Meet the boy toy from hell — a handsome young gigolo who castrated his bludgeoned and dying lover with a cork screw, slit his own wrists, and then applied the severed testicles to his bleeding arms so he could “harness their power.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the lawyer for 22-year-old Portuguese underwear model Renato Seabra told a Manhattan jury as the grotesque murder trial opened today. “This is insanity.”
Carlos Castro, 65, an influential Portuguese fashion writer, was still alive — though likely unconscious — on the carpeted floor of the pair’s Times Square hotel room as Seabra removed his testicles with a cork screw, according to the evidence to come in the next three weeks of testimony.
Defense lawyers are hoping to prove that Seabra was suffering from a psychotic episode during and after the hour-long, January 2011 assault. He is therefore not responsible by reason of mental disease, they argue — in other words, simply too crazy to understand his actions were wrong.
“He was in another world,” defense lawyer Rubin Sinins told jurors in his own openings today.
“He was deluded into thinking that he was a special messenger from God, on a mission to make the world a better place.”
Prosecutors are countering that Seabra strangled, bludgeoned and mutilated the wealthy older man out of rage, as they argued in their pricey, single-bed room at the InterContinental hotel over Seabra’s newly-revealed interest in young women — and over Castro’s decision to end the relationship.
“He was choked,” lead prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal told the eight-woman, four-man jury this morning, as Castro’s sister sat sobbing in the audience, which also included a dozen reporters from Portugal and New York.
“He was bashed over the head [with a computer] and his head was stomped on,” she said — making special note that Seabra’s sneaker-prints were found on the victim’s face.
Rosenthal blamed the murder on Seabra’s fury that three months into the relationship, he was getting kicked off the gravy train.
The older man had lavished money on him — escorting him to dinners, shows and modeling agencies in London, Madrid, and now New York, and was now casting him aside, possibly because Seabra had begun cruelly flaunting a new interest in the opposite sex.
“Tension was in the air,” Rosenthal said, describing Castro’s anguished complaint to his dear friend, Wanda Perez, in the hotel lobby the night before the murder.
“Where’s Renato?” Perez had asked her doomed friend as they prepared to go to dinner at Paulino’s in the Lower East Side.
“I don’t know. He left,” Castro answered. “I saw him talking to two girls, and he gave them his number. I think he went to meet them.”
Sinins addressed the jurors next, insisting that Seabra simply snapped that night, suffering a first-ever psychotic break, as evidenced by his actions that night and his later interactions with cops and shrinks.
“The evidence will show that during the incident, Renato Seabra took a cork screw and hacked at Carlos Castro, at his testicles — that he dug them out, that he pulled them out, with a corkscrew,” Sinins told jurors.
“The evidence will further show that as he explained to the police, the very next day, he believed Mr. Castro’s testicles were demons, and that by pulling them out everything would be right with the world.
Seabra then slit his own wrists there in the hotel room, the lawyer said — and the craziness got even crazier.
“He took the testicles and put one on each wrist,” Sinins said. “This is what the evidence will show — and you didn’t hear about this from the people’s opening.
“He explained that this was for his protection, and he could also harness the power — harness the power! — of Carlos Castro’s testicles,” the lawyer said, his voice rising dramatically.
Don’t buy it, the prosecutor warned jurors.
“This defendant had no mental illness prior to committing this crime,” she told them. “Not a single sign of mental illness in the years, months or days leading up to this crime.”
“He knew that he was beating and choking and mutilating Carlos Castro,” she said. ” And he knew that it was wrong.”
Testimony begins Wednesday, with Perez expected to take the stand to describe Carlos’ growing fear of the younger man in the days before the murder.