Man Hunt

The favelas of Rio de Janeiro are akin to Algiers' notorious Casbah. Teeming shanty towns, about 200 in number, they spot the city's steep hills, shelter its slippery underworld. The Pepe le Moko of the favelas is a little man (5 ft. 2 in., 105 Ibs.) who says his real name is Joao da Costa Rezende but who is better known as Carne Seca, or Dried Meat.

Dried Meat is popular and well-regarded among his kind. When flush, he gives away fish and beans to favela dwellers. He dances a graceful samba. Sentimental and gallant, he has the names of his two sisters tattooed on his chest, and the names of half a dozen other girls on his-arms. He can also be masterful with the dames. Once a certain Dolores talked too much when the police were listening. Dried Meat shaved her head; everybody in the favelas thought it served her right.

The police put Dried Meat down as a petty racketeer and gang boss. They suspected that he protected the bicheiros, who run an illegal numbers game (TIME, June 12). Then one day a rival racketeer, Baiano by name, was cut down by gunfire. The police blamed Dried Meat, chased him for two months through the favelas. Finally the fugitive gave himself up, blithely explained: "Running up & down the hills is for goats, not people."

The judge ruled that it was impossible, in a gang war, to determine whose bullet killed whom. So Dried Meat beat the murder rap, but he got six months in jail for illegal possession of arms. He served three months, then escaped through a sewer. While the press played him up as "Inimigo Publico Numero Um," the police unleashed Rio's most spectacular manhunt.

The favelas were combed by detectives disguised in patched rags and wooden clogs (the footgear of Rio's poor). Dried Meat's two henchmen, Smile and Fork, were caught after an exchange of gunfire in which a bystander was killed.

Last week, after nearly a month of search, the police received a phone call from Dried Meat. "This is a warning," he said. "I'm coming." Nervous authorities thought he might come shooting. Instead, a pale figure in checkered black & white sport coat, he walked up to a suburban policeman, meekly surrendered himself.

He denied that he had committed the three murders, the four assaults and robberies charged against him in the past month. All he wanted was to finish the jail term and take a rest. The hills of the favelas, he said, still tuckered him, and he had no place else to go. "I couldn't leave Rio," said Dried Meat, "because I would get lost."

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