The First Capital Command, known by its Portuguese initials PCC, started out as a disgruntled band of inmates fighting for soap and toilet paper in the 1990s.  It now has some 40,000 members behind bars and on the streets with a vast network of affiliates—making it the largest criminal group in the Americas by some estimates, operating in nearly 30 countries on every continent…With the scale of Italian organized criminal groups and the efficiency of a multinational corporation, the PCC has helped drive record cocaine seizures in Europe and sparked violent turf wars in the heart of major ports in Belgium and the Netherlands. 

 Unlike the narco-tycoons of Mexico, the heavily armed Colombian cocaine militias or the flashy drug lords of Rio de Janeiro’s Red Command gang, PCC members keep a low, businesslike profile, seeking fortune not fame—and shying away from the kinds of gratuitous violence that attract police and TV news crews. New recruits sign up to a strict internal code of conduct, their swearing-in ceremonies sometimes conducted by videoconference.

By adopting religious personas—pretending to be ministers—PCC figures have gone into far-flung regions of Brazil to gain the trust of locals and recruit new members, while securing routes to neighboring cocaine-producing countries…In 2023, prosecutors in Brazil’s northern state of Rio Grande do Norte investigated a PCC cell accused of setting up at least seven churches to launder drug money—a practice now so common that authorities have a name for it: narco-Pentecostalism. Drug profits are also laundered through gas stations, fintechs, real-estate funds, sex motels, car dealerships and construction firms…Few crimes are outside the PCC’s reach. Members today are involved in everything from illegal gold mining and cargo theft to cybercrimes and the trafficking of exotic birds…

When the PCC was born in August 1993 inside the grimy walls of the Taubaté high-security prison in São Paulo state, its founders weren’t seeking world domination. They demanded better sanitation and beds, among other basics. Brazil’s prisons were slum-like infernos—some of the world’s most overcrowded and violent, plagued by tuberculosis and lice—and rights groups said guards routinely beat inmates. Resentment was simmering at Taubaté after 111 inmates had months earlier been killed when police crushed a rebellion at another prison not far away…Alarmed by the growing jailhouse fraternity, authorities tightened prison controls and transferred inmates to other states. This only accelerated the PCC’s national expansion and hardened its resolve. “Peace, justice and freedom” became the PCC’s rallying call, as it cast itself as a parallel power to a state whose abuses—from prison officials to politicians—help the gang draw recruits….The PCC offers recruits a future in a system “made for the poor by the poor,” said Bruno Manso, a foremost authority on the gang and co-author of “The War: The Rise of the PCC and the World of Crime in Brazil.” Manso said the PCC provides what recruits feel they can’t get elsewhere: escape from “the utter misery of urban life.”

Excerpt from Samantha Pearson, How a Brazilian Prison Gang Became a Global Cocaine Power,WSJ, Apr. 23, 2026