RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- Police scoured hillside shantytowns and flew over hundreds of tropical islands Friday in search of the city's biggest cocaine trafficker who staged a spectacular prison escape by helicopter on New Year's Eve.
A newspaper reported that 29-year-old escaped convict Jose Carlos dos Reis Encina, better known as 'Escadinha,' spent Thursday huddling with fellow drug dealers in Rio's Juramento shantytown, surrounded by 30 personal bodyguards.
'Escadinha is dealing with his business right now and he is not going to give police a chance to catch him again,' a bodyguard identified as Pedro Bala told the Jornal do Brasil newspaper.
Residents of Juramento, where Escadinha was considered a sort of Robin Hood because he bought medicine for poor children and took people to the hospital when they were ill, organized a two-day samba party Friday and Saturday to celebrate his escape.
But police said they doubted the city's most-wanted cocaine trafficker would be hiding in such an obvious place.
Police director Humberto Quintas assigned 50 agents to coordinate the search for Escadinha, who was plucked by a helicopter rom the Ilha Grande Island prison 100 miles off the Brazilian coast on Dec. 31. He was serving a 22-year term for bank robberies, drug trafficking and homicide.
Another 250 agents fanned out over Rio de Janeiro state and searched hundreds of tiny islands where Escadinha may have been dropped off after the first-ever airborne escape from the isolated facility.
Escadinha, granted a New Year's Eve visit from his wife, was walking with her in a deserted section of the scrub-covered island when the helicopter swept down and picked them up, police said.
A 21-year-old trainee pilot who was hired for the flight said when he was arrested Wednesday that he had been threatened with death if he refused to cooperate.
Frustrated police officials said his escape may inspire other prisoners to try the same method.
'Up until now, this island offered prisoners only two means of escape -- through the forest or via the ocean,' said prison director Maj. Jose Carlos Barreto Bonfim.
'If another helicopter tried to land, it wouldn't have the least difficulty rescuing other prisoners from Ilha Grande.'
