Melqui Galvao was transferred to a São Paulo prison on May 10. He has a phone.

Brazilian deputy Alessandra Campêlo went public this week with the claim: Galvao has been making video calls from inside the facility — 20 to 30 minutes at a time — to students connected to his BJJ College project in Manaus. Those calls weren't goodbyes. They were allegedly used to threaten students into changing their testimony and to offer money in exchange for cooperation.

He's permanently banned from IBJJF and CBJJ competition. He's facing charges that include sexual assault of minors, threats, and unauthorized device access. That last charge is now pulling double shifts as a description of what he's apparently doing in custody. And he's still on the phone.

The academy he left behind

BJJ College in Manaus wasn't a minor operation. Galvao built it into a production facility for competitive talent over years, with his own son Mica as its most visible product. He came in with real institutional weight: former police investigator, prominent coach, established figure in the competitive BJJ world.

When he was arrested on April 28, the competition community moved fast. IBJJF and CBJJ issued permanent bans within days, removing him from every sanctioned event, coaching position, and official role. The mechanism existed and got used.

What the bans can't reach is the informal structure that comes from years of running a competitive program — the athletes, the parents, the students now sitting inside a criminal case they never asked for. Those students are the people Deputy Campêlo says he's calling.

The deputy, the phone calls

Campêlo's account is specific. The calls are video-based, 20 to 30 minutes each, directed at athletes connected to BJJ College. The content, per her claims: threats aimed at shaping testimony, and financial offers made in exchange for help.

None of this is proven. Campêlo is a public official making a public statement, not a prosecutor. The investigation is ongoing. What is confirmed: her statement triggered scrutiny into how Galvao is accessing video call capability from inside a Brazilian prison. That question is its own story.

The charges against him already include unauthorized device access, alongside sexual assault of minors and threats. Law enforcement moved him from Manaus to São Paulo specifically because keeping him close to the community — close to the witnesses — created obvious problems.

It apparently didn't solve the phone problem.

If the deputy's account holds, the man who built his reputation developing young athletes used that same network to run a witness operation from a cell. The original charges were already serious. The allegation that he's working the phones in response to them makes them worse.

Mica's move

While his father was allegedly on the phone, Mica made a different kind of call.

Mica Galvao announced that BJJ College had "fulfilled its purpose" — the cleanest possible framing for an institution whose founder just got arrested — and launched Mika Jiu-Jitsu in its place. No long statement. New name. Clean break. He moved fast.

Mica doesn't need his father's credibility. He won ADCC absolute gold at 20 and has won multiple no-gi world titles since. He built a following on his own mat record. The new team name — Mika Jiu-Jitsu, a small spelling variation from his own first name — marks distance from the academy that produced him. He's not running from his father's reputation so much as building his own forward, which he's been doing for years already.

Whether the athletes from BJJ College follow him into the new team or scatter somewhere else is being sorted out in Manaus gyms right now, not in any press release. The ones allegedly receiving phone calls from prison are navigating that decision under conditions most competitors never have to think about.

What the ban doesn't reach

The IBJJF permanent ban is the tool the sport has for this. It removes Galvao from the bracket sheet, from the coaching box, from the entire sanctioned ecosystem.

It stops there. The informal network built over years of coaching — athletes, parents, students now being asked to give testimony — isn't covered by any federation action. The ban ends Galvao's access to sanctioned events and leaves everything else to sort itself out.

BJJ has run into this before: a prominent figure gets removed, and the people underneath him are left to sort out team affiliation, competition eligibility, and basic continuity without much support from the institutions that did the removing. The federation acts on the figure. The fallout lands on everyone else.

What's different here is that the removal apparently hasn't ended the contact. If Campêlo's allegations hold up, Galvao isn't just gone from competition — he's calling the people who are supposed to testify against him.

The charges carry more than 15 years if he's convicted on all counts. BJJ College has been rebranded. Every formal mechanism for removing Galvao from Brazilian jiu-jitsu has been activated.

The phone is still on.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

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