The Mechanism by Vladimir Netto

Author:Vladimir Netto [Netto, Vladimir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473563216

FIRST DAY IN JAIL

When he arrived at the Federal Police station, Marcelo Odebrecht was taken to a room to go through the usual formalities on being taken into custody. Other arrested executives from construction firms had passed through there in previous phases of Operation Car Wash. Odebrecht was restless and seemed very annoyed. His defence lawyers were on their way. They would say that the arrests had been unjust and unnecessary, that the Odebrecht group was cooperating with police and complying with all requests from the judicial authorities. They would also claim that the evidence presented by Sergio Moro as justification for the arrests was already known, having been cited in various other Car Wash proceedings. But Sergio Moro had decided that now there was sufficient evidence for an arrest.

When Marcelo Odebrecht’s lawyers arrived, they conferred privately in a corner of the room. Odebrecht took charge, telling them exactly what he wanted and how he wanted it to be done. He was used to giving orders, and that’s what he did, telling his lawyers precisely what they should do, even in front of the detectives. His lawyers did not intervene with suggestions, simply listening and taking notes. Odebrecht admitted to the detectives that he had been expecting something to happen, but had thought the police would raid the company rather than his house, and that they would be investigating the group’s construction firm rather than the parent company, which owns forty-nine separate businesses.

At a certain point, the police gave him fifteen minutes to finish talking to his lawyers. Twenty minutes passed, then twenty-two. The police asked all the other lawyers to leave. Dora Cavalcanti from the Odebrecht group asked for more time. Five more minutes passed, and there was still no sign of her leaving. She had to be gently removed.

During the search at Marcelo Odebrecht’s house, the police found two mobile phones in a bedroom for his own personal use, one in the study, four in the couple’s main bedroom, one in another bedroom and three more in the rest of the house: eleven mobile phones in all. The police had already been monitoring some of them for weeks without any success; most of the phones had been switched off during this period or had simply not been used by him. Odebrecht must be using other mobile phones, thought the officers. In searching for his number, the police also monitored his wife’s mobile.

On the day of Odebrecht’s arrest, there were a number of calls between his wife and their two young daughters. His wife also called her sister-in-law, Monica Odebrecht. Controversially, the contents of these conversations were made public during the preparations for trial.

The disclosure of his wife’s conversations provoked protests from Marcelo Odebrecht, who sued the state for damages, accusing Operation Car Wash of unduly making public information of a private and intimate nature relating to him and his family. The Odebrecht group’s lawyers demanded an investigation into who had allowed the disclosure, and requested that the judge rule the recordings to be confidential.

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