BUSTED in BRAZI

IN THIS edited extract from Fugitive — The Michael Lynn Story, author Michael O’Farrell details how Lynn ended up living just outside Recife in Brazil and how the disgraced solicitor found work, planned new property deals before his ultimate detention in one of the country’s worst prisons and his protracted resistance to his eventual extradition...

RECIFE, the capital of the state of Pernambuco, has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. But no one goes in the water any more. After more than 60 shark attacks in recent years, swimming is forbidden.

The problem arose after Recife began building a new industrial port — Porto Suape — in the 1990s, displacing the natural breeding and hunting habitats of thriving bull and tiger shark populations. Now, stark warning signs every few paces warn of the danger.

Lynn was here for the same reason as the sharks — Porto Suape. Fast becoming one of Brazil’s most important industrial ports, the facility was the engine room of an unprecedented economic boom, the benefits of which were spreading out across the entire state of Pernambuco. Michael Lynn did booms.

On June 26, 2012 — four months after learning he faced criminal prosecution in Ireland — Lynn got the news he’d been waiting for. On that day, the Official Journal of Brazil’s Ministry for Justice listed the outcome of residency case number 08505.098618/2011–93 concerning Michael Thomas Lynn and Brid

‘He was the definition of Irish charm’

Christina Murphy. Thanks to their son — born the previous year in São Paulo — Brid and Lynn were now permanent citizens of Brazil.

Though he had bigger plans for the future, Lynn sought some part-time work teaching English. It was in this way that Lynn and Brid became friends with Mark Astle and his wife, Regina. The owner of the up-market Britanic chain of English and Spanish language schools, Mark was a British expat who’d settled in Candeias 12 years earlier. Unannounced, and with no teaching experience, Lynn had simply popped in to ask for a job.

‘He was the definition of Irish charm,’ Mark later recalled. ‘But in any case, native speakers are a prized possession, so I took him on.’

‘Everything he had here was positive,’ Mark Astle would later say. ‘Maybe this was a redemption for him.’

Teaching English at Britanic — Recife’s most renowned private language school — also offered Lynn further access to elite circles. The school counts many prominent businessmen and figures among its graduates. Typically, only the well-off in Brazil learn English. Only the really well-off do it in a private school. The young adults Lynn tutored would soon be taking their place among the ranks of those who controlled Recife.

Michael Lynn knew precisely where he wanted to get to — and it wasn’t a teaching career, that’s for sure. There was a local property boom to be exploited in Recife and he wasn’t going to sit idly by teaching English parttime while others made millions. He had plans. Big plans.

Perhaps it was karma. Perhaps it was fate. One way or another, Michael Lynn’s timing stank. Just as he began to feel safe in Brazil, the authorities there had decided they’d had enough of their country being regarded as a safe haven for criminals. Protecting murderers, fraudsters, thieves and war criminals was not a reputation Brazil wanted any more — especially as the nation prepared for the international spotlight that the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics would bring.

Since the beginning of 2012, the change of attitude had been quietly noted by ambassadors in Rio and passed back through diplomatic channels to London, Rome, Wellington and Dublin — all capitals with prominent citizens accused of various crimes who had sought refuge in Brazil.

The message was clear. If you wanted to seek the extradition of one of your citizens for legitimate reasons, Brazil would not — as before — make it difficult.

London’s Foreign Office was the first to move. It wanted to secure the arrest and extradition of Michael Misick — the former Premier of the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British-controlled territory 600 miles off the coast of Miami. Misick was precisely the kind of fugitive with which Brazil was tired of being associated and he attracted all the kinds of headlines the country wanted to eliminate.

Misick had turned his country’s