September 30th, 1979. A muddy alleyway in a housing project on the outer edge of Rio de Janeiro. A man named Manuel Mashadu Hashaw, 27 years old, a former army infantryman and one of the finest marksmen in his old unit lay bleeding into the dirt. The neighborhood that adored him called him Manet Galinia.
The world would later know him as Knockout Ned. He had survived an earlier attempt on his life that year. He had survived the assault that started his war. He had survived a conflict that had turned children into executioners. He would not survive this. The bullets came from the gang of a man called Dinho, who had finally tracked down his home address.
The world would later know that man as Z Peno. This wasn’t just another FLLA killing. The man who died in that alley had become against the odds the moral center of an entire community. He was no innocent. He had a record. He carried a gun. He ran an armed crew. But he was the one man who stood up to the king.
And he didn’t do it for territory or product. He did it for revenge for what had been done to the woman he loved. The neighborhood loved him for that. The neighborhood would mourn him for years, and his death would mark the moment the Sedad Deas stopped being a housing project and became something else entirely, a republic of guns.
This is the story of how a government attempt to hide the poor of Rio di Janeiro behind a wall of distance and concrete created one of the most violent neighborhoods on Earth. This is the story of how a boy named Paulo Lind walked out of that neighborhood alive with a notebook full of dead men’s names and turned what he had seen into a novel that became a film that shocked the world.
This is the story of the real City of God. But here’s what the movie didn’t tell you. The real war was longer, dirtier, and far less stylish than the camera made it look. The real Zeno wasn’t a cackling psychopath. He was something colder, more calculating. And the man who finally brought him down wasn’t a rival kingpin in a shootout.
And it wasn’t the police. It was time. It was the next generation of traffickers who seized his throne while he sat in a prison cell. To understand any of this, in January of that year, Rio de Janeiro drowned. Record rains turned the hillsides into avalanches. The FLLAS, those improvised brick and tin neighborhoods clinging to the slopes above Leblon and Lagoa and Copa Cababana slid into the sea.
Around 250 people died. Tens of thousands lost their homes. And here is the part that gets simplified in most tellings. The hardline politician usually blamed for what came next, Carlos Lassera, governor of the state of Guanabara, had already left office by the time the flood hit. But his machine was still running. For years, Lerta had pushed a policy he called Ramasianismo, removalism. The idea was simple.
You don’t fix the fllas. You erase them. You truck the people somewhere else. The housing grid that would become Sedas had been planned under his government. It was his successor, Governor Negrron De Lima, who used the flood as the trigger, loading the newly homeless into army trucks and dumping them on the western edge of the city.
That somewhere else was Jaka Repagua, a swampy patch of nothing 30 kilometers from the center, drained just enough to pour concrete on. They named it Sidade deas, city of God. The first families arrived in 1966, dropped off with whatever they could carry. They found rows of small concrete houses set on a grid.
No paved streets, no buses, no schools, no clinic, no police station. The marshlands still bled water through the foundations. Children walked to school through ankle deep mud. Fathers commuted 4 hours a day for jobs in the city center and lost them when they showed up late one too many times. The state had created a perfect petri dish.
Concentrate the poorest people in Rio, the black families and the mixed race families that the wealthy didn’t want to see. Strip out the institutions. Make sure no one in authority lives within 10 kilometers. Then walk away. What grows in soil like that grows wild. In 1965, Paulo Lind moved with his family to that grid.
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His family was among the early arrivals. He was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1958, the son of a house painter and a domestic worker who had come down from the impoverished northeast. He was small, he was black, he liked to read. He had no idea that he was being placed inside what would become two decades later one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Rio.
He just knew the streets weren’t finished and the houses smelled like wet cement. Lind grew up there through the late 60s and the 70s. He went to school. He read poetry. He started writing it and writing sambas. And while he was doing that, the kids he had played soccer with were doing something else. They were graduating from shoplifting to armed robbery.
From armed robbery to holding up delivery trucks. From holding up trucks to selling marijuana out of cornerhouses, they called bokeas defumo, mouths of smoke. The first generation of sedad deas criminals were what Brazilians used to call meros. Street smart hustlers with a code. They robbed gas stations. They held up motel. They did not, as a rule, kill children.
By the early ‘7s, that was already changing. And one of the people watching it change was Paulo Lind. Here’s where the story turns. Here’s the part the movie compresses into a three-minute montage. You have to understand the geography of Brazilian crime to understand why Cedar Deas exploded the way it did.
Because what happened in that neighborhood didn’t start in that neighborhood. It started on a prison island called Ilha Grande off the coast of Rio. During the military dictatorship that ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985, the generals made what they thought was a clever decision. They locked up their political enemies, communists, Marxist gerillas, student radicals, and they housed them at the Condido Menddees Penitentiary in the same wings as common criminals, robbers, thieves, killers.
The thinking was that putting intellectuals next to thugs would humiliate the intellectuals. The reality was the opposite. The thugs took notes. The leftist gorillas were trained in cell structure, hierarchy, secure communication, and ideological discipline. The common criminals, sitting in the same cell block for years, absorbed all of it.
Out of that fusion in the late 70s, a name started to circulate inside the Brazilian underworld. Commando Verloho, the Red Command. It started as a prison gang for mutual protection. By the time its founders started getting released or escaping in the late 70s and early 80s, it had become something more dangerous. A criminal franchise, a network.
Cells in every major flla in Rio. a code of silence, a shared business model. And the business model was about to change forever because cocaine was coming. You have to picture this. Through the 1970s, the drug trade in Rio’s fllas was mostly marijuana. Low margins, low violence, you sold a few bags, you made a few cruseros.
Then starting around 1980, Colombian cocaine began flooding into Brazil through the Amazon and out of the port cities. The economics flipped overnight. A kilo of marijuana might net you a few hundred. A kilo of cocaine could net you 10,000. And the customers were no longer just poor neighbors.
The customers were the rich kids in Epana, the film producers in Leblan, the lawyers in Bafogo. Suddenly the bokea deumo in a back alley of Sedad deas was the bottom rung of a pipeline that ran straight to Miami and Lisbon. That kind of money attracts a different kind of person. And in Sedade deas that person was a skinny dark-skinned kid named Jose Eduardo Barto Concan born in 1957.
The neighborhood called him Dadinho little baby. He hated the nickname. As he got older, as he got more feared, he changed it. He started calling himself Z Peno, little Joe. He was small. He was quiet. He had a high-pitched laugh that sounded wrong coming out of him. He had been involved in crime since he was a child.
By the time he was 18, he was running with the older robbers. By his early 20s, he was something nobody in the neighborhood had seen before. A businessman who killed for market share. You have to understand, the real Zapeno was not the cackling movie villain. Friends and neighbors who survived those years say the cold-blooded massacre the film pins on him was in fact someone else’s doing.
What he was was a strategist. Around 1979, when most of the Bokeas deumo in Sedad deas were independent operations run by guys who had grown up together, Z Peno began to consolidate. The plan was simple. There were maybe a dozen significant drug sales points in the favlla. He wanted all of them. So he started killing the owners.
Some he ambushed, some he absorbed, some he simply walked up to and shot in front of their families. Within roughly 24 months, by most accounts that survive, Z Peno controlled almost every bokeh in the city of God. He had a monopoly. He had soldiers. He had money. He had, depending on which old residence you ask, somewhere between 50 and 200 armed teenagers working for him.
And here’s the part that gets lost in the movie. He brought stability. Not the stability of peace, the stability of fear. inside the FLLA under Z Peno. You did not get mugged. You did not get robbed. You did not get raped. If you did, and the perpetrator was found, the perpetrator was executed in the alley behind the church. Residents who remember those years tell a complicated truth. They were terrified of him.
In 1979, he went after a man named Mano Machado Roachcha. Mano was born May 12th, 1952. By 1979, he was 27 years old. His path was not a clean one. He had drifted into crime young with petty robberies and a string of arrests as a minor. The ordinary career of a FLLA kid with no other ladder to climb.
At 18, he joined the Brazilian army and served a few years in an infantry battalion where he turned out to be one of the best shots in his unit. Then he came home to Sedate Deas. He was not an innocent. The accounts of what set off the war are documented across multiple sources and they converge on a single spark. Sometime in 1979, Z Peno’s group seized and raped Manuelowell’s girlfriend.
That was the line that even the cocaine money could not paper over. It was a humiliation aimed at a man the whole neighborhood revered. And Manol Machado Roa did something nobody in Sedad deas had dared do to Z Peno. He picked up a gun and went looking for the king. This is the part the movie got right. Manuelow had military training.
He knew how to shoot. He knew how to move. He struck first at Zay Peno’s gang, killing two of his men in the opening raid, then turned on his soldiers, then on anyone who sold for him. Within months, the neighborhood split in half. There was Z Peno’s army and there was Mano’s army which he expanded and armed with heavier weapons than the others carried.
And in the middle were tens of thousands of residents trying to keep their kids alive. Sedati deas is laid out on a grid, but the grid had been overgrown. The original concrete rowouses had been added onto, expanded, stacked. The wide spaces between blocks had been filled in with brick. The result was a labyrinth of narrow alleys, bacus, just wide enough for two people to pass each other.
Inside that labyrinth, two armies fought a guerilla war. The economics were brutal and simple. Abocadumo in 1980 was generating by the most credible estimates that survive in academic accounts between $5,000 and $20,000 a week in profit. There were dozens of them across the FLLA. Whoever controlled the most bokeas controlled the most money.
Whoever controlled the most money could buy the most guns. The arithmetic of the war meant nobody could stop. To stop was to die. Teenagers who had not finished fourth grade were carrying weapons of war paid for by the cocaine appetite of the same Rio elite who decades earlier had voted to push them out to the swamp. And in the middle of this was a researcher named Alba Zaluar.
She was a Brazilian anthropologist who in the early 1980s came to Sedade Deis to do the doctoral fieldwork that would anchor her study of how urban poverty curdles into organized criminal warfare. She needed a local assistant, someone the community would trust, someone who could move between the Bokeas and the church and the schools without getting shot.
She found a young poet who had grown up in the neighborhood and was now studying letters at the Federal University. His name was Paulo Lind. Lind started working for Zaluir in the mid 80s. The job was to collect testimonies. He carried a notebook. He interviewed former bandidos, current bandidos, mothers of dead bandidos, sisters of dead bandidos, priests, teachers, cops. He went to funerals.
He went back to the same alleys he had played soccer in as a child and asked the men who controlled them now how the business actually worked. how a kilo got cut, how a soldier got recruited, how a bokeh got taken, how a hit got ordered, how a body got buried. What he discovered slowly was that the war he was documenting was not a series of random gunfights. It was a system.
It had rules. It had ranks. It had economics that could be charted on a piece of paper. The commando Vermo had given the Favlla traffickers a model and the cocaine boom had given them the money to scale it. The state had given them an empty neighborhood with no police and no oversight. And they had filled the empty space with their own government, a government that taxed, ruled and killed.
Manuel Machado Roachcha Manet Galinia was killed on September 30th, 1979. He had been attacked earlier in the year and survived. The second time he didn’t. Most accounts agree that Zay Peno and his gang discovered where he lived and gunned him down at his home in front of his parents and younger siblings. He was 27 years old.
The neighborhood turned out for his funeral in numbers the police could not believe. He had become in the months of his war against Zeno something more than a man. He had become proof that you could fight back. The fact that he died doing it did not diminish that. In some ways, it amplified it. In early 1980, leadership then passed to a trafficker named Ayelton Bata.
The movie’s carrot Sonora never existed as a single real man. He’s a composite loosely modeled on Bata. The war dragged on into the early 1980s with weekly killings, with houses burned, with mothers wailing over bodies in the street, with children growing up convinced that gunfire was the natural sound of evening. The state finally noticed, not because it cared, because the bodies were starting to make the newspapers in the south zone.
Operations began. Police incursions into Sedare Deas became regular. They were not by any honest account peacekeeping operations. They were retaliations. Cops who had been embarrassed by the Favlla war wanted blood. 1985 in the same year the military dictatorship finally collapsed. Joseé Eduardo Barto Concan Z Peno died.
Here is where the script the movie wrote diverges hardest from reality. He had been arrested and he had escaped from the Frey Kaneka prison and he came back to Sidaready Deas to retake the Bokeas he had lost. But a new generation of traffickers had taken over in his absence and they were not handing the empire back.
Accounts of exactly how he died differ. Some say the rival faction shot him. Some say his body carried no wounds at all and point to an overdose. His own associates hauling the corpse out of the favlla. What they agree on is the irony. The man who had killed his way to a monopoly was finished off not by the police and not by Manet Galinia, but by the next wave of younger killers he himself had helped create.
He had ruled the city of God for roughly 6 years. He had killed by the lowest credible estimates dozens of people personally and ordered the deaths of dozens more. He had built a cocaine empire out of the cinder block houses of a forgotten housing project. And at the end he died young the way almost every flla kingpin since has died.
His death did not end the trade. It just opened a vacancy. The commando of Herloho moved in fully. By the late 80s, Sedare deas was a CV stronghold. Where Zay Pino had run a personal kingdom, the Red Command now ran a corporate franchise. The killing continued. The cocaine continued. The teenagers with rifles continued.
And in 1986, Paulo Lind started writing. Here’s the part that almost nobody outside Brazil knows. The book Sidade Deas was not written in a year. It was not written in two years. It was written across eight years. While Lind worked other jobs, while he raised a family, while he kept going back to the FLLA to verify what he had been told, he had thousands of pages of interview transcripts from his work with Albazaluar. He had his own memories.
He had the names of the dead memorized. He wrote in a style nobody had used before in Brazilian literature. He wrote the way people in Sedat deas actually talked. He wrote without sentimentality. He wrote roughly 300 named characters into one book, most of them based on real people, most of them dead by the time the book was finished.
Sedare deas, the novel was published in 1997 by company, the most prestigious literary publisher in Brazil. It ran more than 500 pages. Critics didn’t know what to do with it at first. It was too violent for a literary novel. It was too literary for a crime novel. It was too true for either.
Then the reviews started coming in. The critic Roberto Schwarz, one of the most respected literary minds in Latin America, championed it. The book won awards. It sold and it did something almost no Brazilian novel had ever done. It made the Brazilian middle class look at the fllas without flinching. A filmmaker named Fernando Meels read the book. He saw the movie immediately.
He partnered with the screenwriter Bralio Manavani and the co-director Katya Lund. They made a decision that would define the project. They would not use professional actors. They would cast the kids from the fllas. They ran a sprawling casting and acting workshop drawing on the nostro theater group we from the hill that had been founded in the Vitigel favlla back in 1986.
They auditioned hundreds of teenagers from communities like Vitigel and Sid Deas itself. The actor they eventually cast as Z Peno Leandro Firmino was a young man from Sedat Deas who by his own account only went to the audition to keep his friend company. The film Sedare Deas was released in 2002.
It went on to earn four Academy Award nominations for directing, adapted screenplay, cinematography, and editing. It is now routinely listed among the greatest films of the 21st century. And for residents of the real Cedare Deas, it was a mixed blessing of historic proportions. On one hand, the movie forced Brazil and the world to acknowledge that the FLLAS were not picturesque slums, but war zones with histories. NOS’s arrived.
Foreign journalists arrived. Social programs that had been ignored for 40 years suddenly received funding. The actors who had been cast became briefly celebrities. Some of them used the money to leave the FLLA. Some used it to stay and build schools. On the other hand, the movie did something the residents have spent more than 20 years trying to undo.
It stamped a brand on the neighborhood. After 2002, putting Sedade deas on your resume in Rio meant your resume went in the trash. Employers in the south zone associated the address with the killers on the screen. The tens of thousands of residents of the real Cedade deas, the great majority of whom had never held a gun, found themselves represented globally by Leandro Firmino’s high-pitched laugh.
In 2009, in preparation for the World Cup and the Olympics, the state government installed a pacifying police unit, a UP in Sedad de. The murder rate dropped. The Commando Vermillho went underground. Schools reopened. Then the Olympics ended. The funding ended. The UP program collapsed across Rio.
By the end of the 2010s, the traffickers were back. The rifles were back. The alleys were dangerous again. Today, in the 2020s, Sedas is contested ground between drug factions and the militias. the paramilitary mafias run by former and current police officers. Polo Lind is still alive. He’s still writing. He’s a poet, a screenwriter, a teacher.
He survived the neighborhood. Most of the men he interviewed did not. Most of the men whose names fill his novel did not. He has said in interviews that he wrote the book because nobody else was going to. Because if he didn’t write down what happened, the names of the dead would disappear and the architecture of violence that killed them would be rebuilt somewhere else by people who never learned what had already failed.
That’s the real story of Sidad Deas. It isn’t about cool kids running through alleys with revolvers. It’s about a government that tried to make poverty invisible. It’s about a generation of children who were given a swamp and told to build a city. It’s about a man named Manuelowell, no saint, but no monster either, who picked up a gun because the woman he loved was attacked and a quiet boy named Dadino who picked up a gun because he wanted to rule the world and both of them dying before they turned 30.
It’s about a researcher with a notebook who walked the same alleys they did and lived to write it down. Zeno ruled the city of God for roughly 6 years. He died at 28, killed by the same kind of young gunman he had built his kingdom on. He left no fortune. He left no children who carry his name in public.
He left a body count that no historian has ever been able to fully count and a neighborhood that has spent four decades trying to recover. Monalia lived 27 years. He left a fiance he could not protect, a brother buried not long after him, and a legend the FLLA has not let die. Paulo Lind took what they did and what was done to them and put it on the page and that page became a film and that film became the way the world thinks about Brazilian poverty.
Sedar deas today is still contested. The kids running through the alleys today carry weapons their grandparents could not have imagined. The real story of City of God is not a story about gangsters. It’s a story about what happens when a state decides certain citizens do not deserve to be seen. The cocaine, the wars, the kingpins, the funerals, all of it grew out of that single decision in 1966.
Move them, hide them, forget them. The men with the guns just filled the empty space. If you found this story compelling, hit subscribe. We drop a new deep dive every week into the real history behind the films and the headlines. Drop a comment below. What other crime story do you want us to unpack
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
