One of the thieves of the famous robbery of the entity in 1998 recounts in a documentary series how the assault was perpetrated
It is the first time that one of the authors of the robbery at the Banco Popular de Yecla puts a number on the stolen money in the most profitable butrón for the robbers of those committed in Spain. Amazon has released a documentary series starring Jon Imanol Saphiela Candela, alias El Sapo. He is one of the thirteen thieves who took part in Christmas 1998 in this robbery.
El Sapo gets in front of the cameras to give details of his extensive criminal career. The series, called ‘Sapo, SA’, covers the greatest ‘achievements’ of this psychopath in several chapters. He himself admits that he is diagnosed as such, that he was a friend and enemy of Ángel Suárez ‘Casper’, the latter considered the leader of the organization that attacked the bank.
In the report by the Mediterráneo production company, several pieces of information can be taken from El Sapo, who experienced firsthand what happened in December 1998. The most notable is the loot figure: “We took 2,700 million pesetas.” Today it would be just over 16 million euros. It must be taken into account that the owners of the boxes burst on Christmas Eve of that year declared that they had stolen 4.8 million euros.
El Sapo was in charge of moving the money first in a van and then in a car parked in Almansa to Madrid. Then he shared it with ‘Casper’. According to his testimony, the gang opened 89 boxes of the more than 200 that were in the vault of the Yecla bank. “My goal was to take 400 million pesetas. I did not imagine what we were going to find », he acknowledges in the documentary. He comments that in the first box he found 60 envelopes and in each of them there was a million pesetas. “God is great and Santa Claus more!” he exclaims.
They used garbage bags from the bank and had to leave the drilling machine there. “That was a mistake,” he says, as it allowed investigators to pull the strings to track down the gang. With that machine they made two holes. The first found a partition in the path that reduced the diameter of the entrance to the chamber where the safes were. The second was the good one, although “Casper couldn’t get in because he was too fat.”
“There, in addition to a lot of money, there were two kilos of cocaine, sexual objects, a sandwich, a shoe box, the crown of the Virgin…”, says the protagonist of the report, who admits that “I never thought there could be so much money in that bank. This robbery expert assures that he entered the bank “like Santa Claus”, through the door, since they had changed the bowler for a master one that allowed any key of the same brand to open the door. One of the moments that also brings something new about the case is when he is asked how the gang found out that there was so much money in that bank in Yecla. “There was a person who reported what was happening in Yecla”, but El Sapo does not give his name. “Let no one speak ill of him in his town,” he says. Despite the fact that El Sapo was testifying in court, he was never charged with anything and was released on this matter.
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