In the early 2000s, on a busy stretch of Rio de Janeiro nightlife, folks out for a night on the town popped in and out of a popular nightclub. On one floor, Latin music echoed throughout a large dance hall, while on another, people were bopping to rap and R&B. At the turntable, a local man in his late 20s, sporting thick dreads and an unwavering smile, kept the party pulse going into the night.
But perhaps what most of the clubbers didn’t know was that this young, energetic DJ was better known for his ability to take people down, rather than laying down a hot beat. In Brazil, he was respected among the most skilled martial artists, including the Gracie family, and in the greater community. Michel Pereira, better known as Buiú to his friends and family, was quickly turning into one of the best Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu athletes in the world.
Two decades later, this professor of BJJ would wind up in the Centennial State. A quick drive from the Mile High City down I-25 will take you to Castle Rock. Just off the highway, in a shopping center, the words “Ghost Squad Castle Rock” pop up above the doorway of a modest-sized facility. Just to the left, a conspicuous red ghost with a tough grin appears, wearing a black belt and white stripes around its tiny waist.
While first-time martial artists might be spooked to step into a such a place, they’d be pleasantly disarmed once Buiú or one of his instructors comes up to greet them. Inside, the brightly-colored matted floor is accompanied by the same tunes Buiú played at the Brazilian nightclub 20 years ago. Now in his early 50s, this guy, a sixth-degree black belt, keeps the same unbendable smile.
“I like to connect to people. I like to help people… that’s gonna be my motto on my stone.”
Ghost Squad Castle Rock is Buiú’s second gym in the United States. He opened his first school, Carlson Gracie Miami Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu & MMA Academy, in Miami, Florida, in 2008. Between then and now, Buiú has gone traveled among Colorado, the Sunshine State, and Brazil to train everyone from beginners with no martial arts experience to police officers and law enforcement.
Buiú’s journey spans more than four decades of training, travel, and self-discovery, starting in Rio de Janeiro back in 1975. Buiú was born to his father, Elidio Pereira, and his mother, Zelia Profiro. In 1980, he lived in Laranjeiras, where he first got into martial arts.
“I was five, that was my first encounter as a martial artist, right? I was a little bit hyper… in that neighborhood, there was only one Judo club… and I ended up getting my blue belt, three stripes, that’s what I could reach.”
Elidio Pereira, who was a “jack of all trades”, as Buiú describes him, couldn’t stick with their current apartment, because the lease had run up. But he was determined to find a neighborhood where his son could continue martial arts.
Ironically, he was surprised to learn many years later that there had been a gym run by a well-known martial artist not too far from where they lived.
“If I knew, or if my parents knew, that I was just literally, like blocks away from the famous Carlson Gracie club. But at that time, you know, we didn’t have the speediness of information that we have nowadays,” he said. But it was in the fates for him to become known and respected by the Gracie family many years later.
The Pereiras moved to Leblon in 1987. Since the neighborhood hosted a Shotokan Karate dojo, Buiú continued his martial arts journey and trained under the late Master Paulo Góes. But, he told me he preferred Jiu-Jitsu to Karate, emphasizing the grappling style’s advantage when the fight gets to the ground.
“In karate, I can punch and kick, but what if that person keeps charging? What if the person keeps coming, moving back and forth like a yo yo?” When you can apply positioning and moves with the leverage of that body, yours or the other person… I can literally take somebody down, mount, ground and pound if necessary, or I can actually subdue the person until I call for help.”
Despite that, the big thing Buiú took away from his Karate training was the art’s emphasis on respect.
“The bowing, the shaking hands, in the ‘90s that was [nonexistent], right? This whole oath, which is like a solid salutation in Japan, to show respect, to show I understand, I comprehend, right? Those three letters (Oss) are very useful in karate, and that’s what I brought to Jiu-Jitsu.”
He told me that’s a centerpiece of his training to this day. While some schools will promote students based on the amount of time they spend at the gym, and the proficiency with technique that they demonstrate, Buiú expects his students to show courtesy and respect to everyone. If they don’t, they might not move up.
During his youth, Buiú became friends with a neighbor who would also go on to become a respected BJJ artist. Rodrigo Antunes, who runs Six Blades South Denver Jiu-Jitsu, grew up on the same block. Although a skilled grappler today, Buiú’s nickname for him wouldn’t exactly give you that impression, once they got to know each other better playing soccer.
“ ‘Made by glass’,” Antunes told me over the phone, “because my shin was very sensitive.” Of course, Buiú was teasing, and Antunes acknowledges that, but he didn’t find it amusing at the time; real bros. They spent their leisure time in The Marvelous City biking around town and surfing at the beach.
When the Gracies first started teaching Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at the time, it wasn’t considered one of the classier martial arts in the country. “(Brazilian) Jiu-Jitsu had a really bad reputation at the end of the ‘80s in Rio,” Rodrigo Medeiros explained to me. “The media was against Jiu-Jitsu, they said it wasn’t nice.”
Despite that, Medeiros, a student of the world-renowned Carlson Gracie, opened his first school, Nova Geracao Jiu-Jitsu, in Rio. He said Buiú was his first student.
Oftentimes, before martial arts go mainstream and become regulated for sport, they go through a Wild West kind of phase, where anything goes, no matter how painful the training may be. I expected Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to be no exception and Buiú vouched for that.
“It was very brutal, extremely brutal, because there’s no methodology involved… that’s how it was back in the day. You don’t do an arm bar for like 10 times each arm and that’s it. Back in the days it was like, if necessary, half an hour you do an arm bar, half an hour you do a choke. That’s how it goes, because professors want to make sure you absorb the technique… but in the 90s, nobody knew Jiu-Jitsu.”
The art was viewed in comparative obscurity, compared to other disciplines. As Medeiros explained, even leisurely sports like surfing were looked down upon by some in Rio, as it was associated with people who’d rather be outside “bumming it” than studying in school.
“That’s actually very common in Brazil, I had many friends that reached black belt and they never liked to compete… It was introduced as a hobby,” Medeiros said. He told me Buiú was the first of his students to take the art seriously. “He was the first student to step into a match.”
In other words, pursuing a career in this developing martial art wasn’t merely unorthodox, it was a gamble.
“Back in the day, we all lived in a good area and didn’t have that opportunity, in terms of school… so he [Buiú] saw Jiu-Jitsu as an opportunity,” Antunes recalled. “The rest of us were still studying and figured out all the ways to succeed in life… Buiú took that opportunity a little more seriously than us.”
Medeiros went on to say that once Buiú became an instructor at his gym, Carlson Gracie Academy, he was instrumental in getting the word out. “He invited the whole neighborhood… he’d meet kids on the street and go ‘hey, come down’. So, he brought in the kids.”
Even though the martial art wasn’t particularly lucrative at the time, the return on investment certainly paid off, literally and figuratively. By the mid ‘90s, Buiú was moving up through the ranks. At that time, he was a substitute instructor and competed at the world championships in Brazil. During the event in 1996, he became friends with Noah Spear, who currently runs a BJJ school in Havertown, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia.
Although no stranger to the martial art, Spear recalled a humbling culture shock.
“My instructor at the time was not a full black belt, and we would have black belts from Brazil coming into seminars and stuff. What I noticed, once I got down there is not everybody was shitty at Jiu-Jitsu… So, when I got down to Brazil and trained with different people, I realized everybody’s just, like, off the chain.”
Usually, people not familiar with martial arts or combat sports assume that the bigger fighter will always win. It certainly took Spear by surprise, upon his first training session with some of the Brazilians. “I did notice that smaller Brazilians had techniques that involved going ‘under’ a larger opponent. It seemed like the last thing that you would want to do, until I saw them pop back up behind the guy and choke him out… I hadn’t seen someone so small go under someone so big, so smooth before.”
Spear would later find that out with his soon-to-be friend, “Buiú, I found, wasn’t a big dude, skinny guy… I was bigger than him, and he had very good techniques that he could also teach very well. I admired him a lot as a teacher… he was very technical minded”
In 1997, Buiú placed second in the adult featherweight division at the Brazilian National Tournament in Brazil. Two years later, he would become the first black belt at Nova Geracao Jiu-Jitsu. Now, with recognition at the national level, and with sincere respect within the BJJ community, Buiú was garnering attention from other gyms in other cities. He was invited to teach in Manhuacu, Santa Catarina, and Joinville, among others. The black belt Ricardo Liborio, who was also a student of Carlson Gracie, invited him to teach at his school in Barra da Tijuca.
But the professor would also come to find himself working for the less fortunate in Brazil. By 2001, he started the “Educating Children for the Future” program at Gama Philo college in the Favelas neighborhood. The idea was to get underprivileged kids involved in martial arts, to keep them out of trouble. Especially as the drug cartels were very active in the area at the time.
Buiú said he was working with 300 kids in the program, with his salary and some expenses being reimbursed by the local secretary of sports. That role evolved as time went on, and he was asked to become a coordinator for the program. By then, Buiú wasn’t just teaching kids BJJ, he was also booking therapy and dental appointments for them, among other things.
Sadly, despite its success, the program was cut in 2004. At the time, Rio de Janeiro was hosting the Brazilian Motorcycle Grand Prix, a sports event that was exploding in popularity and gave the city plenty of media attention and money in ad revenue. The secretary of sports, Buiú claims, decided the funds allocated for the program weren’t generating the desired return on investment compared to the potential from the Grand Prix. Buiú says he tried to keep the program going on his own, but at the end of the day he wasn’t making enough money to sustain himself and had to throw in the towel.
In Pereira’s telling, traffickers often tried to lure kids into the drug trade, especially those without strong parental support, but he drew a hard line around his martial arts program. “They [want to] give ‘any’ help necessary. I said no,” he said, describing an offer of support he refused. He added that the program was funded by the University Gama Filho fund, later supplemented by the secretary of sports, before that funding was cut, leaving him to cover costs himself to keep it running.
Perhaps his religious faith guided him in the right direction. He explained he was teaching at a church in Santa Marta when the drug traffickers made the proposal. “Si, it must be like all the powers of God telling me do not accept this money. Sure enough, I did not accept it.”
He says despite the lack of public funds from the government, he still has some friends who are keeping the project going. Within the last four years, he told me he returned to the area to contribute to the program, and hopes to become more involved in the future.
In 2006, Buiú moved to Philadelphia to train with Spear, who was running his first BJJ school in the Mount Airy neighborhood. Buiú resided in the neighborhood near the art museum, which is a short drive from the school. The city was particularly dangerous at the time, with a nine-year-high of 406 recorded homicides.
But none of that fazed Buiú. His early years growing up in Rio made him street smart, “it’s how you present yourself, it’s how you get there. We have this saying… ‘know how to get in, know how to get out.’” To my surprise, he said his time there was “the safest time of my life”, adding he felt safer in Philadelphia than he did in Brazil.
Spear pointed out that Buiú’s fearlessness took him aback, regarding his bike rides between his gym and Buiú’s apartment. For context, the main road that links the Art Museum area and the Mount Airy neighborhood is Lincoln Drive; a notoriously narrow, winding road, where drivers have little regard for each other, let alone bicyclists.
“One time, I left early, and then he left later to where it got dark. So, you can’t actually go through with anything, no lights in there… so he biked on Lincoln Drive back into the city, and when he told me that I was like, ‘Are you kidding, dude?’ ”
Perhaps that daring confidence translates into success, both on the mat and in the marketplace. His ambition helped drive the development of the sport when he relocated to the Sunshine State.
In 2007, Buiú started teaching at the two main BJJ gyms in the area: Spirit in Motion, and American Top Team South Beach. The latter was founded by his friend Liborio. The following year, he opened his first U.S. school, Carlson Gracie Miami. Although he’s currently based in Colorado, he dedicates time to teach at the Miami facility.
By the early 2010s, Buiú’s roots firmly took shape in the United States. He naturalized and became a U.S. citizen. Throughout the next 10 years, Buiú continued to train BJJ athletes who would go on to become world champions and teach self-defense to the average joe and, he says, members of the Secret Service.
Despite his excellent career and success in South Florida, Buiú had to uproot once again, to accommodate his son’s special needs. “So, basically, my son, he’s on the spectrum. His speech is very delayed, so it’s very difficult for him to communicate… he has a very limited knowledge of words.” Since Colorado had a school that better suited his son’s needs, they visited the colorful state and found it to be a good fit, “going through a place that has open fields, we felt the nature connected with him, and he’s been happier here.”
In 2021, in the wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic, Buiú opened Ghost Squad Castle Rock. Since gyms, in particular, were slower to resume business as usual than other industries, the new frontier got off to a slow start, but has since cultivated a respectable community.
Why “Ghost Squad” of all names? Well, as Buiú told me, it came from a fascination with “Scooby-Doo”. He said he really enjoyed the cartoon series from the ‘60s and had a particular obsession with ghosts.
“How can a ghost scare people and, at the same time, create curiosity?” he explained. “Do they exist? Are they real? … So, I chose that logo”
Ghost Squad sounds like branding until you watch a class long enough. The “ghosts” aren’t Halloween props, they’re the things people drag in with them: anger they can’t place, habits they can’t break, shame they can’t say out loud. Buiú doesn’t pretend a gi fixes your life, he just keeps giving people a place to show up, do the work, and leave a little lighter than they arrived.
It’s the quiet trick he’s been repeating since Rio: Take a room full of chaos and build a ritual, a line, a bow, a lesson; a correction delivered without cruelty. In Castle Rock, the mission looks different than it did in Brazil, but it rhymes. Same discipline, same insistence that you can become someone you recognize.
Buiú isn’t the kind of coach who promises transformation. He just gives you the structure where transformation can happen: small rules that become bigger habits, and bigger habits that become a different life. A student learns to breathe instead of panic, to reset instead of explode.
That’s why the ghost fits. Not because he’s chasing darkness, because he understands it. And because he’s built a place where people can stop being haunted long enough to choose who they’re going to be.
