Inspired by a real case

The kidnapping of Washington Olivetto

São Paulo, Brazil, 2001

This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.

In the late afternoon of December 11, 2001, advertising man Washington Olivetto, one of the country's most awarded, was leaving his São Paulo office by car when he was stopped at a fake police checkpoint: men dressed as police overpowered the driver and took him to another car. The crime had been planned for months by a group of Chileans, Argentines and Colombians linked to former guerrilla organizations of South America, and the kidnappers demanded a ransom of 10 million.

Olivetto spent 53 days in a cubicle of about 3 square meters, with no window, in a house in Brooklin, in the south of São Paulo, with a loudspeaker playing music day and night so that he would lose track of time. He neither saw nor heard his captors and communicated with them by notes. Meanwhile, the negotiation ran through coded messages published in the classified ads of a São Paulo newspaper.

Sources

In the game

Checkpoint on the Corner

São Paulo, Tuesday, December 11, 2001, 11 pm. At 6:40 pm, two blocks from his advertising agency in Higienópolis, ad man Teodoro Bastos was stopped at a Federal Police checkpoint.

In early February 2002, the owner of a country house in Serra Negra, in inland São Paulo state, grew suspicious of tenants who paid their rent in advance in dollars and alerted the police, who arrested part of the gang there, including the leader, a former Chilean guerrilla. The captors abandoned the Brooklin house; Olivetto realized he was alone, banged on the wall and shouted for help, and a neighbor, a medical student, heard him through a stethoscope and called the Military Police. He was freed on February 2, 2002, with no ransom paid. The defendants were convicted of extortion through kidnapping, and the group's leader was extradited to Chile in 2019.

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