The ‘Finger cutter’ and the ‘Brazilian Escobar’: the men accused of bringing cocaine cartels to Europe

The Bressers-Carvalho trial

In the early hours of 7 September, a convoy of heavily armed police swept through the sleeping streets of central Brussels towards the Haren district, on the city’s north-eastern outskirts. They made their way to 22 Avenue du Bourget, a militarised bunker-like complex that was the former headquarters of Nato.

The modernist complex, with its austere and functional architecture, was hastily built in 1967 and houses the Justitia courtroom, where Belgium’s federal trials are now held. It was here that the perpetrators and accomplices of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks and the 2016 Brussels attacks were tried in 2022.

Last month, officers armed with assault rifles patrolled the building’s wide corridors, protecting those involved in this decade’s most high-profile trial: the Bressers-Carvalho case.

For a month, judges and a legion of lawyers shared the main courtroom with journalists and the public on one side of a large armoured-glass partition. On the other side were the defendants, 31 in number, flanked by officers with their faces masked to protect them from possible reprisals. It was a scene more typical of countries ravaged by mafias.

Profiles of the accused

During the lengthy hearings throughout the month, two among the many defendants stood out. The first was Flor Bressers, a 40-year-old Belgian born in Lommel, a town of 35,000 in the province of Limburg. Bressers has an unusual profile for criminal circles. A criminology graduate of the Free University of Brussels (VUB), he was often known to his peers as “the professor” or “the academic”.

Yet his most commonly used nickname contradicts the image of a refined and scrupulous man: Bressers is best known as “the Finger cutter”.

Arrested in 2022 at a wine tasting with his wife in a penthouse of the luxury Renaissance Zurich Tower Hotel, Bressers has been facing charges of kidnapping, unlawful detention, extortion involving firearms, and leading a criminal organisation.

The other key figure alleged to be in the criminal organisation is a 68-year-old Brazilian: Sérgio Roberto de Carvalho. In a joint operation involving Interpol, Europol, the Brazilian federal police and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Carvalho was arrested on 21 June 2022 at a luxury hotel overlooking the Danube in the Hungarian capital, Budapest.

Based in Mato Grosso do Sul, a Brazilian state in the tri-border region of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, which is one of the continent’s centres of organised crime, Carvalho became known in his own country by the nickname “Major”, from his rank when he was a military police officer, a past life in which he blended corruption and crime. In Europe, his moniker was more revealing: “the Brazilian Escobar”.

Operation and financial network

Together, the Finger cutter and the Brazilian Escobar are the main defendants in a Belgian courtroom bristling with security as the international cocaine trafficking network between Latin America and Europe is put under the spotlight.

Bressers and Carvalho are alleged to have been behind an organisation suspected of transporting up to 45 tonnes of cocaine to Europe.

Prosecutors said they led a lawless multinational operation that moved hundreds of millions of dollars through front companies, one of which, the Antwerp water treatment firm Kriva Rochem, has given the case its alternative name.

The money – allegedly laundered through cryptocurrencies, financial markets and property – financed the complex logistics involved in transporting cocaine produced in Peru and Bolivia along illegal, dusty routes in Brazil, before crossing the Atlantic and being distributed in an unknown number of countries in Europe and beyond.

Global expansion of cartels

Over the past decade, cases such as the Bressers-Carvalho one have multiplied. During this period, cells of Latin American drug-trafficking groups have been identified by national police forces, Europol and intelligence services in Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, the Nordic countries, eastern Europe and the Balkans, as well as north Africa.

These criminal offshoots have become embedded in Europe through “brokers” or members of drug cartels that “provide specialised services related to cocaine production in Europe, including extracting cocaine from various carrier materials or the processing of trafficked coca paste”, according to Europol’s Andy Kraag, head of its serious and organised crime centre.

High-level sources across Europe and Latin America indicate that these groups are expanding their operations and influence in the real and digital economies, fuelled by cryptocurrencies, gambling companies, and the financial and property sectors.