The softly spoken man who checked in to a youth hostel in a faded colonial building on a cobbled backstreet of Rio de Janeiro on Monday morning was very polite.

Perpetually dressed in a shirt with the logo of Vasco da Gama, Rio’s fourth football team, he said his name was James Paul Andrews and he was from Brisbane, Australia.

He was passing through Brazil having just attended a wedding, he told one fellow traveller in a rare conversation. “And I would love to marry a Brazilian girl.”

That dream may now have to wait. On Wednesday five plain-clothed police swooped on the hostel and arrested Phillip Smith – as he is better known – only five hours after receiving an international arrest warrant through Interpol.

An eagle-eyed employee noticed the similarly between the purported Mr Andrews and the notorious Kiwi fugitive from local news reports and called police.

His arrest heralds an abrupt end to his Brazilian adventure. Having only arrived in the country on Saturday he could now be deported in days, police said, but possibly not before he is transferred to a notorious jail condemned by the UN as inhumane.

“He is facing deportation not extradition,” Maria Izabel Feijó Asmuz, the federal police chief in charge of the case, said. “This can be almost immediate.”

It can hardly be what Smith, 40, imagined when he successfully slipped through Auckland airport last Thursday while on 72-hour release from Spring Hill prison in Waikato, using a passport he had obtained under his birth surname, Traynor. It later emerged he may have been planning his escape for more than a decade.

He flew first to Santiago, Chile, then São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, before arriving in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday. Because there was no international arrest warrant issued at this point, his arrival did not raise any red flags with border authorities.

His movements over the weekend are unknown, but he did find time to email Radio New Zealand, boasting with confidence: “It is thus highly unlikely that I will be returned to New Zealand under the national law of my host country.”

At about 11am on Monday morning, he arrived at the Cidade Maravilhosa hostel in
Santa Teresa, a bohemia neighbourhood popular with artists and tourists. For decades it was also where another more successful fugitive, Ronnie Biggs, called home.

He paid 80 reals (NZD$40) in cash upfront for two nights in a six-bed dormitory with three male travellers. He presented an ID in his false name and said he was Australian. But he gave an Auckland phone number and spelt Brisbane wrong.

“He was sure he would only be staying for two nights, the 30-year-old hostel manager, who would not give her name on police advice, said. “He was very quiet, very polite and did not cause any problems. He had a backpack and a huge suitcase.”

Speaking not a word of Portuguese, he asked after how to find a permanent apartment in Rio. To one lodger at the hostel, he suggested they take a road trip to São Paulo.

He would stay up late at night in a communal area on his computer. “I figured he had a job,” a 24-year-old guest, who also did not want to be identified, said. “He was always on that computer. The next day, he still had the same football shirt on.”

One member of staff realised that their guest might be Smith, the manager said, and called police. With the murderer in his room, staff then had a nervous wait of an hour before officers arrived to arrest him. “I was so afraid that he would suddenly leave,” she said. “Because his all possessions were arranged as if to go at any time.”

When the police arrived, she led them to his room. She knocked on the door and, with a policeman posing as a potential guest, asked to be allowed to show him the room.
Once they were inside, the other officers rushed in. “Smith was in the far corner of the room,” she said. “He was standing behind a bunk bed so we could not see his face.

“The police asked his name,” she said. “But he did not reply. ‘Don’t you remember your name? Where are your identity documents? We know it is you’ they told him.”

Eventually he mumbled and pointed to his backpack, where police found his passport. “Until that moment I did not believe it was him,” she said. “He just seemed so quiet.”

As he was handcuffed she recalled he said in a low voice: “Please, don’t hurt me.”

In a curious aside police said they found only small change after arresting Smith, who declared $10,200 in cash to customs officials when leaving New Zealand last week.

He was taken to the Federal Police headquarters in downtown Rio, where Detective Superintendent Mike Pannett confirmed his identity to his Brazilian counterparts.

“He showed no emotion,” he said. “He has been very quiet and revealed little. He is clearly taking it in and considering his options. There has been no indication of why he came to Brazil but he was clearly intending to stay for some time.

“We have been very pleased with the speed and promptness of the Brazilian police once they were made aware that this criminal had come to their country.”

Yesterday, Brazil’s third federal district court remanded him in custody for 60 days. Ms Asmuz, the police chief, said that deportation proceedings – as opposed to extradition hearings – should be concluded quickly, perhaps even this week.

“In the next few days we believe he will be taken back to New Zealand,” she said.

In the meantime, he is expected to be transferred to Ary Franco, a notorious prison in one of Rio’s grim working class suburbs. The jail is considered awful, even by Brazil’s low standards, with a United Nations report describing it as “dark, dirty, steamy and cockroach-infested”, and recommending its immediate closure.

There, at least, he may have at least a few days more to dwell on whether his spectacular jaunt to the Cidade Maravilhosa was such a great idea after all.