[CEO Brazil Forum] Angelo Canuto: From Prisoner to Entrepreneur and Sports Talent Manager

The Former Police Officer and Inmate Opened the CEO Brazil Forum 2025 with a Powerful Story of Redemption.

By Monica Miglio Pedrosa, Experience Club Brazil

For 15 years, Angelo Canuto walked back and forth across the yards of different prisons, serving time for organized crime and drug trafficking — reflecting, step after step, on how to escape the path that had brought him there. On stage at the CEO Brazil Forum’s opening session, promoted by Experience Club Brazil, he began his talk by silently pacing across the stage, allowing the audience to feel — if only for a few seconds — the anguish that accompanied him during those years.

Angelo’s story mirrors that of thousands of children growing up in Brazil’s urban peripheries. The son of an absent father, he faced extreme poverty, hunger, and family hardship. Two of his newborn sisters were given up for adoption in desperate attempts to survive. His grandmother was his safe harbor, stepping in whenever his mother disappeared.

As the eldest child, Angelo took on the role of protector. His dream of becoming a professional soccer player never materialized; instead, he sold candy on trains to put food on the table — competing with other kids in equally desperate situations.

“Being a man in the favela means danger is always around the corner. Betrayal too.”

During this period, he met the most powerful drug dealer in the community — a man who taught him about keeping his word and “being a man,” but also introduced him to a path that would lead him to the police as a way to get rich fast.

Angelo passed the competitive entrance exam to join São Paulo’s Military Police but failed the medical check due to a deviated septum — the result of countless street fights. After surgery covered by his first formal job’s health plan, he tried again — this time finishing second overall.

“I don’t know how to do anything small,” he says.

Angelo’s position gave him the choice of where to serve. Instead of joining the elite ROTA battalion, he chose a post where he could more easily collaborate with organized crime. “I was making R$450 a month as a cop in 1993. If I carried a ‘package,’ I made R$8,000. If I went to the coast, R$30,000. How long would I have to work to make that legally?”

He witnessed extrajudicial executions and learned to stay silent — living by the motto, “what happens in the patrol car, stays in the patrol car.” Eventually, the law caught up with him, and he was arrested.

“I learned how to be bad in the police force — and how to be good in prison.”

While incarcerated, Angelo began to write. He drafted 32 chapters of what would become Extracampo – From the Perspective of Prison, using writing as a lifeline. He completed a degree in Business Administration and was later transferred to a special facility — where he saw firsthand how racial and economic inequality shaped incarceration: “In regular prison, 90% of inmates are Black. In the special prison, 90% are white.”

Visits from Patrícia — his teenage sweetheart and now wife — and their daughter Brenda kept him grounded and gave him hope.

Upon his release, the book opened doors. Universities began inviting him to speak, and soon Guilherme Miranda, co-founder of Elenko Sports, offered him a job managing professional soccer players’ careers — an inflection point Angelo calls “the fork in my life.” More recently, Netflix cast him in its hit series DNA do Crime.

“Faith without action is like a Ferrari without fuel — it won’t take you anywhere.”

Today, Angelo is an entrepreneur, speaker, and advocate for social reintegration of former inmates. He is campaigning to transform São Paulo’s former juvenile detention center (FEBEM) into a large-scale professional training center for ex-offenders.

For a man who “doesn’t do anything small,” this dream may soon become reality.