Over 400 Agents vs. Zé Bigode: First Confrontation

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Everything went according to plan, but at the meeting point, one of the robbers recognized a detective, who immediately warned him: “You made a mistake, there are police in the area.”

Thus began, on the night of Friday, April 3, 1981, the longest and bloodiest shootout between police and criminals in Rio’s history. About 400 agents participated in the operation, including civilians and military personnel. More than 2,000 bullets were fired over the course of about ten hours of confrontation that left three state agents and bandit José Jorge Saldanha, known as Zé Bigodi, the leader of the Falang Vermila party, dead. According to authorities at the time, this was the first confrontation between the police and the faction, which later changed its name to Comando Vermelho.

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Decades later, the confrontation in the banking complex inspired the 2010 film “400 vs. 1 – A History of Organized Crime.” The shooting also appears in the series “The Game That Changed History,” which premiered last year on Globoplay.

Today, a criminal organization with tentacles in several states in Brazil, Comando Vermelho, has become the target of a series of attacks by security forces in an attempt to stop the advance of this group of drug traffickers. The so-called containment operation began on October 28, when about 2,500 agents entered the Complexo do Alemão, in the northern region of Rio, to execute dozens of arrest warrants, in an attack that left 121 dead, including four police officers. More than 90 rifles were seized during the mobilization operation.

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But at the beginning of the 1980s, the Falang Vermelha battalion was still at the beginning of its expansion, after its formation at the end of the 1970s in the old Ilha Grande prison, in Angra dos Reis. On April 3, 1981, police officers discovered that Zé Bigodi, one of the faction leaders, who had escaped from Ilha Grande the previous year, was hiding in Conjunto dos Pancarios with five other bandits. To plan his arrest, the agents entered the community unrecognized and gathered in front of Building No. 7, but there the whole plan went to waste.

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In front of the building, a heated quarrel occurred between neighbors, attracting the attention of many residents. The Ze Bigod gang was there in the midst of confusion, and when one of the bandits raised an alarm about the approaching police, some of the suspects fled in a car, opening fire, while the brigade chief Vermelha took refuge in apartment No. 302 of the building.

Since then, agents have tried several times to break into the property, but Ze Bigo resisted, shooting several police officers. One of them was injured on the ground and died during the exchange of fire. When someone tried to save him, they shot him too. The building was evacuated, and the agents fired heavy artillery fire at the apartment, which was targeted by tear gas bombs, machine gun fire, and even hand grenades. Armed to the teeth, Xie Bigod spent the night holed up, occasionally shouting defiance at the police, saying he would leave the property only after his death.

At approximately eight o’clock in the morning, after a night of terror for the residents of the complex, the police carried out the final attack. They threw four hand grenades at Apartment No. 302, then entered again and fired into the smoke. The bandit still retaliated by firing another shot from a machine gun, but was eventually shot in the chest and died.

In addition to the three agents killed in the operation, six were injured, and five suspects were arrested. In an interview next to Ze Bigo’s body, Delegate Francisco de Paula Borges, Director of the Political and Social Police, said that this was the first confrontation between the security forces and the Falange Vermelha Brigades and stressed that it would not be the last. The authorities highlighted the faction’s firepower, and the press highlighted the confrontation in Ilha do Governador. For some scholars, this incident was so highly visible that it could be considered a starting point for the expansion of the Red Order.