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SNOWING IN BALI

an island, I have an aeroplane, because in the surfing world in Brazil they make so much bullshit about me. ‘Hey, Rafael, I wanna bring some coke – can you help me?’

I need to say, ‘Don’t do that, because maybe you focus on me, you wanna be like me; have a nice house, fuck all the girls, ba ba ba ba. You don’t have so much of a good life in the end. You have only three options: jail, hospital or cemetery – one of these three.’

They get shocked, because I say, ‘Man, forget this shit. I know what I’m talking about because I’ve been there and then in the end I get fucked.’ Then I start, ‘Remember the house I have before?’ – because they have seen it in magazines – ‘Where is the beautiful house? Where are the motorbikes? Where is my family, my kids? My nice remote control car? Everything gone to hell. My wife is in jail. I suffer with all that, you know. I suffer when I see friends of mine getting caught, because all of them get killed, murdered, or busted.

‘I’m gonna tell you something . . . If you do this, you might make money, the devil gonna give you a lot of money with the coffee spoon for a long time, but when he take, he gonna take with a big spoon all at once. Whooo . . . You gonna be broke . . . You gonna get shot . . . You’re crazy, man, forget this shit.’ That’s my goal now, to change their minds.

When the ultimate bad ending came for his ex-business partner Marco, Rafael was very aware that – with a different stroke of fate – it could have been him being executed.

I was following it on the TV in Bali, giving all my thoughts, all my prayers that they would give up at the last minute, that somehow he’d escape at the last minute, that they wouldn’t shoot him.

Did you feel lucky it wasn’t you?

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