Estefânia Gonçalves dos Santos

Aliases

Cláudia Luiza Fernandes de Oliveira, A Empregada Invisível (The Invisible Maid)

Description

Estefânia Gonçalves dos Santos (born September 22, 1972), formerly known by her birth name, Cláudia Luiza Fernandes de Oliveira, is a Brazilian housekeeper, con artist, and unconvicted bank robber. Originally from Florianópolis, she gained notoriety in the early 2000s for orchestrating dozens of elaborate robberies and fraud schemes across South America under the guise of domestic employment. In 2010, she fled Brazil using falsified travel documents and has since lived in the United States under several assumed identities. While international law enforcement has been unable to determine her exact whereabouts since at least 2015, unconfirmed sightings suggest she continues to work quietly within the hospitality industry of Los Santos.

While the most recent photographs of Estefânia date back at least ten years, she is described as having a small stature and severe face with mature Mediterranean-like features. She is known to typically wear her dark hair in a restrained bob, and favors modest, everyday clothing, often with a pair of sensible shoes and a cleaner’s smock. Between her subdued clothes and her quiet unobtrusiveness, she is so utterly unremarkable that she can effortlessly blend into the collective cleaning staff of almost any home, office, or municipal building. Combined with her trusty mop (which she is rarely seen without), most people simply perceive her to be another one of Los Santos’ countless low-wage, foreign-born menial workers. That said, not all about Estefânia’s presentation is entirely understated. She is, in fact, among the most liberally-perfumed persons ever to grace the city. Her characteristic floral scent—derived from a fragrance she stole from a São Paulo magistrate in 2004—announces itself well before she enters a room, and lingers long after she has left.

Estefânia possesses a calm, calculated demeanor complemented by a soft-spoken, taciturn seriousness. She has only ever been heard speaking Portuguese, and she has a very difficult time understanding spoken English for the most part. When she does speak, she is no-nonsense and to-the-point, avoiding extraneous comments or editorialization that she deems unnecessary. When a simple “no” will suffice, she will not hesitate to use it. But although Estefânia is a woman of few words, she is also a woman of considerable skill…when it comes to burglary, theft, and fraud, that is. She is an exceptionally skilled forger of everything from passports to fishing licenses…her documents being so accurate that even Frank Abagnale referenced the quality of her work in his autobiography. She also possesses near expert-level knowledge when it comes to safes and locks, and can comfortably crack most major models available on the market. Estefânia even boasts reasonably good sleight of hand and concealment tactics, and many people who have encountered her have described her as “the kind of woman you wouldn’t remember until your silverware was gone, your bank account drained, and your wife’s identity stolen.”

Estefânia Gonçalves dos Santos was born as Cláudia Luiza Fernandes de Oliveira on September 22, 1972, during a torrential rainstorm that flooded three churches and one municipal archive in the colonial neighborhood of Santo Antônio de Lisboa in Florianópolis. Her father, Julio, was an out-of-work street performer and trained party-magician. Once employed by the National Bank of Brazil as a janitor, he was arrested in 1983 after allegedly demonstrating how to rob the main vault using nothing but a crêpe pan, a broken hairpin, and 29 seconds of distraction. Estefânia’s mother, Leonora, was a former beauty queen and her husband’s stage-assistant, specializing in confidence tricks, sleight of hand, and the art of performative disappearances using visual illusion. Although Estefânia didn’t grow up with much, it was through the combination of her parents’ skills that she learned the only trade they could pass down: the art of trickery. Sure, crime was never spoken of directly in their household—but its principles were taught with elegance, restraint, and, in some cases, a sense of virtuous choreography. At 16, Estefânia ran away from home under the pretext of fetching a can of “goose grease,” resurfacing two weeks later in Curitiba as a junior parlor maid in the residence of a foreign diplomatic envoy. For years, she drifted across Brazil, from one wealthy household to the next, pilfering whatever she could find. Whether it was expensive heirlooms, bearer bonds, or on one occasion, a centuries-old chamber organ, she always left behind a linen napkin, elegantly folded and perfumed, as her trademark. By the early 2000s, Estefânia had become a ghostlike presence in South American law enforcement bulletins—referred to only as “A Empregada Invisível” ("The Invisible Maid"). Though she always posed as a domestic cleaner, Estefânia’s true ambition was not in pilfering jewelry from bedroom drawers, but in quietly orchestrating increasingly large heists. Between 2001 and 2010, she was linked—though never definitively—to a string of nonviolent and elaborate robberies targeting mid sized financial institutions across Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Her most famous robbery scheme occurred in 2010, at the Agência Nacional de Crédito e Poupança in São Paulo. For six months, Estefânia—under the alias “Rosa Aguilar”—worked as a night shift janitor. Each evening, she cleaned carefully and with virtuous attention to detail—especially the small third-floor hallway that led to the bank’s vault. With time, she memorized guard rotations, emergency procedures, as well as staff weaknesses. One night, just after 2 in the morning, a fire alarm was triggered in the sub-basement. Investigators would later determine the fire was caused by a combination of commercial floor wax, several bins of recycled paper, and a broken coffee maker with a tampered time-delay function. Amid the commotion, the bank’s staff evacuated the building, as did Estefânia, moving slowly, unnoticed, and pulling a squeaky yellow mop bucket. Inside this mop bucket—beneath a false bottom and wrapped in heat-resistant fabric—was a shrink-wrapped bundle containing 500,000 reais in mixed denomination bills, which she had removed from the unlocked counting room. She walked calmly out through the emergency exit with the other staff, even offering a bottle of water to a coughing guard, before she was never seen in Brazil again. Immediately following the São Paulo heist, Estefânia boarded a flight to Port Gellhorn, Leonida as a quiet, seasonal domestic worker. She carried a convincing-looking letter of employment, a forged B-1 visa, and a battered suitcase containing nothing but cash and her various spoils of theft. She finally arrived in the United States in March of 2010, and has remained in hiding ever since, living under a series of frequently-changing aliases, including most recently in Los Santos where she works as a contracted housekeeper for CleanMakers™ Ltd.