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Studying the social life of objects is a methodological tradition well established in the Social Sciences (Appadurai 1986; Freire-Medeiros and Menezes 2016; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Knowles 2014; Kopytoff 2014; Latour 2005; Miller 2001; Mintz 2003). But these methods are used outside academia as well: “follow the money,” for example, is one of the most well-established methods in police investigations studying the operation of complex “organized crime” networks.¹¹ Recently, seminal works such as those by Knowles (2014) and Tsing (2015) have taken this tradition to a transnational scale and have innovated theoretically by focusing not only on trajectories or journeys as fundamental connectors for the understanding of a globalized social world but also on the theoretical effects of such a methodological operation. Beyond the idea of flows, assemblages, and revealed lines of force, these authors propose a theory embedded in concrete empirical situations. Such a theory would perforce be very plural.

In the debate on mobility (Freire-Medeiros, Telles, and Allis 2018; Martins Jr. 2015; Urry 2002, 2004, 2010), the contribution of Amit and Knowles (2017) proposes the notion of “tacking” as a framework to understand the importance of the daily improvisation of actors, be they dominant or subordinate, in the construction of their own possibilities for acting in society. This improvisation includes inventiveness, timing, and the unexpected, and describes the recurrent, though little discussed, way in which contemporary subjects navigate their daily lives.¹² Opportunities for survival and business, income generation, mobility, and production of life forms would, to a large extent, also result from situational improvisation in the face of very different barriers and everyday problems, because the world has been changing rapidly.

The notion of tacking is even more useful when it comes to studying crime rings, as we do in this book. Unlike other markets, in which advertising and marketing are essential, in the illegal world, to keep operating in secrecy is “the soul of the business.” As repression is always possible, it is also necessary to diversify routes, hide warehouses, modify paths, and change passwords (but also cell phone chips and devices, addresses and clothes, hair and looks, and sometimes one’s very physiognomy). Circumstances change even faster in illegal markets and any action may be under surveillance by the police, rivals, or enemies.

In the criminal sphere, there is no stability guaranteed by bureaucracy or reliable information available to operators. For this reason, horizontal organization is encouraged. Criminal factions, mafias, cartels, and gangs are a way to produce trustworthy and essential internal environments, functioning as institutions under the logic of honor. As Amit and Knowles (2017) propose, the skills of inventiveness, timing, and dealing with the unexpected are at the base of the operations of stimuli and obstacles to the contemporary global circulation of goods, services, and people.

As instability expands in the contemporary world – viz. the effects of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020 – the circumstances and the definitions of situations are, almost always, contingent. The ability to improvise and adapt is one of the virtues most cherished by contemporary institutions and labor markets; it is no different in (il)legal markets. Methodologically, considering daily tacking as a means of structuring the actions of operators is more realistic than starting from any rationalist or structuralist theories. At the same time, the effects of these improvisations produce very rigid structures of inequality and a lot of specificity in the disposition of violence (Feltran 2012).

The actors improvise, but always very awkwardly; by improvising, they create solutions and innovations, breaking patterns but not freely. A long-term examination sees the reproduction of the same capitalist urban conflict that is well known from classical theories but being reproduced among an enormous plurality of ways of living and contemporary urban government orders. Actors move around and produce their unequal stories but within plausible, possible goals offered by each historical moment, each space, each situation, understood as a situated parameter of social structuring. Without a doubt, the trend of this construction points to an increasingly unequal and increasingly violent social world.

Likewise, there is a long tradition of sociological studies based on life stories (Arendt 1994; Bertaux 1981; Foucault and Barbin 1980; Lewis 1961) and trajectories (Bourdieu 1986; 2004; Cabanes 2004; Telles 2010). The situational encounter in ethnographic research has also yielded fruitful narratives in anthropology, especially those that relate the life stories of researchers and their interlocutors (Das 2007a; Feltran 2017). In this sense, autobiographies and biographies become generators of the analytical unit to be worked on in this book – the journeys of stolen cars and those of their owners and their thieves (Bourdieu 1986, 2004, 2011).

The methodological construction of our typical journeys follows the tradition of contemporary ethnographies of objects (Knowles 2014; Tsing 2015) but also that of narrative analysis (Alleyne 2014). In this method, the formal construction of the narratives is part of the methodological-analytical work. In this book, the journey of our five stolen cars is a composition, by aggregation, of situations and characters that we got to know in the field. The journeys must be typical, that is, we must reconstruct the chain of profile events of subject who were usually, frequently, found in the field. We did not, therefore, opt for exceptional scenes or liminal situations, even when we observed these in the field, but for repeated scenes and situations.

Analytically, we started out with the scene of the crime of the theft of a vehicle, we then looked at typical immediate destinations, then typical forms of attempted recovery in São Paulo (insurance, police, or actors from the criminal world), the standard forms of repression, the appearance of the stolen cars on the markets, and so on. Table I.2 summarizes the five car’s journeys we follow through the chapters.

TABLE I.2 The Cars’ Journeys

Vehicle, owner, situation	Time and location of theft or armed robbery	Where does it go immediately	What is it used for	Where do the car or its parts go	Markets, purchases and sales	Other developments
Toyota Hilux 2016 Family from Campos Verdes Insured Tracker	7 a.m. – Robbery with kidnapping of family; ordered in São Paulo, stolen in Campos Verdes (MT, 1,700 km)	Vehicle crosses the border with Bolivia, 80 km away, by back roads. Spends months in San Matias, Bolivia, circulating without plates.	Exchanged for 6 kg of cocaine (base paste + hydrochloride).	Truck driver brings cocaine to Ermelino Matarazzo (border with Guarulhos, where the mules are).	Part of base paste resold in the SP East Zone; hydrochloride exported through the Port of Santos	Hilux legalized in La Paz, Bolivian government recognizes ownership without papers, vehicle becomes the car of an elite family; cocaine arrives at periphery parties in SP and clubs in Europe
Fiat Strada 2014 Seo Claudio No insurance No tracker	7 a.m. - Theft Aricanduva	Vehicle “cools down” on street in Sapopemba next to large avenue for three days – common practice to avoid arrest.	Thieves pick up car and take it to clandestine warehouse	Vehicle is “chopped up” in warehouse and parts of commercial interest repackaged for sale	Parts loaded onto truck in warehouse, sent to Belém, Pará state; 3,500 km away	Invoice from similar Strada “warms up” other stolen parts on avenue known for illegal dismantling in São Paulo
Hyundai HB20 2014 João Insured No tracker	11 a.m. – Theft in Osasco, West Zone of São Paulo	Vehicle “cools down” for two days in same neighborhood	“Hunters” from insurer Alvorada Seguros retrieve vehicle by making rounds in neighborhood, airbag popped to justify not returning vehicle	Vehicle goes to Car Auction Corp auctioneer on Tuesday.	Purchased by a small businessman from the interior of Rio de Janeiro and resold as a second-hand car	Parts extracted from the car in the auction yard circulate in the informal market; resale of beaten-up cars takes place online; urban areas become specialized
Fiat Palio 2011 Sérgio, No insurance	5 p.m. – Armed robbery in Ferraz de Vasconcelos, municipality in São Paulo Metropolitan Region	Taken to a housing project in Cidade Tiradentes, owner appeals to PCC but is turned down as he cannot cite any violation of the unwritten code of the criminal world, later files report with police	Dismantled haphazardly in front of housing project, some parts stay in the vehicle, others taken away	More than a week later police officer finds car picked clean in Cidade Tiradentes public housing project, calls owner and asks him to remove it from the street as required by law	Shell stays at Sergio’s house, he thinks of possible destinations; stolen parts sold on Mercado Livre (online sales platform)	Owner attempts to find parts in the illegal chop-shops so as to reassemble vehicle but gives up due to cost, student buys one of the doors after a car crash. Shell appears on Tietê river in dry season.
Ford Ka 2018 Diego Insured, rented by Uber driver	8:40 p.m. – Armed robbery Av. Sapopemba, East Zone of São Paulo	Researchers follow vehicle’s arrival in favela to sound of funk music amid clouds of marijuana smoke	Circulates unregistered in Sapopemba for three months thanks to absence of any police inspection and tolerance on the part of the community	Boys joy-riding outside the favela are seen by police, flee, crash vehicle, abandon scene, police contact insurance company Horizonte Seguros, which sends vehicle to Rodrigues Paiva auctioneer	Maurício wins Ford Ka at auction through professional buyer	Maurício relabels and sells pieces as Stratus part, one of the thieves is killed by police a few months later

We talked at length, as a team and with our research subjects about what would be the most typical journey and therefore the most plausible for us to follow. When reliable quantitative data were available, they provided the fundamental criteria for the construction of our journeys. If insurance companies recover many more cars in São Paulo than the police do, if car thieves are young people in general from the favelas, or if the dismantlers have very heterogeneous profiles, then these were characteristics to be reconstructed during our journeys. If the police kill many car thieves in São Paulo, but if one thief is killed for every several hundred thefts or robberies, we decided that none of our five cases would end with a dead criminal – although from what we’ve seen empirically, the phenomenon should be discussed in the book. And so it was with each decision regarding the journeys presented, in an extensive analytical work over the course of more than a year. Many tests, with different versions of the journeys, led us to the structure that we present here, guided by the criteria of plausibility and representativeness.

The sheer vastness of the universe that we researched means that typical journeys do not mean major routes. There are many other plausible, possible, and empirically verified journeys for stolen cars and for supply chains in these markets that we have not reconstructed here. Our set of five cars affords us an overview of the enormous diversity of illegal markets and their connections with their legal equivalents. What’s more, the reconstruction of these journeys, based on the principles of narrative analysis, introduces readers to the same sociological knowledge that we researchers have access to. Empirical fragments and analytical debates lead us to broader theoretical questions underpinned by solid foundations.