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1940, Wolf decided to uproot his family yet again, still in pursuit of the fabulous wealth he had dreamed about as a young man in England. This time, the Watkins clan headed to Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital. At first they settled on the city’s outskirts in the down-at-heels municipality of Mesquita, moving three times in their first year until Watkins established the Society of National Reconstruction, a company that specialized in building and fixing railway carriages, known by its Portuguese acronym SONAREC. Mesquita, the site of a large sugar plantation that had fallen on hard times after Brazil’s Princess Isabel abolished slavery in 1888, was named for the plantation’s owner Baron Jeronimo José de Mesquita. Although the rolling hills and lush landscape must have reminded the Watkins clan of Uruguay, Mesquita was no pastoral retreat populated by well-mannered European immigrants. The town was located in the mosquito-infested Baixada Fluminense, the lowlands north of the city of Rio. It was hot and sticky in the summers and endured punishing torrential rains in the winters. Most of the town’s nine thousand residents were impoverished farmers, factory workers, and aging former slaves who had never left the ruins of the former plantation. There were few diversions in Mesquita, and the good schools were nearly an hour away by rail in Rio de Janeiro. It was hardly the place for an upwardly mobile businessman like Wolf and his young family.
    By the time the Watkinses arrived in Mesquita in the 1940s, local businessmen had largely failed in their efforts to turn part of thebaron’s old plantation into orange groves for the production of orange juice. Still, Wolf saw opportunity. With its proximity to Brazil’s capital, Wolf felt that it was only a matter of time before Mesquita would turn into a booming industrial center, especially as it was strategically located on Brazil’s great Estrada de Ferro—literally “the highway of iron,” or the railroad. Yet, in the early days of their life in Mesquita, the Watkins family must have faced some difficult times.
    But it was there that Watkins began to make his important connections among Brazilian politicians and railway barons that would ensure his success for years to come.
    Although Watkins did end up making a lot of money, the bulk of his earnings weren’t exactly from the repair of railway carriages. From his base in Mesquita during the war years, when gas was severely rationed in Brazil, Watkins entered into a lucrative if not quite legal partnership with a powerful politician and military man named Napoleão Alencastro Guimarães. A former minister of transportation, the tall, dapper politician was also the director of the Central do Brasil train station in Rio de Janeiro, one of the country’s largest transport facilities at the time. Alencastro Guimarães, an anglophile who was fond of bespoke suits and an habitué of the most elegant supper clubs in Rio, took an instant liking to the plucky Englishman. And so when he sent railway carriages to SONAREC for repair, they would arrive loaded with cans of petrol. Watkins, who had developed a healthy network of black-market contacts from his years spent in the towns strung along the border of Brazil and Uruguay, easily sold the petrol on the black market. He then returned the railway carriages empty to the Central do Brasil and divided the spoils with his friend Alencastro Guimarães.
    â€œHe made a tidy fortune,” said Marcelo Steinfeld, who first heard the stories of Wolf White Watkins from Lily when she was living in Rio in the late 1960s. “But even though he was rich, Watkins was too much of a spendthrift to ever be successful.”
    Wolf’s partnership with Alencastro Guimarães proved so profitable that he was able to move his family to a stately apartment in Rio at the end of the Second World War. Wolf managed to install his family