Six for One

For slaying Brazil's famed, long-hunted bandit, Lampeao, "the Lamp Post" (TIME, Aug. 8), the police of Alagoas State last week received: 1) $5,000; 2) six freshly hacked human heads.

The $5,000 was a reward for the most recent killing of the Lamp Post, and its payment was proof enough to skeptical Brazilians that this time the Government believed him dead. The six heads were the grisly gift from the remaining members of the Lamp Post's gang, and belonged to inhabitants of a remote interior settlement who were massacred and decapitated in retaliation for the Lamp Post's death. One head was that of the aged grandfather of an Alagoas police lieutenant who led the attack on the bandit chief.

Last week Alagoas' unfortunate police received word that the surviving bandits would burn every village in the countryside, massacre the inhabitants, send their heads to headquarters. The message came as a shock, for it was sent by "Corisco," one of the Lamp Post's lieutenants, whom the Government has also killed several times.

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