Others who would receive a visit from police that morning were far less prepared.
In São Paulo, Delgatti's old friend Gustavo Santos was pinged awake by a cell phone alert. Santos, who now lived with his girlfriend in Brazil's largest city, had installed a network of cameras and sensors at the empty home he still maintained in Araraquara. The devices sent alerts to his phone when they were tripped. Sometimes the sensors were triggered by cats or bugs; this time they were being triggered by an early morning police raid, but Santos was oblivious. “I was really doped up from sleeping medicine,” he says. So he went back to sleep.
At around 8 am the buzzing of his apartment's intercom woke Santos again. He dragged himself up and answered. “Gustavo,” the intercom barked, “there is a Sedex here for you. You have to sign for it.”
Santos didn't recognize the doorman's voice. “Man, you can sign for me,” Santos said into the intercom, refusing to come down. But as he hung up, Santos thought: “Fuck, this does not smell good.”
Santos went to the window, parting the curtains a crack. He glimpsed several figures dressed in black approaching his apartment building. Now fully awake, he frantically started cleaning up his apartment—ripping up documents and flushing any potentially compromising material down the toilet. (Santos dealt extensively in cryptocurrency trades and other schemes.) Then, remembering the nearly 100,000 Brazilian reais in cash he had in the apartment—about $25,000—Santos went to the bedroom where his longtime girlfriend, Suelen Oliveira, was still sleeping; neither the buzzing intercom nor Santos' frenzied movements had woken her. “Su,” Santos whispered, waking her up. “You have to hide this for me, because the police are here.” She blinked at him, confused. “She didn't under ..
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