The finger cutter” and “the Brazilian Escobar”: The defendants accused of bringing cocaine cartels to Europe

A major trial in Brussels has put the links between a Belgian criminal organization and a Brazilian cocaine gang under the spotlight, raising questions about cooperation in drug trafficking between European criminal groups and Latin American cartels, The Guardian reports.

In the early hours of September 7, a convoy of heavily armed police officers swept through the quiet streets of central Brussels, heading for the Haren district on the city’s northeastern outskirts. Their target was 22 Avenue du Bourget, a fortified complex resembling a military bunker that had previously served as NATO headquarters.

The modernist complex, with its austere, functional architecture, was rapidly built in 1967. It is now home to the Justitia courthouse, where Belgian federal trials are held. In 2022, the defendants and accomplices in the 2015 Paris and 2016 Brussels terrorist attacks were tried there.

Last month, officers armed with assault rifles patrolled the building’s wide corridors to ensure the smooth running of the decade’s most high-profile trial: the Bressers-Carvalho case.

For a month, judges and a large number of lawyers shared the main courtroom with journalists and members of the public, separated from them by a large pane of bulletproof glass. On the other side sat 31 defendants, surrounded by officers whose faces were covered to protect them from possible retaliation—a scene more reminiscent of places affected by mafia activity.

During the lengthy hearings held over the month, two of the defendants stood out from the rest.

The first was Flor Bressers, a 40-year-old Belgian born in Lommel, a town of 35,000 people in the province of Limburg. Bressers has an unusual profile for the criminal underworld. A criminology graduate of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), he was known to his associates as “the Professor” or “the Academic.”

However, the nickname by which he is most widely known is in stark contrast to the image of a cultured and restrained man: Bressers is known above all as “the finger cutter.”

He was arrested in 2022 while attending a wine tasting with his wife in a luxury penthouse at the Renaissance Zurich Tower hotel in Zurich. Bressers faces charges of kidnapping, unlawful deprivation of liberty, armed extortion and leading a criminal organization.

The other key figure suspected of belonging to the organization is Sérgio Roberto de Carvalho, a 68-year-old Brazilian. In a joint operation by Interpol, Europol, the Brazilian Federal Police and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Carvalho was arrested on June 21, 2022, at a luxury hotel overlooking the Danube in Budapest, the Hungarian capital.

Based in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, in the border region between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay—one of the continent’s areas with the highest concentration of organized crime—Carvalho became known in his home country by the nickname “the Major.” The nickname referred to the rank he had held as a military police officer, a period during which, according to allegations, he combined corruption with criminal activity.

In Europe, his nickname was even more telling: “the Brazilian Escobar.” Together, “the finger cutter” and “the Brazilian Escobar” are the two principal defendants in a Belgian trial held under tight security, centered on an international cocaine trafficking network between Latin America and Europe.

Bressers and Carvalho are suspected of heading an organization accused of transporting up to 45 tonnes of cocaine to Europe.

Prosecutors say they ran a multinational criminal operation that moved hundreds of millions of dollars through shell companies. One of them, the Belgian water-treatment company Kriva Rochem in Antwerp, has also given the case an alternative name: the Kriva Rochem case.

The money was allegedly laundered through cryptocurrency, financial markets and real estate investments. It funded the complex logistics of transporting cocaine produced in Peru and Bolivia along difficult, illicit routes through Brazil, before the drugs crossed the Atlantic Ocean and were distributed across an unknown number of countries in Europe and beyond.

Since 2021, Bressers had been on Europol’s most-wanted list. According to the agency’s notice, he was wanted for kidnapping, unlawful deprivation of liberty, armed extortion and participation in a criminal organization.

An earlier case in 2010 involved allegations that he had ordered an act of revenge in which a victim’s finger was cut off with pruning shears. Bressers was ultimately acquitted in 2015 for lack of evidence. However, that case is believed to have earned him the nickname “the finger cutter.”

In 2020, five years later, he was convicted in connection with another act of revenge. It involved the kidnapping of a Dutch drug trafficker, who was beaten, threatened with death and injured with a razor after being blamed for the disappearance of a cocaine shipment. After the case, Bressers fled and remained a fugitive for two years.

His name also surfaced as a suspect in at least one other violent case, this time in Guyana, where a rice trader was murdered after a seized shipment in his possession was found to contain cocaine. The murder was allegedly carried out to cover up the tracks and prevent the gang’s criminal network from being dismantled. That case, too, never went to trial.

According to Brazilian court documents, Carvalho led the group that secured tens of tonnes of cocaine produced in Peru and Bolivia and transported it through central-western Brazil to the ports of Paranaguá and Natal, from where the drugs were shipped to Europe.

Born in 1958 in Ibiporã, in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, Carvalho grew up in Mato Grosso do Sul and became involved in criminal activity while serving as a police officer in the state.

In 1998, he was first sentenced to 15 years in prison for drug trafficking. However, he was not dismissed from the police force until 2010.

Rather than continuing to run his operations from Latin America, “the Brazilian Escobar” moved to Europe, first hiding in Portugal and later in Spain.

According to Spanish police, he settled in a villa worth €2 million in Marbella, on the Costa del Sol, using the identity of Paul Wouter, a wealthy Surinamese national.

From this base in Spain, a well-known hub for international cocaine trafficking, prosecutors say Carvalho coordinated an organized criminal network operating in Portugal and Spain from 2017 to 2020.

The network allegedly specialized in smuggling drugs through ports such as Setúbal, near Lisbon, and Leixões in northern Portugal, as well as through Lisbon airport and the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp.

Portuguese police suspected that Carvalho had links to Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), or the First Capital Command, Brazil’s largest criminal organization.

In November 2020, Carvalho was surrounded but not arrested during a coordinated operation involving more than 1,000 police officers from Portugal, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Romania and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Europol.

The operation led to 45 arrests and the seizure of more than €13 million in cash, 70 luxury cars, 37 aircraft and 136 properties.

During the trial, it emerged that Carvalho allegedly staged his own death that same year, obtaining a death certificate for Wouter, who was said to have died from complications related to COVID-19.

He later moved to Budapest, where he was arrested in 2022 while using the identity of Guillermo Díaz Flores, a Mexican national.

According to the charges, Carvalho had used at least 10 false identities before being arrested in the Hungarian capital. In June 2023, he was extradited to Belgium and sent to a high-security prison.

In the courtroom, he once again faced “the finger cutter,” his suspected associate, as both were accused of organizing an international criminal operation.

During his testimony, Bressers denied all the charges and claimed he was the victim of a media campaign against him.

“I have a strong feeling that all of this has been orchestrated by the authorities,” he said.

Bressers’s defense is challenging the admissibility of the evidence and has asked for the case to be dismissed. His lead lawyer, Hans Rieder, was contacted for comment but had not responded by the time the article was published.

During the trial, the defense accused the media of creating “an absolutely monstrous image” of their client.

Carvalho, who did not attend every hearing because of health problems, insisted that he was innocent and claimed he was being persecuted by Brazilian federal authorities.

“I’ve been in prison for five years and nobody listens to me,” he said during a hearing. “I didn’t commit the crimes; someone else with the same name as me did.”

Carvalho’s lawyers, Frederic Thiebaut and Renaat Landuyt, were contacted for comment but did not respond. The Belgian federal prosecutor handling the case also declined to comment.

The hearings ended on October 9, and the verdict is expected on December 15. Bressers faces up to 20 years in prison, while Carvalho could be sentenced to up to 15 years.

Latin American cartels are expanding their operations in Europe

Over the past decade, cases such as the Bressers-Carvalho case have increased significantly.

During this period, national police forces, Europol and intelligence services have identified the structures of Latin American drug-trafficking groups in Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, the Nordic countries, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, as well as North Africa.

These branches of criminal organizations have established themselves in Europe through intermediaries or members of drug cartels who provide specialized services for processing cocaine in Europe.

According to Andy Kraag, head of Europol’s Serious and Organised Crime Centre, these services include extracting cocaine from the various materials used to transport it, as well as processing trafficked cocaine paste.

“Latin American criminals are very involved in this activity. We are seeing their presence in Europe grow and their operations become increasingly important,” Kraag says.

“It used to be the other way around. Now we have flows in both directions. For decades, we have seen high-level criminals from Europe settle in Latin America. Now, increasingly, we are also seeing criminals from Latin America operating permanently or semi-permanently in Europe,” he adds.

Senior sources in Europe and Latin America say these groups are expanding their operations and influence across the real and digital economies, driven by the use of cryptocurrencies, betting companies, and the financial and real estate sectors.

According to Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, a professor of international relations at Di Tella University in Buenos Aires and an expert on organized crime in Latin America, the war on drugs as waged in Colombia, where he lived for 20 years, made the cartels more resilient and better able to adapt. He says this explains their ability to expand beyond national borders.

“In recent years, Europe has become a place where drug consumption has risen particularly sharply. If you look at United Nations reports, it is a significant market. In the 1980s, particularly when it came to cocaine, Europe was not a market of particular importance,” he says.

“In this context, European demand and inconsistent drug policies—which militarize the fight against drugs but then coexist with this reality—create a set of circumstances that ultimately empower organized crime,” Tokatlian says.

Like Carvalho, dozens of people suspected of leading criminal organizations, including the PCC, Tren de Aragua, the Sinaloa Cartel, Clan del Golfo and Los Lobos, are being held in prisons across Europe, are wanted by national police forces and Europol, or appear on Interpol’s Red Notice list.

They are suspected of involvement in cocaine trafficking to Europe, arms and synthetic drug trafficking to Latin America, and links with European criminal organizations in the Balkans and the Italian ’Ndrangheta mafia.

Gabriel Feltran, a sociologist at Sciences Po in Paris and research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), says groups such as the PCC and the Sinaloa Cartel are forming business partnerships with European criminal organizations, including groups in Albania and the ’Ndrangheta mafia.

According to him, these organizations buy cocaine directly from producers in Latin America and can transport it all the way to its final destination without ownership of the drugs changing hands between intermediaries along the supply chain.

Feltran describes this model as the “platformization” of organized crime. Much like multinational digital platforms such as Amazon, Google and Meta, cartels combine their infrastructure and business models in an effort to control the entire drug-trafficking chain: from production in the interior of Latin America to sales on Europe’s streets.

This means that everything—from communications and payments to the precursor chemicals needed to produce drugs, laboratories and logistics—is concentrated at the organization’s highest levels.

Meanwhile, transporters and local operators can be hired, often without knowing the true scale of the criminal operation, as paid service providers, in a way similar to drivers working for ride-hailing platforms such as Uber.

Feltran explains that, before this new model, drug trafficking relied mainly on specific routes and a number of intermediaries, each of whom owned the drugs at one stage of the chain.

Now, he says, “partners join forces at the highest levels, buy directly from the producer and deliver the product straight to its final destination. They no longer go through intermediaries.”

“Ownership of the drugs no longer passes from one hand to another. They consolidate everything, optimize processes and grow very quickly. The more people use their services, the more dependent they become on them. That is the network effect,” Feltran concludes.