'I ordered them to dig a hole and bury the guys alive'

This was all before Raquel de Oliveira rose to the top to run a bloodthirsty cocaine cartel in one of Brazil's toughest favelas, where she buried enemies alive and shot dead rival gang members on her turf.

And all before she became addicted to the deadly drug herself – and lost the lot. 

But now, a 54-year-old mother of three, Raquel has left behind her life of crime and lifted the lid on the underground world of drugs, sex and murder that blights Rio de Janeiro. 

In a new book, called A Número Um (Number One), which charts her life in the run down, crime-ridden Rocinha favela, she describes the brutal realities of a world, and events, which many struggle to believe could ever happen.

Only, it did happen to Raquel - starting with the moment her grandmother sold her to a gangster when she was just a child. 

Raquel revealed the gangster ran a notorious illegal lottery called 'jogo do bicho', which translates as 'the animal game'.

The little girl was taken from the life she knew, and was put to work in a brothel. She was only saved from a life of prostitution because, when she arrived there, the brothel bosses had some kind of 'spiritual awakening', which convinced the pimps not to force her to work as a prostitute.

They released her aged 11 back into Rocinha, the biggest favela in Rio, and she was given a gun by the gangster, who she called her 'godfather'.

'Things that happened to me as a child were common things, normal at the time, which take place even today,' she told MailOnline.

'Make no mistake because girls today, they sell themselves and are exchanged for a little line of cocaine. A line of coke is worth a sex act.... Girls of 10, 13. 

'Mothers nowadays put their own daughters on street.'

The turning point came at 15, when she killed for the first time. She describes the moment through her main character Bonitona's eyes in the book. 

In the book, she reveals how the man, who she was meant to buy drugs from, ended up 'lying on the sofa with multiple stab wounds to his body'.

'He thought giving me marijuana would get me high and then he could do things with me,' she explained. 

'But it didn't. So it was him or me.' 

It would be another 10 years before the next man to change the course of her life would appear, in the form of Ednaldo de Souza, or 'Naldo', who worked beneath Denis of Rocinha, the boss of the whole favela

He had risen to fame in the slums of Rio de Janiero as the first person to use an assault rifle, flagrantly firing his HK submachine gun, called Jovelina, from the rooftops of the favela.

Raquel started dating him aged 25, when she was already a mother-of-two.

He was, it seems, the love of her life. Her one regret - of all the things which she has done and seen in her life - is not dying alongside him when Naldo was killed in a gun battle with police three years later. 

Instead, she kept a bullet to take her own life if she ever came close to being arrested. 

That evening she fled the favela. When she returned, she was determined to restart her beloved Naldo's operation. 

'Naldo left 300g of marijuana, I just had to receive it,' she explained. 

'Then I set up a place to package it with some people who offered to help. At first, I went to the street to sell it myself. I sorted a place free from police, because the favela was full of officers.

'It exploded. It was incredible. And I had these rules: no one could smoke nearby, no one could work high, no more than two people at a time and no way were any children allowed. I had an enormous list of things you couldn't do.'

From four people, Raquel's gang grew to six, then 10 and finally 19 traffickers were working under her.

(dailymail.co.uk)