Brazil, the late 1970s. The country's been under a military dictatorship for over a decade,

and like everywhere else in Latin America at the time, there's a bunch of different rebel and guerrilla groups forming and fighting, many of them preaching leftist revolutionary doctrine.

They're running around, kidnapping officials, robbing banks, all that kind of fun stuff.

But there's other things happening too. The population in major cities like Rio is growing at a really high rate,

as people from the countryside set up shop in shanty towns and all the surrounding hills.

The economy is actually booming, but the slum dwellers aren't seeing much of a benefit.

And some of them decide they're going to get money that ski mask way.

William de Silva Lima is one of those types, a real old school bandit.

He's a pickpocket before he's finished puberty, and he soon graduates to robbing banks.

He's good at the robbing part, but not too good at the getting away with it part. Soon he finds himself locked up with a serious

sentence and troublemaker that he is, he eventually gets sent to a maximum security island

prison with the worst of the worst are kept.

And those leftist guerrillas and rebels I mentioned earlier,

they're not too good at avoiding the law either.

Pretty soon a bunch of them get locked up too, and since the military government wants to

teach them a lesson, seeing these political

prisoners as a serious threat, they get transferred over to the maximum security alcatraz like

Ireland prison too, joining William and some of the other hardcore criminals.

You see the rebels, they're all middle class kids, right?

College educated, they read books on theories,

and the jailers and government figure,

the gangsters and murderers and bank robbers,

...