NEW YORK, N.Y. —A celebrity Portuguese television journalist was found castrated and bludgeoned to death in a New York City hotel, and his companion, a male model who had recently been a contestant on a Portuguese reality TV show, was in police custody Saturday.
Workers at the InterContinental New York Times Square hotel discovered the mutilated body of the 65-year-old journalist, Carlos Castro, in his blood-drenched room at about 7 p.m. Friday.
He had arrived in the U.S. in late December in the company of his young boyfriend, the model Renato Seabra, to see some Broadway shows and spend New Year’s Eve in Times Square, according to a family friend.
There had been some friction between the two men toward the end of the trip, but nothing to suggest that anything horrible was about to happen, said the friend, Luis Pires, the editor of the Portuguese-language newspaper Luso-Americano in Newark, N.J.
“I think that they were a little bit upset with each other, for jealousy reasons,” Pires told The Associated Press.
The couple saw the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, took in the movie The Black Swan, and were supposed to meet Pires’ daughter for dinner Friday when Seabra suddenly emerged in the lobby acting strangely, he said.
“He told my daughter, ‘Carlos will never leave the hotel again,’” said Pires. He said his daughter, distraught, fetched a hotel manager. Security guards opened the door to the room and found the body.
Seabra left the scene, but was detained by police hours later after he sought care at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital, not far from the hotel. He was being evaluated Saturday at Bellevue Hospital Center, across town. No charges had been filed against Seabra as of Saturday afternoon, the New York Police Department said.
Police said Castro suffered serious head trauma. The medical examiner’s office will determine the cause of death.
Seabra was a contestant last year on a Portuguese TV show called A Procura Do Sonho, or “Pursuit of a Dream,” which hunts for modelling talent.
He didn’t win the show but did get a modelling contract with an agency founded by Fatima Lopes, who developed the show and was a judge on it.
Seabra had always been interested in fashion, he told the Independente de Cantanhede newspaper in Portugal in September
“I have entered this world, and I don’t want to leave it because I see I can be successful,” he said.
Castro was admired in Portugal for his bravery in coming out as a gay man and “revealing the feminine side of his personality,” said Rui Pedro Tendinha, a film critic who knew Castro.
He was a high-profile public figure as a TV personality, Tendinha said.
“The way he died is causing a big commotion in Portugal,” he said.
The organizer of Lisbon Fashion Week, Eduarda Abbondanza, said she knew Castro from his coverage of Fashion Week. Though they weren’t close, Abbondanza said that whenever she fell ill, Castro “was always there for me, calling me every time, checking up on me.”
On a trip to Rome, Castro even bought Abbondanza a rosary that the Pope had blessed. Abbondanza said that when she heard about Castro’s death, she took the rosary to a church to pray.
“I only wish I could have helped him the way he helped me,” Abbondanza said. “He had a huge heart. Only a human being with a heart like that could have done what he did for me.”
Designer Ana Salazar, considered a fashion pioneer in Portugal, recalled Castro’s role as one of the country’s first social columnists.
“I was both in his best- and worst-dressed lists in the ’80s,” she said.
She said she was shocked by his death.
“It’s like something out of a horror movie,” she added.
A guest at the InterContinental, Suzanne Divilly, 40, told the Daily News she heard the two men arguing in their room during the day Friday.
“There was a lot of noise, talking,” she said. “You could hear them arguing in the corridor and even in our room.”
Another guest, Anthony Hughes, 43, of Newcastle, Australia, told the newspaper he saw the woman who had gone to the hotel to check on Castro “screaming hysterically” in the lobby.
Pires described Castro as having “kind of a Liberace style. Eccentric, but very well known.” He said Castro had been on Portuguese TV since he was a teenager, had written several books and was friends with the country’s former president, Mario Soares.
The young model and older journalist had been dating each other for a few months, he said.
“My wife and my daughter were with him for the past three or four days,” Pires said. “My wife told me that he was a very nice kid. Very polite. I think this must have been a crime of the heart.”
“This was a 21-year-old kid, looking for fame. He (Carlos) probably saw him watching girls, or something.”
The death is the second recent slaying in an upscale New York hotel room.
Swimsuit designer Sylvie Cachay, 33, was found strangled and drowned in a bathtub at the trendy Soho House hotel on Dec. 9. Her boyfriend, Nicholas Brooks, has pleaded not guilty in her death.
Brooks, the 24-year-old son of You Light Up My Life writer and Oscar winner Joseph Brooks, has been held without bail since his arrest.
In 2009, Ryan Jenkins, a contestant on the VH1 show Megan Wants a Millionaire, was charged in the gruesome slaying of his ex-model wife. After her body was found in California, he fled to his native Canada, where he hung himself in a hotel room. He left a suicide note that said he considered her the love of his life, but thought she was cheating on him, police have said.
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