Trial of Boy Toy and the Cork-Screrw Castration Killing of His Sugar Daddy

By LAURA ITALIANO


Meet the boy toy from hell.


Opening statements were made in Manhattan this morning in a young stud-on-sugar daddy mutilation murder so brutal jurors were screened for their ability to handle graphic autopsy photos and testimony.
Renato Seabra, 22, a Portuguese underwear model, is on trial for bludgeoning, strangling and then castrating his older, wealthy lover, a well-known Portuguese fashion writer, as they argued on vacation in their Times Square hotel room in January 2011.
Carlos Castro, 65, was still alive, though likely unconscious, as his testicles were removed 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 not guilty by reason of insanity.

Steven Hirsch
Renato Seabra
"He was choked," lead prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal told the eight-woman, four-man jury this morning.
"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 rage -- the younger man's fury that three months into the relationship, he was getting kicked off the gravy train.
The older man who'd lavished money on him -- escorting him to dinners, shows and modeling agencies in London, Madrid, and now New York -- was casting him aside, possibly because Seabra had begun cruelly flaunting a new interest in young women.
"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."
Defense lawyer Ruben 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.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "This is insanity."
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.”

Comments