SAO PAULO, Brazil — Natasha Viederker flew halfway around the world to visit her Swiss husband for the first time in two years in Latin America's biggest prison. She was turned away at the gates because of her shoes.
"They told me I couldn't go in with these on," said the 25-year-old Swiss woman with a tremor in her voice, pointing to the thick wedge-heel on her black sandals, eyed by guards as a likely hiding place for drugs or cash.
Fortunately for Viederker, on her first heart-rending trip to Brazil since her newlywed husband was jailed for drug trafficking, Dora was on hand to rent her a pair of flip-flops.
"Dora's Place," a stall on the grubby sidewalk opposite Brazil's sprawling Carandiru prison complex, rents anything from brassieres to jeans to women who are turned away by guards for being inappropriately dressed.
Libido runs high in Carandiru's main unit, the Casa de Detencao, where 7,200 men crowd into a space built for 3,250. To keep tensions to a minimum, the thousands of women who file through every weekend are forced to conceal their curves.
And with the smuggling of cell phones and drugs commonplace, a thorough body search is accompanied by a strict dress code that bars suspect platform shoes or hollow block heels.
Although many slip through with a bit of grease.
"Low-cut tops won't get in, high-heels won't get in 'cos they could put drugs in them, nothing transparent," said Dora Frugis, 49, who has pitched her stall at the gates on weekends for the past three years.
Dora's stall forms part of a bustling minimarket of rental clothing that flourishes under a dirty bridge opposite Detencao.
The decrepit prison, just a few subway stops from the heart of Brazil's financial capital, may be a world away from So Paulo's skyscrapers, but business there, too, is booming.
On a good day, when visitors come in their thousands and guards get nitpicky, Frugis can make $472 on clothing rental and from storing handbags, minimattresses and blankets.
Many visitors camp out overnight to guarantee they are first in line when the gates open at 7 a.m. Dora's stall is at the upper end of the market — $2.40 an item — but women flock to the neat stacks of shoe boxes and sweet-smelling clothes.
Numbered plastic bags storing wallets, watches and jewelry line shelves, protected from Sao Paulo's rife violent crime by an unspoken respect and fear of repercussions from the more deadly criminals inside.
Women shuffle into a makeshift changing cubicle by the side of a busy road to swap their figure-hugging tops for baggy shirts or make minor adjustments to pass the dress test.
"They wouldn't let the half-cup in," said Roseria Gomes, 19, sliding two metal curves out of her underwire push-up bra and preening herself in a crooked mirror hanging off a van.
The week before, Gomes went in knickerless after the warden took a dislike to the red pair under her trousers. Many stalls sell, rather than rent, white underwear for those emergencies.
"'What if my husband only gets excited with red knickers' I told the guard," laughed a feisty Gomes, whose husband is behind bars for robbery and homicide.
Underwear is just as important as outerwear for women on their weekly visits to their jailed husbands, boyfriends or even blind dates. Conjugal visits are sacred at the prison, with the private time in cells seen as an essential pacifier.
To save heartache, stalls carry a stock of old clothes they offer free to women who fail the Detencao dress test but cannot afford the extra dollar on top of bus or subway fares.
But the scores of women emerging from the prison in cleavage-baring tops or tiny skirts are evidence that the same rules do not apply to all.
The dress code often depends on the guard's mood. But visitors say they regularly grease the palms of poorly paid wardens with bribes of $10 to $120 to take in drugs, alcohol or the inmates' favorite weapon—the mobile phone.
To the surprise of the general public but not of their wives, Carandiru inmates in February used cellphones to coordinate the biggest prison rebellion in Brazil's history. Calls between 28 jails across Sao Paulo state stirred 29,000 inmates to riot, taking thousands of day visitors hostage.
Police said they located about 40 cellphones in a post-riot search of the state's prisons but the women who visit Carandiru on weekends say they phone their husbands inside every day.
Prison authorities admit that the sheer number of visitors and inmates and the sophistication of organized crime has left them helpless to stop the illegal flow of goods.
Now, following the mass rebellion, Sao Paulo state authorities plan to demolish Carandiru's Detencao unit within a year and relocate the 7,200 inmates.
That news washed over the industrious clothing, pizza and soft drink sellers that crowd the Detencao gates. They have been hearing that pledge from officials since the early 1980s.
But stricter prison policy since February's riot has already sent ripples through the mini-market. The state government restricted the number of visitors per inmate to two, from as many as 10 before.
That has prompted street-seller Bruno Lombarde, 50, to reassess his business. Lombarde's stall serves hot coffee, bread and pastries to the sleepy visitors on open days.
"I'd say business is down by about half since the riots," said Lombarde, who also rents a few items of clothing and stores handbags, earning about $120 per weekend.
Next door at Dora's, Grugis said business has been steady thanks to a regular clientele drawn to her fragrant shirts and carefully folded jeans, all stamped with a trademark "D."