When the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC) took over the brightly-colored hillside favelas in São Paulo, Brazil’s most powerful gang also brought the criminal underworld under control. There was an order to what might seem like criminal chaos, and rules to abide by. Robbing the city’s most vulnerable residents was prohibited, but it was okay to target the rich. And when major businesses were hit, the loot had to be shared with the community. For the city’s marginalized residents, neighborhoods got a bit safer.
“We called it a Robin Hood campaign because it was a kind of solidarity – with all the quotation marks we can put on it. But things have changed,” said Djalma Costa, who founded an NGO dedicated to protecting the rights of adolescents in São Paulo’s favelas.
But the PCC’s Robin Hood days are a thing of the past.
As the gang started working its way into the global cocaine trade in around 2016, profit appears to have changed its politics. The PCC began retreating from the streets it once governed, delegating local drug dealing to smaller, less organized partners.
Now, the gang has evolved beyond the prisons and favelas it called home. As it gets comfortable in São Paulo’s financial sector and posh neighborhoods, near the establishment it once opposed, it leaves criminal control around the city’s more marginalized communities in far less capable hands.
From Prison Protection to Cocaine Kings
Born and raised in Brazil’s prisons, the PCC brought both order and criminal profits to its world behind bars via rules known as the Disciplina (discipline), which were codified in its 1997 charter. The PCC declared its solidarity with the Rio de Janeiro-based Red Command (Comando Vermelho – CV), Brazil’s oldest prison gang and second-largest organized crime group, which was both an inspiration and future rival of the PCC. The gang promised to “revolutionize the country from inside the prisons,” fighting “powerful oppressors and tyrants” whose abuse led to “the creation of monsters,” declared the charter.
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As some members finished their sentences and returned to São Paulo’s streets, the charter mandated that PCC members had to support their “irmãos,” or brothers, behind bars. They began instituting the gangs’ criminal rules in São Paulo’s poorest neighborhoods while taking over local drug dealing. “I remember a time when a worker living in the community could not be robbed… And if it did happen, [the PCC] would go after whoever did it and be very strict about it, so there was order,” Costa told InSight Crime.
The government tried to stymie the PCC’s growth by isolating incarcerated leaders and moving them to distant facilities to cut them off from the gang’s rank and file. But the strategy backfired and instead helped the PCC take its ideas to the new prisons and expand around the country. As authorities arrested more members, the group grew even stronger.
The gang’s expansion helped it to take over a large chunk of Brazil’s domestic drug market while maintaining its home base in São Paulo. But when Gilberto Aparecido Dos Santos, alias “Fuminho,” a childhood friend of the PCC’s leader Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, alias “Marcola,” made a visit to Bolivia around 2016, everything changed. Fuminho secured a large and steady supply of cocaine from local coca growers, and the PCC set its sights on the international cocaine trade, taking over transit routes in Paraguay and forging illicit business deals with European mafias.
Late that year, the PCC and Red Command’s solidarity came to a violent end. The gangs went to war in the prisons, and the conflict spilled onto the streets. The rival gangs vied for cocaine trafficking routes, particularly in northern Brazil.
In 2017, the PCC published a new charter erasing all mentions of the Red Command. It also added sections defining how members could pursue profit on the outside, as long as they continued to abide by the charter and send money to support the group.
The PCC Finds New Priorities
The gang’s leap into the international cocaine trade saw it retreat from the streets it once governed, and its famous Disciplina got lost.
SEE ALSO: How PCC ‘Discipline’ Helped Gang Control the Underworld
While the PCC had strict rules, it never shied away from violence. The violence just had to be approved. The gang often carried out brutal and performative murders of rivals, even assassinating a prominent judge in 2003. Members were forbidden from settling personal disputes through force. Using “organized” violence, the PCC carved out a larger footprint and expanded its membership. But at the same time, its violent expansion began to attract more attention from authorities. Leaders that were enforcing the gang’s principles in São Paulo’s neighborhoods were arrested, leading to more turnover and vacuums in local leadership.
As the PCC’s international trafficking started to bring in far more profit than local drug dealing, the gang began delegating some of its roles in the favelas. The PCC began putting small groups of people from the neighborhood, or even individuals, in charge of local drug dealing and enforcing the PCC’s code. But even though they had the backing of the PCC in theory, these were outsiders – petty criminals from the favela. The PCC supplied the drugs, but not the muscle. Without the gang’s full weight in the neighborhood, the Disciplina began to fade, and the small-time drug dealers no longer had the will or a way to enforce the PCCs rules there.
Crime With No Punishment
In the Capão Redondo neighborhood, one of São Paulo’s most marginalized, locals crowd the bus stops and sidewalks to take long commutes into the city center each morning.
Long hours inside the hot, cloying air of public transport used to be the main worry for people here. But since 2016 and the retreat of the PCC, robbery against residents in this neighborhood has increased by 32%.
“One thing criminals never accepted was robbing people at bus stops, because they allegedly love working people. Today, it’s become a free-for-all here,” an NGO worker born and raised in M’Boi Mirim, one of São Paulo’s most violent regions that includes Capão Redondo, told InSight Crime.
Beyond the favelas, the PCC’s evolution into a major player in international cocaine trafficking created a new type of member. The group began recruiting people with elite contacts and education – people who had never set foot in a favela or prison cell but could launder the gang’s ill-gotten gains through Brazil’s financial institutions. Thus, the PCC began to forge their own elites in the underworld.
“You have a lower class, which is those kids who carry cocaine in their backpacks. […] But they are not the same as the guy who, after making so much money from drug trafficking, bought a house in a fancy neighborhood and drives around in an armored car. When we talk about criminal organizations, we have to understand that the profile of the drug dealer has changed,” Ivana David, a São Paulo judge who has spent her career prosecuting the PCC, told InSight Crime.
Just over an hour’s ride away on public transport from Capão Redondo, the view mutates from poor, stacked houses to huge modern buildings around Faria Lima, a wide tree-lined avenue filled with bike lanes and office workers in expensive suits carrying briefcases. A world away from where the PCC began, Faria Lima is home to Brazil’s biggest financial sector. As the PCC has diversified, it has infiltrated the halls of some of the area’s largest corporations, laundering money, committing fraud, and even creating its own illegal banking system.
Authorities estimate that the PCC is now raking in $1.85 billion (R$10 billion) a year, with activities ranging from drug trafficking to money laundering through the formal sector. Now deep into the fintech game, the PCC creates illicit virtual banks that rival legitimate ones in size, according to São Paulo prosecutors. The gang is increasingly behind profitable and seemingly legitimate businesses. In 2025, operation Hidden Carbon (Carbono Oculto) revealed the gang’s control over businesses linked to São Paulo’s gasoline supply chain.
A brazen assassination outside Brazil’s busiest airport in November 2024 revealed how deeply the gang had penetrated the formal sector. The victim, Vinicius Gritzbach, was a real estate agent. But before his murder, Gritzbach admitted to laundering at least $500,000 in drug profits through cryptocurrencies, gas stations, and real estate, and began working with the police. But the government could not protect their star witness from the PCC’s deadly reach.
Even though the PCC’s top brass remain in federal prison in São Paulo, authorities are seizing luxury vehicles and apartments belonging to people linked to the PCC who have never set foot in prison and are now vital to the gang’s day-to-day operations.
The gang has also gotten into bed with the government it swore to oppose, using corrupt public agents to win municipal contracts that allow it to launder money. The PCC even uses the same transport networks ridden by the city’s favela residents to commute into the city as profit channels. In January 2025, São Paulo’s City Hall terminated its contract with two bus companies the government had hired after discovering they had ties to the PCC.
The PCC’s rags-to-riches story has moved it up and away from its humble origins, and the communities it once protected are now in incapable hands. Its ally-turned-enemy, the Red Command, may have eyes on São Paulo – the authorities believe that with the PCC focused on international trafficking, the Red Command is trying to take over local drug dealing in their rival’s backyard. With the guardianship of the PCC gone, the only sure thing for residents right now is uncertainty.
Featured Image: Graffiti connected to the PCC in M’Boi Mirim, São Paulo. Credit: Christopher Newton / InSight Crime.