The Best American Crime Writing 2003

DEVIN FRIEDMAN: MURDER ON THE AMAZON

The Seamaster anchored in the wrong place. Claudio, on duty at the harbormaster’s office, watched it pull right past him. It moved past Alvaro, who was sitting on an overturned canoe, enjoying a morning bottle of wine, and João, who was loading a boat with cases of Coke and was soaked in sweat. It was ten o’clock on the morning of December 5, 2001, and the sun was already bleaching out the world. The Seamaster’s sails were down, and its motor was churning up deep contrails of white water as the 112-foot aluminum schooner plowed through the Brazilian Amazon, past Rita as she pinned up laundry along the river, and a man known as the Pig Farmer, who was buying lima beans at the grocery near the port. The Seamaster, with a crew of nine plus the skipper, Sir Peter Blake, was supposed to motor on to Macapá, a few minutes downriver. But they didn’t receive that message from the harbormaster because they were tuned to the wrong radio frequency. Instead they pulled into the port of Santana, the worst neighborhood in maybe two hundred miles. The Seamaster was anchored there for only a half hour before an officer from the port authority told them this was not a safe place to be, and the boat moved on to Macapà. But the Seamaster’s shipping agent, a fat and perpetually sweating man whose name is José Sansão Souza Batista, but who likes to be called Sam, says that their mistake changed the whole course of events. “I would think, if I was a spiritual person, that everything was concurring for this boat to have an encounter with death,” Sam says, with the benefit of hindsight.

“Everyone knows the boats that come in and out of here,” says Alvaro, who was drinking the wine. “We all pay attention. This is what it is to live in this town.” João, who was loading the Coke, says there was a lot of talk about the Seamaster. “We have yachts come through here all the time, but this was a strange-looking one. Everyone thought, This person is very rich.”

Among the others who took an interest in the Seamaster were six men who would later be called pirates in newspapers all over the world: Ricardo, Isael, José, Reney, Rubens, and Josué. They were known to hang around the docks, where they’d pick up the odd job or smoke a few cigarettes or get drunk in the saloons at night. Ricardo, a 22-year-old from Santana, would later say, “We saw the boat and we were thinking, This is a rich tourist. There will be a lot of American dollars. And so we thought, Let’s go see this boat.”

Santana is not geared for tourists-there are lots of boats moving through the port, but almost none of them are yachts carrying foreigners looking for rum drinks and beaded necklaces. The only regular visitors are the crews of giant, rusty freighters that stop to load wood pulp or manganese. A bartender at one of the dirty saloons that crowd the port area says he makes a good deal of his money from Greek and Russian sailors. He says there are ten people ready to sell them a beer the second they descend the gangway, and at least as many ready to charge them for sex, rob them, or both. At night, you can see the whores congregate around the port wearing the international whore uniform: cheap, high plastic pumps and brightly colored short skirts.

Macapá, population 250,000, is the capital of Amapá, the most godforsaken of the Brazilian states. The only way in or out is by plane or boat. They tried to build a road to the city of Manaus, a thousand miles away, but a couple hundred miles out the thing sank into the Amazonian swamp. Santana is ten miles from downtown Macapá, and the intrastate epicenter of crime. Most weeks, says a doctor at the Santana hospital, a dozen people are murdered. “Mostly it’s by machete. I had to help a guy yesterday who had had seven hacks taken out of him. It was because he’d killed the attacker’s brother the week before. Neither of them has been arrested.”

On the Sunday after I arrive, my translator, Marcelo, and I are approached by a drunk guy with a puffy face and a T-shirt that says Santana will be AIDS-free by 2001. He asks for money, and when we say no, he pushes Marcelo. A shipping porter comes over and chases him away before anything else happens. The porter and Marcelo say this is by far the most common kind of robber: a sort of aggravated begging. Santana is a place where you need to know where you are all the time, Marcelo says, and it’s good to be able to tell when the mood of a place is changing.

Late one night, I can’t sleep and decide to take a walk around the neighborhood, though I’ve been warned against it. On the front porch of my hotel, I meet a woman named Rose, a Mormon missionary. She has soft lines on her face, gray hair, and a low-wattage beatific smile. As it turns out, she is a first-rate insomniac and has stood watch over the darkling streets of Johannesburg, Manila, and New York, among others. I ask her why Santana seems to be such a dangerous place and she says that poor rural villages the world over are pretty safe. It’s the poor people in the cities, the transients, the have-nots in plain sight of the haves, who become antisocial.

When I leave for my walk (which lasts about thirty-seven seconds), Rose puts her hand on mine and says, “Careful, dear, they’ll shoot you in the face.”

When Sir Peter Blake pulled his boat into Macapá, it was the last day of the Seamaster’s two-month mission through the Amazon basin. The crew had sailed 1,200 miles upstream and back again, making a documentary about the Amazonian ecosystem to teach the world, as Blake said, that “the earth is a water planet: good water, good life; poor water, poor life.” The size of the crew fluctuated between ten and twenty people throughout the expedition, but the core was men Blake had known for years-Don Robertson, his best friend; Errol Olphert, who had sailed with Blake on his America’s Cup team-and for whom the Seamaster voyage was a kind of reward.

Things on the Amazon hadn’t gone exactly as Blake had planned. He had hired a diver to do some filming, but the Amazon was so murky with silt that they’d been unable to get any good footage. Plus, says Robertson, “With wildlife, it’s not like the zoo; the animals don’t just line up so you can take their picture.” But they did see a few pink dolphins-strange, shy animals that live more than a thousand miles from the ocean. Throughout, Blake ran the expedition with an abiding professionalism-the crew rose at dawn each morning to clean the boat, chart the course, set up for the filming.

Blake was possibly the greatest sailor who ever lived. There are people who would argue this point-some would say it was Dennis Conner, or maybe Sir Francis Drake-but there are about four million people who wouldn’t. Blake was from New Zealand, and after winning the Whitbread around-the-world race in 1990, the Jules Verne Trophy in 1994 (in the process breaking the record for circumnavigating the globe), and, most famously, the America’s Cup in 1995 and 2000, he became a national hero. “Most kids in New Zealand will have a bit of a grasp on who the heroes are,” says Don Robertson. “And they’ll tell you it’s Edmund Hillary and Peter Blake.”

Blake did not become the greatest sailor in the world by being the best technical sailor. It was a greatness achieved more by force of personality. He was an extraordinarily striking person to meet. He stood six feet four inches tall (his friends sometimes called him Six Four) and had worn his hair in a Beatles-esque mop since the seventies. Steve Fossett, who holds world records for sailing and ballooning, says it made him look like a Viking. People who met Blake say he possessed a spiritual energy, as if he were sprinkled with a kind of fairy dust that could make almost anyone a true believer. Michael Levitt, who’s written eleven books on sailing, tells this story: “I met him in Philadelphia when he took one of his early Whitbread boats around. He’d put this project together, built this boat, and he was off to win this race, and you could just see it in him. You didn’t know what to make of it then, because he hadn’t actually accomplished anything yet. But he just radiated.”

Blake had an uncanny ability to get very rich men to give him millions of dollars to build and race boats in exchange for a company logo painted on the hull, and to convince the best yachtsmen in the world to sail with him. David Alan-Williams, who crewed with Blake on his record-setting around-the-world voyage in 1994, says, “There were a lot of us who used to say that if Peter came to us and said he was going to sail a boat to the moon, we’d go, ‘Okay, when do we start?’” Levitt thinks people became devoted to Blake partly because he acted as if he had never in his life experienced a moment of doubt.

Blake endured a great deal to be a long-distance sailor. In an ocean race, you are expected to shrink your existence to its smallest and most portable form. Peter Blake was not designed for the quarters on racing yachts; the ceilings on the ENZA New Zealand, for instance, were less than six feet high. So Blake spent thirty years of his life on metal schooners and catamarans doing thirty knots, bent at the waist, sleeping in beds in which maybe 80 percent of him fit comfortably. And most of those races he did not win-he lost the Whitbread four times before he won it. “Every time I’ve done a round-the-world race, I’ve said it’s the last,” Blake said in 1987. “It’s the highlight of your life, but it’s crazy.” At some level, Blake was carrying on a war of attrition against the Big Forces of the world: weather, ocean, time. His greatest skill may have been his ability to ignore conditions, failure, and, according to the sometimes dismal logs of his races, broken masts, disintegrated hulls, and spells of hypothermia. The will to move forward was possibly Blake’s most basic impulse.

The Seamaster was a retirement from professional racing. Blake felt he’d accomplished everything he could. (As Don Robertson says, “Would Hillary climb Everest twice?”) Instead of puttering about in the garden or sinking into a fit of drinking and self-pity, as some retired athletes do, he decided to launch the Seamaster. “I sailed all over the world,” Blake said, “but I never got to slow down and look at anything.” He was able to convince the Omega watch company to give him the money to buy a boat from the Cousteau Society, which he painted, stamped with the name SEAMATER, after Omega’s $3,000 flagship watch, and launched under the imprimatur of Blakexpeditions, which he figured on building into his own Cousteau Society. Not that retirement didn’t have its benefits. Instead of eating freeze-dried soy protein, as he had when he raced, on the Seamaster he had a full-time cook, a Brazilian named Rizaldo. When they brought the boat to South America, the crew built canvas shades against the tropical sun, and stocked the fore freezer with loads of meat and the aft refrigerators with greens and tropical fruit and milk and cold beer. Robertson says, “The conditions were positively luxurious compared to the other boats we’d sailed on.”

Because they didn’t really have anything to document in Macapá (the main tourist activity is straddling the equator, which runs through town, at the visitors’ center), the Seamaster’s crew had designated the day for running errands and generally screwing around. Sam, the shipping agent, drove them to the big grocery store in town, where they bought fruit, gas for the grill, and bottles of local rum. Blake and six of his crew spent a few hours at a restaurant at Fazendinha Beach, across from their new anchorage, eating fish and rice and drinking caipirinhas.

“Mr. Peter docked his dinghy right there and stayed from 5:30 P.M. until 8:00 P.M.,” the waiter who served them tells me. “He was a very tall man, much taller than us, very white and very strong, much stronger than us. It was easy to see he was the leader. All the attention was on him.”

Around Blake at the table were most of the crew of the Seamaster, who were also his good friends. Leon Sefton, the cameraman, was his longtime business partner’s son. Blake had invited Robin Allen, because at 19 he was a promising young sailor, and Rodger Moore, an Auckland plumber with little sailing experience, because Blake had worked with his son. Don Robertson was staff photographer.

“We were all quite relaxed because it was the end of the trip,” Robertson says, “and all we had to do was sail around the corner and up to Trinidad and Tobago, where some of us were going to have a Caribbean Christmas.”

The waiter says, “They had a very good time, laughing always. They drank, too. They had ten caipirinhas and fourteen six-hundred-milliliter bottles of beer between seven of them. You see that waitress over there? She served him.” He calls the waitress over. She’s in her forties and wearing stained yellow spandex pants and a white shirt that laces up the front. “We danced together a little bit, and I gave him his last kiss, on his cheek, of course,” she says.

When the crew got back to the boat that night, Blake and the others turned on the CD player, opened a few beers, and installed themselves in their hammocks. The cook began preparing a light dinner.

“The night in Macapá started so great,” says Robin Allen, who lives near the Blakes’ home in Hampshire, England, and is close with their children (James, 15, and Sarah-Jane, 18). He says, “You know, there was absolutely no alcohol allowed while we were under way. Peter would kick you off for that. The main partying took place when he would say, ‘Okay, tonight is for having a good time.’”

“They had a nice party,” Sam, the shipping agent, says. “They drank beer. If there was one thing they had a lot of, it was beer. When I came on the boat later, I saw a bucket with fifty empty beer cans in it. But this was a party, and we know we can’t just have two beers when we are having a party.”

At nine o’clock, six men met at the port in Santana: Ricardo, Isael, José, Reney, Rubens, and Josué. They were local guys, between 20 and 30 and mostly unemployed. Ricardo had been working as a receptionist at a computer school his cousin owned, until he was fired the month before. Reney sometimes helped his father with electrical work. Most of them had a history of crime, especially armed robbery. Isael had been out of prison for only two months and seven days.

Some of the men brought their motorcycle helmets to Santana. Others had cut their wives’ and mothers’ pantyhose to make masks. Rubens, 20, had gotten use of his boss’s boat, a twenty-foot wooden catraia, the most common kind of boat on the Amazon. The men pooled their money, bought five reals’ ($2.15) worth of gas, and then pointed the boat toward the ocean. At close to ten o’clock, Rubens drew the catraia flush with the far side of the Seamaster, away from the lights of Macapà so that only the monkeys and birds of the jungle could have seen the men climb on board. He killed the motor and lashed the catraia to Blake’s boat. As always in Macapà, it was hot and windy, and the water, which carries so much silt it looks like roiling, molten peanut butter, was covered in baby whitecaps. The six of them sat quietly for a few minutes, observing the crew. Everyone on the Seamaster was listening to what Ricardo called “loud foreign music.” Some of them were dancing, and many of them were talking in loud foreign voices.

The first two aboard were Ricardo and Isael, each with a 7.65-millimeter pistol; Reney, Josué, and José followed. Rubens stayed in the boat and waited for the getaway. Almost immediately, things got complicated. “This is a robbery!” Ricardo screamed. “Everyone get down on the floor!” But the crew did not speak any Portuguese and didn’t seem to understand what these men were doing on their boat, wearing stocking masks and waving guns. One of the crewmen tossed a can of beer at the intruders. Someone else threw a jar of mayonnaise at them.

Later, none of the crew would talk specifically about what happened that night; they were worried about the effects it might have on the trial, which, when this story was written, was still in progress. According to one person on the boat, “The crew were totally out of their depth. When someone comes on board with a gun, there’s a certain script you’re supposed to follow, and they didn’t follow it. It could have been worse than it was.”

Rodger Moore, 55, decided to fight. He pushed Ricardo, and Ricardo shoved back. The operation seemed on the verge of chaos, so Ricardo pistol-whipped Moore and knocked him out. While Ricardo herded the rest of the crew together, he saw a tall white man run downstairs. He figured the man was going to radio for help and sent Isael to follow him.

As soon as he saw Moore being pistol-whipped, Blake had turned and gone downstairs. One of the crew members heard him saying, “Is this for real?” Blake was going for the Winchester.308 rifle he kept in his cabin. Before he and his wife, Pippa, had left on their honeymoon, sailing around the pirate-rich Red Sea in 1979, Blake had trained on a rifle range so he could protect them.

David Alan-Williams says, “Peter was always quick to identify a problem, and he’d often fix it himself. If something was wrong at the top of the mast, he was the first to go up there, even if the boat was pitching back and forth in storm conditions.”

Leon Sefton had been below deck reading a book when he heard the commotion. He got up to investigate, and as he neared the stairs he saw Isael, short and taut, with a mask obscuring his face. Isael pointed his pistol at Sefton’s head and Sefton got on the ground. Then Blake’s cabin door opened, and he came out. He leveled his gun at Isael and said, “Get the fuck off my boat.”

Sefton watched Isael break for the deck and, in a moment, Sefton heard shots. He can’t say who shot first; he doesn’t know the sounds of guns well enough. A spokesman for the federal police says, “Probably it was Peter Blake who shot the first time. Maybe if Mr. Blake did not shoot, maybe if he did not have a gun, maybe the criminals would not have shot anyone.” But the prosecutor trying the case says, “Isael behaved as if he were leaving the boat, and Peter Blake followed him. Then, once he got to the top of the stairs, Isael turned and shot at Peter Blake.”

One way or another, Isael and Blake began shooting at each other, Isael at the top of the stairs and Blake behind the wall at the bottom, turning to shoot upward. Rubens, in the catraia, heard the gunfire, jumped into the river, and hid beneath his boat. In the confusion, the Brazilian cook got into the control room, locked the door, and radioed for help, but the radio was still tuned to the wrong frequency and he could raise only the harbormaster in Manaus, nearly a thousand miles away.

Isael’s bullets made holes in the aluminum walls of the cabin, and shots from Blake’s Winchester tore through the canopy. Blake hit Isael in two places-piercing his forearm and blowing off two fingers. The prosecutor says this was a show of both Blake’s restraint and, as he would write in the indictment, “utmost precision.” A defense lawyer says that Blake shot at Isael point-blank, and would have killed him had he been sober. After Isael was hit, Ricardo ran to the stairway and began shooting into the cabin.

Sefton saw Blake banging his gun against the floor. He tried to give him some extra ammunition, but Blake said he didn’t need it-his gun was jammed. Sefton went back down the hall again, and when he came back a minute later he found Blake on the floor, shot in the back. The police say Ricardo confessed to shooting Blake, but he later denied it.

A few of the criminals kept watch over the crew, who were lying on the deck, while Ricardo and Isael gathered what they could-some cameras, a couple of Omega Seamaster watches, CDs, and Blake’s Winchester. They took one of the Seamaster’s dinghies, a rigid-hull inflatable Zodiac, and made their escape in two boats. They fired back at the Seamaster (they claim someone was shooting at them with a second rifle) and grazed Geoff Bullock across the back. As they were making their getaway, Reney said to Ricardo, “Why did you shoot [Blake]!” and Ricardo said, “It was either me or him.”

Peter Blake lay at the foot of the stairs, bleeding from twin holes in his back. The boat was quieter now, and the movement of water was audible. At its mouth, the Amazon is tidal, and the river was now flowing backward, raising the Seamaster five feet an hour. Sefton found Blake with his head cocked awkwardly to the side. He straightened it and watched as Blake took a few labored breaths. One bullet had traveled through his left lung and superior vena cava and come to rest just under the skin of his armpit; the other had pierced his lungs and aorta, and remained in his upper right chest. Either one would have been enough to kill him, says Dr. Carlos Marcos Santos, who arrived on the Seamaster at 10:40 and tried to resuscitate him. He estimates that it took Blake about fifteen minutes to die. He says that Blake had alcohol on his breath (though the crew says he wasn’t drinking on the boat), and that the others seemed very drunk-unsteady on their feet, bleary-eyed, slurring.

“When I got there, Mr. Blake was faceup, below deck,” Dr. Marco says. “He was wearing shorts, either blue or khaki, I can’t remember. And no shirt. You could tell he had a great deal of strength for a man his age. But he was out of shape. He had a prominent belly. His face had seen the sun, you could tell that. There were many deep, permanent lines around the eyes.”

At near 11:00 P.M., Marcos pronounced Blake dead. As they were taking the body off the boat, Rizaldo, the cook, said to the doctor, “These guys have no idea what they have done. He is a national hero, like Pelé is to this country. Everybody loves him. They have no idea what they’ve done.”

The news of Blake’s death reached the rest of the world in the morning. In England, where Blake had been knighted for his accomplishments, The Daily Telegraph wrote that “Blake towered over the sport” of sailing. In New Zealand, Parliament was canceled for the day and the government flew at half-staff a pair of red socks-Blake had worn red socks nearly every time he raced. The prime minister, Helen Clark, speaking at a memorial two weeks later, said, “He put New Zealand on the map.”

I asked Robertson if he had any regrets about the way things happened that night in Macapá. “No. There’s no way any of us can replay the scenario and say, Well, we were responsible, or, We could have done more. Or could’ve done less. I’m sure people must have horrible experiences when somebody dies and the last thing they remember is that they had an argument. But we were having such a good time.”

One well-known character in the yachting world, who didn’t want his name used, says, “Blake was a tough guy. A very tough guy. The kind who wouldn’t have handed over his wallet without a fight. Hearing the circumstances, it wasn’t surprising. Like a lot of Kiwis, he didn’t take a lot of crap. It was part of his skill as a leader, but it was also part of his downfall.”

A week after the murder, when all six suspects have been arrested, Marcelo, the translator, takes me driving through the neighborhoods where they grew up. They are suburbs that have evolved organically, small wooden houses with which the electric/water/civil-service grid is struggling to keep up. The men are mostly in flip-flops and soccer shorts. But the women wear very stylish and sexy clothes. One girl looks particularly elegant, sitting sidesaddle on the back of a bike in a sheer black skirt, black shirt, and black stilettos, heading down a dirt road under the waning equatorial sun.

Another thing you notice is the kites. Big red kites and little black kites and even those cheap plastic bags dispensed at every shop the world over. Telephone wires holding the skeletons of old kites, frozen in their death like inmates zapped while trying to climb the electric fence. Maybe it’s just that the conditions are perfect: It’s always sunny, warm, and windy, and there are always plenty of little kids and plastic bags to go around.

José, one of the two so-called pirates who didn’t have a record, lived in one of the better neighborhoods. His parents’ house is just a few blocks from his, and they’ve agreed to be interviewed because they don’t want people to think José is a hardened criminal.

We sit on the concrete patio in front of their house. There’s a little plastic Christmas tree on a table in the corner, and the family Volkswagen has been pulled up onto the patio, blocking the front door. José’s parents, a teacher and a retired government worker, sit on metal rocking chairs. His wife, Milene, leans against the car, holding their two daughters, Isadora, one, and Isabela, five, who has drawn a rainbow tattoo on her forearm. Across the street, some neighbors are building a brick wall around their house because someone keeps stealing the light fixtures on their porch. José’s mother says she will not discuss anything about the case, because she is afraid of saying the wrong thing, but that she’d like to talk about José as a regular person.

“He treasured the motorbike his father gave him,” his mother says. “And his collection of Conan the Barbarian comic books.” Isabela runs inside and returns with a Conan the Barbarian comic book written in Portuguese. “No one was allowed to touch them,” his mother goes on. “And he had over a hundred magazines.” On the cover of the comic book, Conan is swinging onto the deck of a ship with a sword between his teeth.

José, Ricardo, and Reney were arrested on December 6 after they were given up by Isael, who was the first to be picked up, since he was walking around with two stumps where fingers should have been and was easy to identify. They found Josué and Rubens the following day, hiding out at a house in the jungle. At Ricardo’s mother’s home, in the ceiling, they found a Canon camera, an Omega Seamaster watch, a pistol with a fitting for a silencer, a.38 revolver, a bulletproof vest, and, as the police report indicates, thirty-seven “foreign music” CDs. José was arrested while having sex with his wife, dragged naked out into the street, and beaten in front of the neighbors. They discovered another of the watches at his home, where he’d shoved it inside a little red teddy bear in Isadora’s room.

The first four, as well as three others who were eventually released, were arrested by the local police before being turned over to the federal authorities. While still in local-police custody, these four were beaten in the presence of one of their lawyers (though the police denied this). Later, in a cell, José claims, the officers played a game called telephone, which involved smacking both his ears simultaneously. A man named Jânio, a suspect who was later released, says that they put a bag over his head until he almost passed out, and then took it off. “And when we were in the car, the policeman, he put a bullet in the gun and spun it,” Jânio says, “then pulled the trigger right in front of my face. I could see the bullet, that it wasn’t yet in the chamber, but I was still scared. They were saying, The president of Brazil told us he doesn’t care if you’re alive or dead. He said, “Do whatever you want to them.”

“I shit my pants.”

In the few hours after they were arrested, the pirates came to realize that they’d been involved in an event of completely different proportions from what they’d thought. They left the boat having robbed and murdered a tourist, an anonymous victim, but they soon discovered they’d killed a person who might inspire large-scale consequences. And realizing this was, they all say, pretty bewildering.

“If this had been some regular guy,” one of their lawyers says, “they wouldn’t have even made arrests at this point.”

The Amapá State Prison is on the outskirts of town. It’s not a hulking, high-tech campus, like American prisons are. There are no monolithic sliding gates or remote locks or video cameras. It’s just a few single-story buildings separated from the highway by a series of concrete walls. Between the buildings are a couple of bald fields where prisoners play soccer.

Marcelo, the translator, lives just across the road and says that every year a few inmates are killed by other prisoners or guards, and another half-dozen escape. “It’s okay, I guess,” Marcelo says. “They usually run into the woods and not toward my house.”

A Franciscan friar who runs a mission at the prison agrees to take us to meet the six suspects. We arrive just after lunch. When you’re done with your meal at the Amapá State Prison, you simply throw what remains out through the bars of your cell, so the hall is covered with rice and what appear to be bits of chicken. Beneath that odor is the funk of food rotted into concrete and the stink of fifty men in equatorial heat. Some of the inmates make noises as we walk past-quasi-menacing laughter, unintelligible grumbling, a convincing pig squeal.

All six of the accused are housed in the same cell, which looks to be about six feet across and twelve feet deep. When they hear our approach, they get up from their hammocks, which are slung across the middle of the room, and make some effort to clean up a bit. Ricardo, the shooter, puts on a shirt, and Rubens pushes some clothes into a corner. They all come to the cell door and look at me curiously. The friar says, “You’re the first white reporter they’ve met.” The guard tells us we have an hour to talk, then leads us to a concrete bench outside the cell block and waits at the gate.

In the pictures published all over the world two days after the murder, the pirates looked like a bunch of guys pulled in from a barbecue, wearing soccer shorts and sandals. In person, they look even less intimidating. Only Isael looks like someone you’d be scared of, with a big scar across his belly and a muscular body with a very low center of gravity. The gunshot wounds to the hand and forearm don’t hurt, either. Reney, on the other hand, has delicate features and soft, velvety black eyes. He doesn’t look so different from Ralph Macchio, circa The Karate Kid.

“We are being treated worse than anyone else here,” Ricardo says. “We have been tortured. Show them, José.” José stands up and pulls down his shorts. His ass is covered in big black-and-yellow bruises, which, he says, were administered with an iron bar wrapped in a towel. Isael puts his arm forward and says he hasn’t been allowed to see a doctor in a week. The wound on his forearm, about eight inches long and closed crudely with some black thread, looks unnaturally wet. He unwraps the bandage on his hand and shows where the two fingers closest to his pinkie were shot off at the knuckle.

José, who’s called Grande Blanco (roughly, “Big Whitey”) and has remarkable jug ears and a prominent jaw, says, “It’s not like the media is saying that we are used to doing this job. This is the first time we killed someone-” and then Ricardo cuts him off. The police say Ricardo was the mastermind, and he seems to control the group. He rarely allows any of the others to speak.

One thing I wanted to ask when I came to see them in prison was, given that they didn’t set out to murder a man, how they felt when they realized they had. This was, after all, possibly the crucial moment in their lives. The group looks to Ricardo for an answer: “We did not know what happened. We never went down below deck to see him. We knew only that his shooting had stopped and so we left the boat.” I don’t point out that this can’t be true, since they stole Blake’s rifle.

I ask them if there is anything they want to ask me. Ricardo says, “What is the main religion in Peter Blake’s country?” I say I think they are mainly Protestant, and ask why he wants to know. “I’m Catholic,” he says, “so I would like to know. It’s important.”

Jose says, “I have a question. What did you think of us before? And how do you think of us now? We aren’t what they say we are, right? We are not pirates, river rats.” I tell him I hadn’t known much about them other than that they’d killed Peter Blake while trying to rob him. “Well, I don’t think it’s right, what they’re saying about us. You know, I’ve never been convicted of any crimes before.” The criminals now find themselves infamous, cast in a role larger than they had before. Ricardo seems to see the appeal of it. Jose, though, is scared shitless that he’s lost his former identity as simple local screwup, a feeling that thirty years in prison will probably relieve him of. Jose says, “I swear, I never could imagine that the story would end this way.”

If things had gone according to script, it would have been the Southern Ocean that killed Peter Blake. The Southern Ocean is roughly eight million square miles spreading out from Antarctica. It was the most dangerous and crucial leg of his five Whitbreads and two Jules Vernes, and Blake liked to call it the loneliest place on earth. He said often, “If you get into trouble down there, well, no use crying to Mum.” And trouble was inevitably what you’d find in the Southern Ocean. It was a wind-and-weather factory of unrivaled proportions, and Blake called the swells there “liquid Himalayas.” “The real danger,” he said, “is the bow digging in and the boat flipping end over end.” He built little hatches on the hull of ENZA New Zealand so he could climb out if this happened, not that there’d be much he could have done, sitting on an upside-down boat in the middle of the loneliest place on earth. Blake’s friends and colleagues paint the relationship between him and the Southern Ocean like the relationship between, say, Rocky and Apollo Creed-the chummy, mortal respect reserved for worthy adversaries. It’s not that Peter Blake did not realize that he was, like everyone else, a pawn of fate; it’s just that when fate showed up on his boat, dressed in a motorcycle helmet and a grimy T-shirt, he failed to recognize it.

I went to Brazil just before Christmas last year to report a story on the death of Peter Blake for Men’s Journal, where I was working at the time. Yd like to say I was drawn to the story because of some overarching theme it brought up for me. But the truth is that a story appeared in The New York Times one morning about a world-famous sailor who’d been killed by pirates on the Amazon. It was a kind of no-brainer Men’s Journal story, plus I had not written a piece in a while and I was afraid I was going to be fired. I am usually afraid I’m going to be fired. So I flew to Macapá, Brazil, a town I had never heard of before, found a translator who spoke maybe fifth-grade English, and drove around Equatorial Brazil in a rented Fiat, almost always in danger of being robbed by drunk people with machetes.

There was, nonetheless, plenty of adventure and discovery in the reporting of this story. The thrill of finding yourself in a town you’ve never heard of before, suddenly integrated into its community of policemen and lawyers and criminals, cannot be overstated. The editor of Men’s Journal largely wanted me to write about the life of Peter Blake. He was, after all, a Men’s Journal kind of guy-intrepid adventurer, naturalist, celebrity. But to me, his life was just another example of bored rich people creating challenges for themselves where none naturally exist (if Blake wanted to circumnavigate the globe, British Airways would have done it more quickly and cheaply, and with more free pretzels). I was more interested in the families of the killers, in the neighborhoods where they lived, in the concrete stadium built over the equator for dancing competitions, and in the masses of children flying kites at dusk. It’s always reassuring to go to some distant outpost and discover just how enormous and varied and confusing the world is.

One night, in my hotel room, I became convinced that bandits with pistols were going to climb through my window, steal my stash of American currency and Clif Bars, and leave me bleeding on the floor. And suddenly just how obscene Peter Blake’s death was seemed very real. Blake had simply been a curious man passing through a town that meant almost nothing to him, not so different from me. It was a humanizing moment. That it took my feeling threatened is, I know, kind of pathetic, but I blame fame; it can take away a person’s person-ness and make him seem more like a brand. The more I drove around Macapá in my rented Fiat learning about the night Blake was murdered, about the people involved, the more I became fascinated with the confluence of lives, with the perfect-storm-like escalation of events, the loss of control, the spontaneous combustion that resulted in a tragedy that no one involved had wanted.

When I met Peter Blake’s killers in jail, they were bewildered at having been part of something so large and violent. When I spoke to the men in the crew, they were likewise bewildered. It was the sort of event for which denial is the only sensible reaction. Since I’ve returned from Brazil, the “pirates” (more like petty thieves) have begun prison sentences many of them may not outlive; Peter Blake’s widow just put up the family yacht for auction, since it’s too big a boat for her to handle on her own and she could use the money; Blake’s business partners are trying to make a go of Blakexpeditions as a Cousteau-ian nonprofit In the movies, killers are calculating and the murders they commit are shot through with meaning and psycho-philosophical dilemma. In Macapá, though, as in most places, lives take violent, abrupt turns for almost no reason at all.