How far would you be willing to go for ratings? Not tailoring certain aspects of your content to better play into an algorithm—if push came to shove, what would you really be capable of?
Think about it: true crime content is everywhere. Most stories are old enough that others have already made books, documentaries, or videos about them. But what if there was a different way to handle true crime content? What if you were able to exclusively cover breaking stories before police even had time to investigate the crime scene? That certainly sounds like a recipe for success, and the kind of content morbid viewers would absolutely enjoy.
Now there’s an obvious problem with that business model. How on Earth are you supposed to know about murders before the police do? So the question becomes: how far would you be willing to go for ratings? Would you kill a man?
Of course not—you’d pay someone else to do it for you.
The Law and Order Candidate
There’s not a lot of information available about the early life of Wallace Souza, including in Portuguese sources. He was born in Manaus, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, which is located on the banks of the Amazon River, just upstream from its confluence with the Rio Negro.
This section is called the Meeting of Waters in Brazil, because the dark waters of the Rio Negro and the sandy waters of the upper Amazon run alongside each other for several kilometers.
After high school, Wallace earned his first degree at the São Luiz Gonzaga Commercial College, and a second at Basílio Machado State College in São Paulo. He also studied theology and philosophy at the Center for the Study on Human Behavior, though he did not earn another degree there.
Instead, it was time for Wallace to enter the workforce. What kind of job would you expect a 21-year-old with an education in business, theology and philosophy to seek out? If you guessed “police officer,” you are both correct and probably cheating, because there’s no way that should have been anyone’s first guess based on his educational background.
But it was a good job, and presumably a very busy one. Manaus is notoriously dangerous. It is regarded by Brazilians as the country’s most dangerous state capital, and according to the statistics it is the second or third most dangerous city in the entire country. The murder rate is exceptionally high, falling just shy of being in the top 20 highest murder rates in the entire world.
Over half of the cities with higher murder rates are all in Mexico, though New Orleans and Baltimore also appear to be more deadly than Manaus.
Just like how the rates of violent crime in Mexico are largely attributed to the cartels, the crime in Manaus seems to be fueled by gangs of drug traffickers as well. In short, there should have been no shortage of work for Wallace to do during his time as a police officer. It kept him busy for a good eight years, long enough to get married and have the first of his four children, but in 1987 his time with the police department would come to an end.
Of course, that wasn’t actually Wallace’s decision. He was fired after being arrested for pension fraud and stealing gasoline. It’s unclear what the scale of either of these crimes was, particularly the gas theft, but obviously committing crimes is a good way to lose your job as an officer of the law. Or at least it should be.
To be fair, Wallace was reinstated to the force after the investigation concluded and he was found not to have been guilty, but that didn’t happen until 2009 so it’s not like he actually went back to the job. The fact that this happened in 2009 is more than a little ironic, for reasons that will become apparent later.
Following his time with the police, Wallace got into broadcasting. He started as a radio presenter on Rádio Tropical Cidade, 99.3 FM. He also started teaching law at Nilton Lins University in Manaus. While it’s unclear if this began before or after he started his TV show, it was definitely well before he was reinstated to the force. That means someone actively chose to hire a disgraced former cop to teach law at their university.
But where this story really begins and the details start to come into focus is with Wallace’s 1996 TV show Espaço Livre, or Free Space. The show was essentially a pulpit from which Wallace would sermonize about how inefficient public officials were and their failures to keep the people of Manaus safe from the violence that plagued the streets.
While Wallace did give a lot of his own opinions, at its core Espaço Livre was a crime show filled with Wallace’s own investigative journalism. The show was successful, and in 1996, the same year it began, he ran for Councilor of Manaus. He received only 898 votes, falling tens of thousands of votes short of what he would have needed.
This format for the show wasn’t going to last, however. In the Brazilian state of Paraná, the local station Rede OM had made some big moves, and in the early 1990s it became the first nationally broadcast network that wasn’t based in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo. One of their most notable programs was Programa do Ratinho. It was hosted by Carlos Massa, and the show’s name came from his nickname: Ratinho, or “little mouse.”
It was a primetime show, and it was sort of all over the place. There were police reports, talent shows, musical numbers, paternity tests, and whatever else they felt like doing. Programa do Ratinho was immensely popular, often hitting number one in the ratings during its time slot. It was so popular that in 1998, games played for the Mercosul Cup (an international soccer tournament in South America at the time) were preempted for Ratinho’s show, with only the second half of the games being aired.
Wallace looked at the success of the show, and basically said, “forget straight journalism, let’s do that instead.” Starting in 1998, Espaço Livre was rebranded as Canal Livre, or Free Channel. Instead of just being his personal soapbox like the original version, Canal Livre became a variety show very similar to Programa do Ratinho.
It featured musical acts, a puppet named Galerito, and reports of crimes going on in the city. The show quickly skyrocketed in popularity, becoming the most watched afternoon show by far, with nearly all of Manaus watching Canal Livre during their lunch breaks. But Wallace took everything Programa do Ratinho was doing and ramped up the intensity to extreme levels.
Sensationalism on the Streets
Instead of just talking about police reports, Wallace began following police to active crime scenes. In the early days the entire crew only contained a few people, and Wallace was the only reporter. He would venture out in his own car to follow police as they performed drug raids that resulted in shootouts between the traffickers and the cops (putting himself in the line of fire), and he would film murder victims whose bodies hadn’t even been covered up by investigators yet.
They would broadcast videos of bodies that were riddled with bullet holes and bleeding out in the streets, and this was all totally acceptable by Brazilian daytime TV standards. Family members of the victims were often present at these scenes, which gave Wallace the opportunity to interview them as well.
But it wasn’t all about violence or puppets. Wallace wanted to help people, and he would help them directly on his show. Rather than recording the show in an empty studio like he did for Espaço Livre, Canal Livre was filmed in front of a live studio audience of about 50 people, again copying Ratinho. Wallace did something new though. People would come on his show asking for things like food or tires, and he would give them what they needed. Well, it was mostly his sponsors who did, but Wallace was still the face of these philanthropic efforts, and it was likely his idea as well.
This was fantastic both for ratings and for Wallace’s personal popularity. It’s reminiscent of other figures who provided real, tangible help to people rather than just asking them to pray for salvation or to trust in their government to help them. It’s an effective tool for gaining popularity, and then using that popularity to gain power.
For Wallace, that power came in the form of the 1999 election for State Deputy, Brazil’s equivalent of a state senator. A few years earlier he couldn’t even get 1,000 votes, but this time he won the election with almost 52,000 votes. It was the most votes ever received by a State Deputy in Manaus, and the highest percentage of votes received by any State Deputy in all of Brazil. He would go on to win reelection with record breaking numbers two more times, serving until October of 2009.
But despite being a member of government now and having all sorts of official duties to attend to, Wallace continued to host Canal Livre. The show had grown to the point that they had multiple field reporters, but Wallace still wanted to be in the studio even if he wasn’t the one personally investigating the crimes. Usually he was in the studio at least, though his brother Carlos also would act as a host of the show.
They had another brother, Fausto, who was one of the field reporters, a sister who was not involved in the production, and there had been one other sibling, Ulisses. Though he never appeared on the show, Ulisses was ostensibly the reason it existed at all.
Ulisses had been a drug addict, and he died from a drug overdose. This was a major catalyst for Wallace wanting to clean up Manaus and save the people from the criminals that had taken over their city. Drugs made him extremely angry, something he was very vocal about on the air. He made it clear that drug dealers were a scourge, and the only way they could be effectively dealt with was by killing them. His exact words on an episode of Canal Livre were that drug dealers could only be stopped “by a bullet and a grave.” This candor is undoubtedly one of the things that made him such an attractive presenter to audiences.
A Bizarre Spectacle
Regardless, it’s difficult to emphasize what a ridiculous spectacle Canal Livre was. In one moment they would be showing footage of a body dead on the ground, blood pouring from its head and soaking the pavement, then it would suddenly cut to a dance number in the studio where camera crews zoomed in on the backsides of girls dancing in skirts that were so short they may as well have not existed in the first place.
Much of the audience changed with every episode, but there was one man who was always in the audience: Gil the Pie Man. Although he sat in the front row of the audience, he was actually a cast member of the show. He was also a humorless character, or at least that was the character he was hired to play. Gil would sit in the audience with a bucket of sfiha, a sort of Middle Eastern open faced meat pie.
Other cast members, especially the puppet Galerito, would constantly mock Gil. Usually this consisted of calling him gay, because it was the 1990s, and Gil would retaliate by throwing pies in the faces of people who teased him. Sometimes things would get more physical though, and in one famous clip that went viral years later, Gil, after being mocked by Galerito, fought his way backstage, tossed the puppeteer over the window through which he had been holding the puppet, and continued to assault him on stage. Whether this was staged or adlibbed remains unclear.
Gil may have been the only person in the audience every episode, but he wasn’t the only audience member that had been planted there. Sometimes, the audience members didn’t even know they were plants. In one famously controversial episode, Wallace put a murderer and the mother of his victim in the audience together. Neither was aware of the other’s presence until halfway through the show when it was revealed, just so they could film the resulting interaction, which included other audience members having to prevent the murderer from fleeing and forcing him to the front of the crowd to speak.
All in all, it was a bizarre show that was a mix of a true crime podcast, Jerry Springer, and The Carol Burnett Show. And also there was a puppet. Canal Livre won several awards during its run, and Wallace was an incredibly trusted member of the community and the government. Even though he was already at the top of the ratings for afternoon programming, Wallace saw the potential to get even more viewers. He noticed that whenever they showed graphic footage of freshly murdered bodies, the ratings spiked. So they needed to do more of that.
First on the Scene
Originally, Wallace just followed the police to crime scenes, or sometimes to raids of drug dens viewers had sent in anonymous tips about. Before long, the police were the ones calling Wallace to give him the tips so he could bring his camera crew to follow them. Eventually, citizens witnessing crimes started calling Canal Livre before even notifying the police, as they trusted Wallace and his show more than they trusted the authorities.
There was a police standoff with a man that showed just how much people believed in Wallace. The man had taken a hostage who he was holding at gunpoint. He was completely surrounded and agreed to turn himself in at the police station, but he refused to let the police enter the house and take him into custody. The man believed that if he did, he would likely be killed by the police on sight, or possibly in the car on the way to the station.
Admittedly, this was a very real concern, as such actions were pretty common.
And so the hostage taker made one simple demand: he wanted State Deputy Wallace Souza to be the one to take him to the police station; Wallace was the only one he trusted to take him there safely. Wallace had been home at the time this was happening, but as soon as he got the phone call he drove down to the location of the incident and traded places with the hostage. They entered the criminal’s SUV and began driving off.
The car then stopped, and there was the sound of a gunshot. Police took a moment to evaluate the situation and prepare themselves for action, at which point an unharmed Wallace got out of the car and walked towards the police as the SUV drove off. He told police that the guy changed his mind about turning himself in, something that seems improbable given that his chances of survival weren’t going to be any higher behind bars than they would be in the back of a police cruiser.
All of this was caught on camera by police and reporters, so Wallace immediately went to the studio to start recording his next episode of Canal Livre. The footage of him in the hostage situation was shown repeatedly over the coming weeks, not just on his show but across every channel. He was seen as a hero who risked his own life to save a hostage, many crediting his time on the police force for his ability to remain calm in a dangerous, high pressure situation.
Oddly enough, Wallace’s former job as a police officer came up a lot throughout his career, but nobody ever seemed to bring up the crimes for which he was fired. Well, they did, but nobody really cared. Wallace claimed that they were fake charges brought against him after he had been falsely implicated in a college entrance exam fraud scheme he was investigating. People seemed to go along with his explanation.
Enemies and Suspicious Timing
Of course, while most people loved him, Wallace was making enemies this entire time as well. He would constantly use his show and his political speeches to disparage fellow politicians who he felt were corrupt, incompetent, or both. He was out there trying to make a difference and help the people of Manaus while the other elected officials did nothing.
As far as can be determined, the police didn’t have an issue with him. He had remained friends with his old buddies from the force, so he would receive tips from them before any other media outlet, allowing Canal Livre to always have the first, exclusive information about crimes in progress.
Often times Canal Livre’s reporters would arrive at a crime scene before the police did, which was certainly noteworthy. As noted, people would report crimes to the show before they reported them to the police, so this wasn’t an inconceivable turn of events. However, every now and then the reporting did give people pause.
And there was one famous episode that raised a lot of questions about exactly where Wallace was getting his information. A reporter arrived at the scene of a murder well before the police did. The victim had been burned alive, to the point that the body was completely unrecognizable; you wouldn’t even be able to tell whether it was a man or woman by looking at it. It was a recent murder as well, so recent that you could still see smoke rising from the charred corpse in Canal Livre’s footage.
The reporter went on to say that the victim was a male, the approximate time of the murder, that there were no bullet wounds, and that gasoline had been used as an accelerant. Most viewers wouldn’t have questioned any of this, as it seems like standard reporting, but some of the more astute members of the audience began to wonder how the reporter could have known any of that.
Sure, the person had been burned alive and the body was still smoking but not enflamed, so it’s reasonably simple to determine an approximate time of death from that. Depending on how large the person was before being burned, the body could continue to smolder anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours after the flames were extinguished. However, the other details, including the person’s sex, were impossible to have known simply by looking at the body.
While the knowledge the reporter had seemed somewhat suspicious, there was still the possibility that they had been tipped off by a witness to the murder. This happened all the time, though in that case there would usually be somebody to interview whereas this body was completely alone in the woods. That doesn’t mean somebody didn’t call in the tip and then flee the scene so the murderers wouldn’t see the witness’s face on TV and know who to silence, but it was certainly suspicious.
This particular incident was seen as the most concerning and is the most often cited, but it wasn’t an isolated incident of Canal Livre’s reporters arriving suspiciously early at a crime scene and knowing more than it seemed like should be possible. In one instance, they reported on a drug dealer who had been shot multiple times but was still alive when the Canal Livre crew arrived. Over the course of the next hour they filmed the man slowly dying, during which time emergency services never showed up. And yes, they aired that footage.
But Wallace was a good guy and a champion of the people. He was using both his media fame and his political position to fight against a corrupt and inefficient government that was letting the people of Manaus down. He was cleaning up the streets, and most of the murders they aired on TV were of traffickers and other criminals anyway. Many of the residents of Manaus, probably even most, believed that there was no way that such a good person could have been involved in anything nefarious.
Allegations of Something Nefarious
It began in October of 2008 with what was supposed to be a routine drug raid. Police had been tipped off about a drug den, so they went down with a warrant to search the place. And what was up was cocaine. Lots and lots of cocaine. And also weapons, but mostly cocaine.
The owner of the house was Moacir Jorge da Costa, better known as Moa. At first Moa tried to bribe the officers with 10,000 Brazilian reals each to let him go. Going by the exchange rates from 2008, that would’ve been about $5,000 per arresting officer. The police asked where he was going to get so much money.
That wasn’t his answer, though. Moa worked for someone very important who he assured them would pay the bribe. But since he didn’t have the cash on hand, Moa was arrested and taken down to the station instead.
Moa certainly would have known about police corruption as well, seeing as he had been a former member of the military police. In Brazil, there are the civil police, who investigate crimes after they happen, and the military police who patrol the streets as visibly as possible to try to prevent crime from happening. Basically, they are meant to be the big, scary deterrent for any would-be criminals.
Moa ultimately got fired from that job after being implicated in a homicide for the ninth time. Because murdering eight civilians as a police officer was apparently tolerated, but nine murders was just a step too far.
Anyway, throughout the early hours of his detainment, Moa remained convinced that his unnamed benefactor was going to swoop in at any moment and save the day. Once this didn’t happen, he was officially arrested and charged with possession of illegal drugs and weapons. Unlike in the US, where you can be held in a jail for up to a year or so, these charges meant it was time for Moa to go directly to prison to await trial. And he was not having any of it.
Part of it would be the fact that, as a former cop, he would naturally be the target of violence. Especially if he was housed in the same facility as people he had put behind bars. But there was more to it than that. Moa was 100% convinced that if he was put into prison, he was going to be murdered. But there was still the matter of his boss, the powerful man he had previously thought was going to protect him.
In exchange for being kept safe and away from the rest of the prison population, Moa said he would tell them absolutely everything. It was the sort of deal that the police are pretty much obliged to accept. After all, if it turned out that Moa was lying they could just throw him to the wolves after. But they were not prepared for what he was going to tell them.
Moa told of a meeting that took place at his boss’s house with his fellow conspirators. They had been directly ordered to go out into Manaus and wreak havoc. Break store windows, destroy bus signs, commit robberies, and even commit murder. They were meant to cause as much crime and chaos as possible, with murder having been explicitly ordered. Moa’s boss was none other than Wallace Souza.
Or so Moa claimed, at least. He said that Wallace had hired him as a bodyguard, and that it was he and his fellow bodyguards that had been ordered to commit violent crimes. The goal was allegedly to undermine any efforts being made by the government to clean up crime in the city, giving more weight to Wallace’s constant talk of corruption and inefficacy.
By this point, over a decade after the start of Canal Livre, some members of the police had already begun to grow suspicious of the show. According to Moa, the reason Wallace knew where and when to send his reporters was because he was the one orchestrating the crimes they reported on. The reporters weren’t claimed to have had knowledge of what was going on, and the inexplicable details they possessed had been fed to them directly from Wallace.
For example, Wallace might send a reporter out to go do a story about a busted water main, but then they would get an update. It would turn out that a murder had very coincidentally just been committed in the immediate area where the reporter happened to be already, so they would move and go cover that story instead.
When confronted with these allegations, Wallace’s response was totally predictable. He claimed to have never met Moa before in his life and said that the allegations were all a conspiracy from his political rivals. And maybe that was the case. It’s not like there were any official payroll records of Moa having worked for Wallace, so maybe he really had made it all up. Clearly one of the two was lying, and there was no way for police to be sure which one was the liar.
Wallace continued to make speeches at the legislature about how he was innocent and all of this was a conspiracy set up by his political enemies. He had pissed off too many people by calling them incompetent and worked too hard to root out corruption, and now those people wanted their revenge.
Things only became more complicated when Moa’s wife, Mary, came forward. According to Mary, everything Moa had said was a lie. She said she had spoken to Moa and he claimed that he was tortured by the police until he signed the incriminating statement without even reading it. The man who tortured him had allegedly been Thomaz Vasconcelos, the Amazonas’s Secretary of Intelligence who was also leading the task force investigating Wallace.
After this happened Moa recanted his statement and said that yes, it was all a lie and he had been tortured into incriminating Wallace. He alleged that the police had not only beaten and tortured him but threatened to murder him if he didn’t sign the statement. Furthermore, he said that Wallace was telling the truth and the two men had never even met one another. Shortly after this, anonymous packages arrived at multiple newspapers, each containing a copy of a photograph: Wallace on the left and Moa on the right, hanging out together in the pool at Wallace’s house.
That meant clearly he was lying about having never met Moa before in his life. But Wallace had a perfectly good reason for that. According to Wallace, he had no idea this guy went by “Moa”. As far as he knew the guy’s name was Jorge. And it wasn’t his bodyguard, it was his son Raphael’s jiu jitsu teacher. Wallace had invited him to a barbeque at the house, and they just happened to take a swim together.
Back in the real world, where that story is highly dubious at best, the police didn’t buy it for a second. It didn’t help that Moa claimed the photo was a fake, which is why police make sure to keep suspects isolated from one another when taking statements.
There was no way for the two to get their story straight with Moa behind bars. So when Wallace went from “Moa? Never heard of him” to “Oh that guy? I thought his name was Jorge”, that was at least vaguely plausible. But for Wallace to admit having met the person and that they took a swim together only for Moa to say they never met and the picture was fake? The whole situation was more of a mess than an episode of Canal Livre, but without the booty dancing.
To make matters even more confusing, Mary came forward to retract the statement that had caused Moa to retract his statement. Now she was claiming that her first stop after finding out that Moa was arrested was Wallace’s house. She went to see if he would pay for a lawyer for him, but Wallace said he couldn’t because of all the incriminating things Moa had said.
According to Mary, Wallace offered to hire a lawyer for Moa if she could get him to retract his statement and say that he was tortured into making it. It was clear from these new claims that Mary had been lying with one of her statements, but which one? Were there two different stories because she and Moa were afraid of what the police would do to them, or because they were afraid of what Wallace and his associates would do to them?
Fortunately for the task force, they didn’t have to rely solely on the self-contradictory statements from Moa and Mary. There were other witness statements from Wallace’s associates, financial records that allegedly linked him to organized crime, and most importantly phone calls recorded from wiretaps. Unfortunately, none of those recordings are publicly available, but it was more than enough evidence to have the task force convinced that Wallace was a violent and dangerous criminal.
There was just one problem though. Well, there were a couple. One was all of the threats of violence against members of the task force. They were being followed home on a daily basis and receiving death threats around the clock, so they needed to hire security guards for their own protection. It was believed that the people following them were on Wallace’s payroll, though it’s unclear if this was ever proven.
They also thought Moa’s life was in danger as well. Although he was in prison, he had received police protection and was separated from all the other inmates. One day, however, there was an explosion at the prison. It was assumed this was a bomb planted by Wallace’s associates and meant to take out Moa so he couldn’t testify if the case ever went to trial, but it turned out to be a false alarm.
It was a very real explosion, it was just an accident. The police had improperly stored some confiscated explosives, and they wound up going off.
Parliamentary Immunity
But the biggest problem was that little qualifier: if the case ever went to trial. In a case where someone was accused of murder (and that accusation was backed up by a mountain of evidence), you’d assume that the only way the case wouldn’t go to trial is if the accused either died or pled guilty. As it turns out, however, there was no way to charge Wallace.
Members of the Brazilian government enjoy a little thing called parliamentary immunity. This type of immunity is pretty common all throughout the world, but it’s typically a form of qualified immunity. In most countries, those with parliamentary immunity can’t be charged with any crime related to their official duties in office. Which makes sense.
It’s like how if a cop goes undercover in a biker gang, they can’t be prosecuted for doing coke or committing vandalism with the other bikers. This is basically just the white collar version of that.
In Brazil, however, parliamentary immunity doesn’t only protect a person for crimes allegedly committed in pursuance of their official duties. They are fully shielded from prosecution for any and all crimes they might commit, up to and including murder (unless they are literally caught in the act, so no killing people in public). That meant the police weren’t actually allowed to pursue Wallace.
His son, on the other hand, did not have immunity. Raphael had been implicated in the crimes as well, which meant police were able to obtain a search warrant for his home. And wouldn’t you know it? Raphael was still living with dear old dad, which meant that, through the power of loopholes, the police were able to get a warrant for Wallace’s home.
Things were moving very quickly in the case, especially given how high profile Wallace was. Moa was arrested and made his statement in October of 2008, and in April of 2009 the Souza house was searched by police. Because warrants have to be specific the search was largely limited to Raphael’s bedroom and his car, but there was still plenty for police to find.
The car was searched first, and inside it they found 380 pistol magazines, which is just excessive. Even if you’re a contract killer, there is no need to have that much ammo readily available in your car at any given time. Depending on the size of the magazines, it would come out to anywhere from 5,700 bullets to over 11,000.
There was plenty to find in Raphael’s room as well. There were plenty of guns in his room, along with more ammunition. There was also the equivalent of about $100,000 in cash, which made for a great photo opportunity. That’s certainly some suspicious material to keep lying around the house, but rich people having cash on hand isn’t the craziest thing in the world.
Far more concerning was a list of names in Raphael’s room. All of the people on the list were drug dealers, some of whom had already been killed. There was a list of guns as well, though that isn’t as inherently incriminating. Given the situation as a whole though, especially the witness testimony the task force had already collected, this all looked really bad.
The other rather concerning piece of evidence found was a number of spent bullets. Not bullet casings, the actual bullets. That’s weird, to say the least. For someone who had thousands of bullets in his possession, it seems hard to believe that Raphael would have had some childish, sentimental connection to every single shot he ever fired. It was the opinion of the task force that these were bullets that had murdered drug dealers around Manaus and been retrieved to prevent them from being collected as evidence.
Allegedly Wallace attempted to bribe the police, then threatened them by claiming that he was going to become the new State Secretary of Security. If that were true, the position would give him a lot of power over the police. It wouldn’t give him direct control over the officers, but it would give him control over their resources.
There is no evidence that Wallace made the reported bribe or vague threat, but even if he did it clearly didn’t take. Raphael admitted to being the owner of the items the police seized and was arrested. According to one of the officers on the scene, Wallace appeared to be “physically crushed” by seeing his son arrested.
Although Wallace remained popular amongst the voting public, his support from his fellow legislators began to wane over the months that followed. Either they really were all part of a conspiracy against him, or there was just too much evidence against Wallace. In either case, they decided that it was time for him to stand trial for what he was alleged to have done, which meant they had to remove the parliamentary immunity that was shielding him from prosecution.
On October 1, 2009, Wallace was impeached and removed from office. The vote to do so wasn’t unanimous, but it wasn’t close either. A warrant was issued for his arrest almost immediately, and so for four days Wallace went on the run. Roadblocks were set up to block all of the ports out of Manaus, and a manhunt ensued to track down the former State Deputy. There were numerous raids attempting (but failing) to find him, and after four days Wallace finally turned himself in.
That’s how it’s worded in a lot of reporting, anyway. What actually happened was they found him hiding out at a friend’s house, and he agreed to go with them voluntarily so long as he was held in a separate cell, far away from anyone he had helped put behind bars. But since he wasn’t dragged kicking and screaming, semantically that counts as turning himself in.
Seeking Justice
With both Wallace and Raphael behind bars, along with a number of alleged coconspirators, all that was left to do was hold everybody accountable for their crimes.
The first to go to trial was Wallace Souza himself. Unfortunately, there would be no conclusion to this trial. Wallace had suffered from numerous illnesses throughout his entire life, and his failing organs had no interest in cooperating with the state’s desire for a jury trial.
Wallace’s health had been a topic of concern even before he was arrested as well. He was hospitalized back when he was facing impeachment, which should have caused him to miss the ethics committee hearing against him. The committee offered Wallace the opportunity to make an official statement from the hospital, but, ever the showman, he instead demanded to be wheeled into the ethics committee on a stretcher so he could speak in person.
Many people thought that this public spectacle was an attempt to garner sympathy. That was probably part of it, but it likely had much more to do with his ego and love of sensationalism than anything else. Besides, he was successfully impeached, so even if it made the public more sympathetic towards him, it didn’t save him from prosecution.
Less than a month after being arrested, Wallace was transferred from prison to the hospital as he again needed treatment. He remained there for months, until he was released in February of 2010 to be placed under house arrest. A month later he again needed to be hospitalized, this time being transferred to a hospital in São Paulo.
Wallace suffered from a rare condition known as Budd-Chiari syndrome. It only affects about one in a million people, and it is characterized by blockages in the veins that drain the liver. The most common symptoms are fluid buildup in the abdomen, abdominal pain, and an enlarged liver.
There’s a wide range of other symptoms as well, especially because Budd-Chiari syndrome is usually caused by some other underlying chronic condition. Because of the variety of symptoms and underlying comorbidities, there isn’t any definitive research on how deadly the condition is or the average life expectancy of people suffering from it.
For Wallace, though, that life expectancy would be 51 years. A few months after being transferred to São Paulo for treatment, he experienced complications in his lungs and kidneys. He had to be moved to the intensive care unit, where he was placed in an induced coma and put on a ventilator. Two months later while awaiting a procedure to drain fluid from his abdomen, he suffered a heart attack and died.
Wallace may have never had his day in court, but there were plenty of other people involved with Canal Livre that were implicated in crimes alongside Wallace. The task force had put together a 500-page report detailing all of the accusations and evidence they had, and they intended to put Moa, Raphael, and several others involved with Wallace behind bars.
But while the task force felt that they had a mountain of evidence, they didn’t really have any physical evidence. There was the cash found in Wallace’s house, but he had claimed that was just savings he kept on hand for emergency medical treatments. Given the circumstances, that seems plausible. Raphael claimed that the spent bullets were from a shooting range, which seems less plausible.
As for the papers they found, Raphael said those were notes from a conversation with his lawyer. He hadn’t been writing down his crimes, he had been writing down the crimes his lawyer said Moa had accused them of so he knew what allegations to defend himself against. While that seems dubious, it is definitely a logical enough explanation to establish reasonable doubt in jurors.
In a search for more physical evidence, police exhumed the body of a murder suspect believed to have been one of Wallace’s victims. The bullets inside the body matched the spent bullets found in Raphael’s room, though the extent to which they matched is unclear. If they could use markings to prove they were fired by the same gun that would be huge, but it seems like all they could do was match them as being the same type of ammo, which is basically meaningless.
That was it for physical evidence, which meant most of the other evidence they had was witness testimony. This proved rather problematic, as the majority of witnesses to the crimes were all drug dealers and other criminals. Seeing as Wallace had built his career on trying to clean up Manaus and put these people behind bars, they certainly would have had a reason to lie and say he was behind the murders.
Because of this, one of the prosecution’s star witnesses in these cases was Gisele Vaz, a reporter for Canal Livre. According to Gisele, she had recognized for a while that something untoward was happening. If she was sent to go film a drug raid and the police didn’t find any drugs, she would watch as they retrieved drugs from their cars to plant and continue the raid. She was then to report on the scene as if the drugs had been there all along.
Gisele also claimed to have been in the room when Wallace ordered the murder of Jaiza Fraxe, the federal judge that was heading up his case. This testimony was pivotal, as she was an honest citizen with inside knowledge of Wallace’s activities, and she was directly claiming that he had ordered murders. However, Gisele also stated that she had been threatened by the task force with jail time if she didn’t say all of this. That doesn’t mean that nothing she said was true, but that’s the sort of thing that still looks really bad to a jury.
The other star witness was Moa, the one who was responsible for this entire investigation beginning in the first place. He had made incredibly damaging statements and then retracted them, so everyone was waiting to see what he would say on the stand. Of course, seeing as he was implicated in these crimes as well, the answer should have been obvious.
Moa denied ever meeting Wallace or having any involvement with him, and he stuck to the story that he had been beaten and tortured by the police into making those statements. Even though that’s at least partially a lie because of the picture of them together, that was Moa’s official testimony under oath. With all of the other witnesses either being criminals or admitting to having been coerced by the task force, the defense must have felt that Moa going against his original accusations against Wallace was his best chance of an acquittal.
And it worked. Everyone that had been arrested for the murders alleged to have been orchestrated by Wallace was found not guilty. Everybody except one person, that is. Moa still had to go back to prison, what with the mountains of cocaine they found in his house and all, but he wasn’t the one convicted of murder.
That was Raphael. The man they had allegedly tried to hire to murder Judge Fraxe was Luís João Macedo de Souza, also known as Luís Pulga. Regardless of whether or not it was true that they tried to hire Luís for this murder, Luís was gunned down after the meeting allegedly took place. The reasoning given was that he had either refused to murder the judge or gotten cold feet, and so he had to be eliminated as a witness.
He was not the only witness eliminated in this fashion. One person came to the police saying they had witnessed Wallace’s associates commit murder, and a couple days later that person was also gunned down and thus unable to testify.
Raphael was found guilty of the murder of Luís (and of possessing illegal weapons, which was a much more straightforward case) and he was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2012. He had remained in custody since his original arrest in 2009, so in 2015 he was released on parole after serving six years of his sentence.
Aftermath and the New Generation
This case has been highly controversial, in no small part thanks to how it was covered. All of the reporting treated the task force’s findings as fact, which led to a widespread belief that of course Wallace was guilty. It wasn’t until a Netflix documentary on the case a few years ago that the other side of the story was shared in any meaningful detail. It was always reported that Wallace claimed to be the target of a conspiracy, but nobody was given any real reason to believe it possibly could have been true.
It can’t be understated just how many enemies Wallace had made though, including both politicians and the crime families of Manaus. Even though the majority of people loved him, he still felt he had to drive around in a bulletproof car. And while his political enemies were largely the result of him calling others inept and corrupt, it did go much deeper than just name calling.
For example, Wallace accused the mayor in one of the cities of Amazonas of embezzling money, a crime he allegedly would have been very familiar with from his days as a police officer. Not only did an investigation prove that the mayor was embezzling, but it also discovered that he was a habitual sex offender who preyed on young girls in the city he was mayor of. If the politicians were all as corrupt as Wallace claimed, seeing him willing to hold them accountable for their crimes would certainly put a target on his back.
Organized crime also spiked following Wallace’s death, which suggests that his activities really were hindering crime in Manaus, giving them a reason to plot against him. In particular was the Family of the North, a gang he had targeted and spoken out against repeatedly. With Wallace out of the way, the Family of the North became more powerful and organized than they had ever been.
The question remains: was Wallace guilty, or was there really a conspiracy to remove him from the equation? If either story was presented as a movie plot it would probably be thrown away for being too unrealistic, but one of them has to be the truth, and there’s a reasonable argument for each side.
Personally, the evidence suggests that Wallace was guilty and that Moa’s original statement was the truth. Wallace had some dangerous enemies, and with good reason, but the extent of the conspiracy would need to be impossibly far reaching in order for it to be true. It would need to include the crime families, members of government, local and federal police, and local and federal judges in order for it to work.
The scope just seems too broad when a much more simple explanation was that Wallace was trying to be a net positive for Manaus with a “by any means necessary” mentality. The people of Manaus are extremely divided in which they believe is the truth.
Fast forward to New Year’s Day, 2017 at the Anisio Jobim Penitentiary Complex. It was shortly before Moa was set to be released from prison, and Mary had even come to see him that day so they could start planning for their life once he was a free man again. But he would never get that chance.
There was a riot and subsequent massacre in the prison, orchestrated by the Family of the North. In total, 56 inmates were murdered. Some were decapitated or dismembered, while Moa was burned alive in his cell. If there was ever going to be somebody that both knew and was willing to share the truth about Wallace Souza, that opportunity most likely died with Moa.
And yet the story is far from over, because there’s still one character who hasn’t been introduced yet. We’ve talked about Wallace’s son Raphael, but he had a younger son, Willace. Willace was only 14 when his father died, so even if his father was guilty it’s unlikely he would have known anything that was going on.
Willace has always maintained his father’s innocence, saying that the mere notion that a person would commit murder just for TV ratings was insane. He truly believed in everything his father had done, and so he sought to follow in his father’s footsteps. The main goal was to do so politically, but his 2018 run for congress failed.
However, while the people may not have been ready to elect Willace into office yet, they did want him to become a broadcaster just like his father had been. At first, Willace was unconvinced. He began doing the same sorts of investigative journalism his father had done back on Espaço Livre, and uploading the videos to Facebook. People loved it and wanted more, but in a 2019 interview with 60 Minutes Australia, he said that he didn’t think he was ready to be a broadcaster.
At the time it seemed unclear if Willace was ever going to make the shift to traditional media, but as of 2021 Canal Livre is back on the air and hosted by Willace Souza. For the most part, anyway. The show now goes by the name Sinal Livre, or Free Signal, but it uses the same logo and font and everything, and is considered to be a continuation of the original show.
Sinal Livre is much closer in style to the original show, featuring journalism, public interest stories, and numerous ads in each hour-long show. It doesn’t feature any of the over-the-top sensationalism and frenetic chaos of Canal Livre. The only quirky element of the show right now is an MC who introduces Willace while wearing a suit, tie, and Daft Punk style helmet.
It remains to be seen if Willace continues to run the show the way he has for the past three years, or if he will follow in his father’s footsteps and alter the show in an effort to chase higher ratings. Should that happen, though, Sinal Livre will likely be under intense scrutiny from authorities who will want to make sure that Willace doesn’t turn into his father.
Key Takeaways
- Wallace Souza, a Brazilian TV host and politician, allegedly orchestrated murders to boost ratings for his sensationalist crime show Canal Livre.
- His reporters frequently arrived at crime scenes before police, sometimes knowing impossible details about victims that suggested insider knowledge.
- A former associate named Moa claimed Wallace ordered him to commit violent crimes, though Moa later recanted and then died in a 2017 prison massacre.
- Wallace’s son Raphael was convicted of murder and weapons possession, while Wallace himself died in 2010 before standing trial due to parliamentary immunity being removed.
- Wallace’s younger son Willace now hosts a successor show called Sinal Livre, maintaining his father’s innocence while continuing the family broadcasting legacy.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Wallace Souza and what was Canal Livre?
Wallace Souza was a former police officer turned TV host and politician from Manaus, Brazil. Canal Livre (Free Channel) was his television show that began in 1998 as a rebranding of his earlier show Espaço Livre. It was a sensationalist variety show featuring musical acts, a puppet named Galerito, philanthropic giveaways, and graphic crime scene footage. The show became extremely popular, with nearly all of Manaus watching during lunch breaks.
What was Wallace Souza’s background before becoming a TV host?
Wallace Souza was born in Manaus, Brazil. After high school, he earned degrees at São Luiz Gonzaga Commercial College and Basílio Machado State College in São Paulo, and studied theology and philosophy at the Center for the Study on Human Behavior. At age 21, he became a police officer in Manaus, where he worked for eight years until being fired in 1987 for pension fraud and stealing gasoline. He was later reinstated in 2009 after being found not guilty.
After leaving the police, he worked as a radio presenter and taught law at Nilton Lins University.
How did Wallace Souza use Canal Livre to build his political career?
Wallace Souza used Canal Livre’s popularity to build a public image as a champion of the people fighting against crime and government corruption. The show featured him helping citizens with food and other needs, and he used it to disparage corrupt politicians. This popularity translated into electoral success: in 1999 he won election as State Deputy with almost 52,000 votes, the most ever received by a State Deputy in Manaus and the highest percentage in all of Brazil. He won reelection twice more with record-breaking numbers, serving until October 2009.
What were the allegations against Wallace Souza regarding murders for ratings?
Wallace Souza was accused of orchestrating murders and other crimes to boost ratings for Canal Livre. According to his former bodyguard Moacir Jorge da Costa (Moa), Wallace ordered him and other bodyguards to commit violent crimes including murder to create chaos and undermine government crime-fighting efforts. The allegations claimed Wallace knew where to send reporters because he was orchestrating the crimes they covered. Reporters would sometimes arrive at crime scenes before police and know suspiciously detailed information about victims, such as the sex of a burned body that was unrecognizable.
What happened to Wallace Souza after he was investigated?
In October 2008, Moa was arrested and implicated Wallace, leading to an investigation. In April 2009, police searched Wallace’s home through a warrant for his son Raphael’s belongings, finding weapons, ammunition, cash, and suspicious documents. On October 1, 2009, Wallace was impeached and removed from office, losing his parliamentary immunity.
He went on the run for four days before being found and agreeing to go with police. Due to severe health problems including Budd-Chiari syndrome, he was hospitalized multiple times, placed under house arrest in February 2010, and died of a heart attack in July 2010 at age 51 before his trial could conclude.
What was the outcome of the trials of Wallace Souza’s associates?
Most of those implicated alongside Wallace were found not guilty, including Moa. The prosecution struggled because most witnesses were criminals with motives to lie, and star witness Gisele Vaz admitted she had been threatened by the task force. Moa denied his original accusations on the stand, claiming he was tortured into making them.
However, Wallace’s son Raphael was convicted of the murder of Luís João Macedo de Souza (Luís Pulga), allegedly a hitman who was killed after refusing to murder Judge Jaiza Fraxe, and of illegal weapons possession. Raphael was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2012 and released on parole in 2015 after serving six years.
What happened to Moa after the trials?
Moa was found not guilty of the murders but remained in prison for the drug and weapons charges from his original arrest. On New Year’s Day 2017, shortly before his scheduled release, a riot and massacre orchestrated by the Family of the North gang occurred at the Anisio Jobim Penitentiary Complex. Moa was burned alive in his cell among 56 murdered inmates. His wife Mary had visited him that day to plan for his release.
What is Sinal Livre and who hosts it?
Sinal Livre (Free Signal) is a television show that began in 2021, considered a continuation of Canal Livre using the same logo and font. It is hosted by Willace Souza, Wallace Souza’s younger son who was only 14 when his father died. Willace had maintained his father’s innocence and initially resisted becoming a broadcaster, doing investigative journalism on Facebook instead.
After a failed 2018 congressional run, he eventually took over the show. Sinal Livre is closer in style to the original Espaço Livre, featuring journalism and public interest stories without the sensationalist chaos of Canal Livre, though it does feature an MC who wears a Daft Punk-style helmet.
What was parliamentary immunity and how did it affect Wallace Souza’s case?
In Brazil, parliamentary immunity provided full shielding from prosecution for any and all crimes, including murder, unless the politician was literally caught in the act. This is broader than most countries where immunity only covers official duties. Because of this immunity, police could not initially charge Wallace Souza despite the mountain of evidence against him.
His son Raphael did not have immunity, so police obtained a search warrant for Raphael’s home, and since Raphael lived with Wallace, they were able to search Wallace’s house as well. Wallace was eventually impeached and removed from office on October 1, 2009, which removed his immunity and allowed his arrest.
What controversial elements were featured on Canal Livre?
Canal Livre featured numerous controversial elements: graphic footage of murder victims with uncovered bodies riddely with bullet holes, interviews with grieving family members at crime scenes, planted audience members including a murderer and victim’s mother being surprised by each other’s presence, a cast member called Gil the Pie Man who threw pies at people after being mocked with homophobic slurs, and dance numbers with women in extremely short skirts intercut with violent crime footage. The show also allegedly featured police planting drugs during raids that reporters were told to present as authentic.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: Wallace Souza and Canal Livre - Murder for Ratings
- Hero image source by IAEA Imagebank / openverse, by.
