabbing
drug lords with names like "Seaside Freddy," "Pitbull" and "Big Bat"
has made her the city's best-known cop, and in a city whose police
are generally viewed suspiciously, her exploits are praised from
op-ed pages to Internet communities.

"She is a model to be followed," says Denise Frossard, a
congresswoman and former judge who once locked up 14 heads of clans
that controlled organized crime in Rio.

Ms. Maggessi, a diminutive 46-year-old, is a rare success story in
the drug war in Latin America. While Asian and Middle Eastern nations
fight terrorism by Islamist extremists, Latin American countries
continue to wage their own battle against the illicit trade in
narcotics, fighting powerful drug gangs that often are
better-equipped than police. The criminality and violence stunt
economic growth in the region, divert government resources, corrupt
institutions from the police to the bureaucracy to the courts and
have claimed countless lives.

Progress in the drug war is especially hard to feel in places like
Rio. Kingpins largely control the slums' warrens of streets, and
those arrested by Ms. Maggessi are immediately replaced by underlings.

Against that backdrop, Ms. Maggessi provides citizens with an
occasional, if elusive, sense of victory. Elderly women often bake
her cakes, and some provide valuable information. About two years
ago, an 80-year-old woman gave her 22 videotapes of local drug
dealers she had filmed from the window of her tiny apartment. As a
result, prosecutors were able to convict 20 people of drug charges,
including nine corrupt cops.

Ms. Maggessi was born into the same Rio poverty as many of those she
puts behind bars and works close to her prey in a run-down precinct
building at the bottom of the Monkeys' Hill slum on Rio's north side.
Her team can spend months listening to tapes, comparing voices,
trying to break down codes used by criminals and cross-referencing
phone records.

One high-profile arrest was Elias Pereira da Silva, also known as The
Crazy One. Prosecutors accused him of involvement with 60 homicides,
including the torture and murder of an investigative reporter. Ms.
Maggessi and her team spent three months wiretapping his family,
friends and lawyer to pinpoint his location -- an old couple's shack
- -- and helped arrest him without firing a shot in September 2002. He
is now serving a 28-year prison term.

Ms. Maggessi uses street smarts when a wiretap isn't sufficient. A
few years ago, she was tracking a cocaine dealer known simply as
Waldir by camping out in an apartment next door and waiting for him
to use his wiretapped phone to call his out-of-state supplier. She
needed the supplier's number too, so she could arrest both men. But
because Brazil's telephone companies had just been privatized, Waldir
couldn't figure out the new dialing instructions and was having
trouble making the call.

Tired of waiting, Ms. Maggessi seized on a power outage -- which
disabled Waldir's phone's caller ID -- and called him on his phone.
Posing as a telephone-company operator, she guided him through the
dialing instructions. A pleased Waldir spent weeks telling friends
how privatized companies had improved customer service, until he was
caught by Ms. Maggessi the moment he took delivery of the drug.

Aside from eavesdropping, Ms. Maggessi relies on psychology, as Rio
copes with a generational shift in the underworld. Fifteen years ago,
the drug trade here was the realm of businessmen who weren't addicts
and who divided the city through gentlemen's agreements. Now, a horde
of illiterate, addicted and violent lesser bosses -- who ascended as
their superiors were arrested or killed -- run the show. After
arresting younger traffickers, Ms. Maggessi offers them what they
least expect -- sympathy. By using cups of coffee, sandwiches and a
bit of motherly attention, she coaxes out information that often
leads to new arrests.

Despite her professional achievements, Ms. Maggessi doubts her work
will win the battle to stamp out drugs. "Police are the last resort,"
she says. "When every other institution has failed -- the family, the
church, the schools, the state -- people turn to police, but the
solution is not with us."