Federico Venero spent the last years of his life at the door of his small establishment near Puertochico, the Rubi jewelry store. There, in Santander, between client and client, he watched life pass by, which in the murky past was a dangerous whirlwind. There was nothing to suspect that this businessman with an expressionless face and calm manner had been a police confidant and journalist, and that in the 1980s he uncovered one of the most scandalous corruption plots of the Transition, which shook the foundations of the Ministry of the Interior headed by José Barrionuevo: the police mafia involved in the disappearance of ‘El Nani’, a small-time criminal who worked robbing jewelry stores for a group of police officers.
He had regained his anonymity, but he retained the air of a sad and even scared man, of someone defeated. When he pulled the blanket, many – and he himself – thought he would end up in a ditch, or disappeared, like his crony ‘El Nani’, the origin of the whole scandal. But he remained alive and after almost three decades he died in oblivion, at the age of 65, in 2014.
Venero, a small man of short stature and a mustache, ran a jewelry store on Casimiro Sainz Street in Santander that was, in reality, a cover for a much more ambitious business. The jeweler was a police informant and accomplice of a mafia network that involved agents from Santander, Bilbao and Madrid. He was in charge of providing information about lucrative robberies in jewelry stores, including his own, carried out by criminals he trusted, such as Santiago Corella himself, alias ‘El Nani’ – who later became the first person to disappear from democracy. The loot was divided between police, confidants and robbers.
It was the eighties and the National Police retained some of the fearsome vices and corruption of Franco’s regime. At that time, the police jewelry mafia acted with total impunity. Sometimes they blamed the robberies they organized on other criminals, whom they probably made sing with unorthodox methods, and in the process they hung medals on themselves. Until ‘El Nani’ disappeared and Federico Venero entered the scene.
The jeweler was a police informant and accomplice of a mafia network that involved agents from Santander, Bilbao and Madrid. He was responsible for providing information on lucrative robberies at jewelry stores, including his own, carried out by criminals he trusted.
The corrupt police recruited Santiago Corella to carry out the robberies that they themselves organized. Everything went well until in the robbery of a jewelry store in a town in Valladolid, ‘El Nani’ and his cronies stole 48 kilos of gold, but only gave eight to Federico Venero. The rest, apparently, were buried on the outskirts of the town. The police even came to look for him with excavators, but he never appeared.
Those who were directing the plot were not willing to lose such substantial loot. So the jeweler, who was 36 years old at the time, entrusted ‘El Nani’ with the next robbery of the Paymer jewelry store, on Tribulete Street in Madrid, for which he provided him with two weapons: A sawed-off shotgun and a pistol. The owner of the establishment, Pablo Perea, died in the robbery. Ten days later, the police arrested ‘El Nani’ to find out where the loot was. That day, November 12, 1983, Corella disappeared forever. His trace is lost in the General Directorate of Security in Madrid. In the heart of Puerta del Sol.
In reality, it was later discovered that ‘El Nani’ did not accept Venero’s offer and did not star in the Tribulete robbery. In fact, the real robbers were later arrested. But it was the excuse of the corrupt Anti-Robbery Brigade of the time to make their former partner sing.
In the spring of the following year, journalist Gregorio Roldán, from Diario 16, revealed this event, causing a great shock in public opinion. According to the criminal’s wife and sisters, also detained in Sol, Corella was savagely tortured at the police station. The loud music that the police played could not drown out the screams that were heard by their crony, Ángel Manzano, who was also beaten and taken to the hospital. “Sing, Nani, sing. Tell us where the gold is,” his torturers repeated. Their relatives had also been detained. His wife, Soledad, was stripped naked and groped, and his pregnant sister-in-law was threatened with abortion.
As a result of that tragic night, Santiago Corella was never heard from again. The police said he escaped when they took him to search an open field. Several months later, the sisters of ‘El Nani’, desperate due to the lack of news, told what happened to a journalist from El País. A year later, the fourth chamber of the National Court closed the matter, after a complicated investigation hindered by the alleged protagonists of this police plot orchestrated in three police stations in Santander, Bilbao and Madrid.
Venero pulls the blanket
But in December of that same year, on Christmas 1985, Federico Venero pulled the rug out from under him when a journalist from Cambio 16 contacted him to inform him that he was going to publish information about the police mafia, which he had obtained from a Santander police officer who He wanted to remain anonymous. Before being discovered, Venero chose to confess. He stated that the police were involved in most of the jewelry thefts that occurred at that time, and that they kept part of the loot they recovered. He also shocked the country by claiming that ‘el Nani’ died of a heart attack at the police station, after being savagely tortured, and that he was buried in quicklime in a field in Vicálvaro.
He even confessed that he participated in the robbery of his own jewelry store on September 15, 1981, with a loot of more than 200 million pesetas in jewelry, and that inspector Antonio Caro – whom he accused of being part of the plot – was in charge of investigating. Caro was sentenced to six years in prison, a sentence that was later annulled by the Supreme Court after being defended by the controversial lawyer Emilio Rodríguez Menéndez. He retired a few years ago as commissioner of the National Police Corps in Cantabria with two awards: the commendation of Number of the Order of Civil Merit and the Cross of Merit of the Local Police.
From this confession on, Venero lived with an escort 24 hours a day, fearful that one of those harmed by his testimony would exact cruel revenge.
Venero’s role in the plot went beyond organizing the robberies. In the back room of his jewelry store there was a ‘chocolate maker’ with which he melted the gold and precious metals from the robberies into ingots and then distributed them among his accomplices.
The jeweler was a prominent protagonist in the trial for the disappearance of the Nani that was held in the Provincial Court of Madrid in 1988 amid enormous expectation. A process that Spanish Television recorded and that has recently been used to make the documentary ‘Pact of Silence’. Of the seven accused, three were sentenced to 29 years in prison each – Commissioner Francisco Javier Fernández Álvarez and inspectors Victoriano Gutiérrez Lobo and Francisco Aguilar – for crimes of document falsification and illegal detention with forced disappearance, torture and deprivation of rights.
Venero had a partner, Valentín Ochoa, who betrayed him by testifying against him in the police mafia trial and who, in turn, denounced the existence of another drug mafia in the Civil Guard. He also said that the body of ‘El Nani’ was in the pond of a farm in Madrid, on the Extremadura highway. Venero had pointed out a vacant lot in Vicálvaro, but he changed his version and said that he was buried on the estate of the aristocrat Jaime Mesia Figueroa, where GAL forces also trained and where, according to his testimony, some of the police officers went to hunt. corrupt. Nothing was ever clarified. The body of ‘El Nani’ never appeared and the case became one of the darkest episodes of democracy.
Venero’s role in the plot went beyond organizing the robberies. In the back room of his jewelry store there was a ‘chocolate maker’ with which he melted the gold and precious metals from the robberies into ingots and then distributed them among his accomplices. According to what he himself confessed before the judge, he also acted as an intermediary in arms trafficking between the police corruption network and various criminal gangs.
The situation in Venero became complicated when inspector Antonio Caro was assigned to Catalonia and the new Anti-Robbery Brigade that arrived in Cantabria began to suspect his behavior. To the point that they asked the judge to tap his phone. The recordings revealed relationships with criminals and their involvement in drug matters, among other issues. Venero, in addition, had other cases with the justice system. Subsequently, he was sentenced to four months in prison and a fine of 50,000 pesetas for receiving jewelry, which the police found inside a sock when searching his car when he returned from Bilbao in the company of another individual. They had been tipped off.
Upon returning to Santander from a trip to Egypt, in November 1987, he was informed that he would be prosecuted, this time by the Provincial Court of Santander. It was a trial about the alleged police mafia of Cantabria – whose existence was denounced by Venero himself – and which implicated the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior. The Minister of the Interior, José Barrionuevo, had to testify; the Secretary of State, Rafael Vera, and the Director of the Police, José María Rodríguez Colorado. A commissioner and four inspectors were prosecuted for drug trafficking and illegal possession of weapons. Venero himself was accused. In fact, the testimony of some residents of the Pasiega region indicated that Venero managed a clandestine workshop for the artisanal manufacture of pistols in the Selaya area. Although it was not proven, a blacksmith from the area, Salvador Fernández Cagigas, linked to arms trafficking, was prosecuted.
In that trial he declared that he was carrying out information work in the fight against terrorism on behalf of the Ministry of the Interior and that he had met with Txema Montero, MEP for Herri Batasuna, in Santander, in the office of his lawyer Antonio Sarabia. Montero confirmed that he had met twice with the jeweler to try to clarify the murder of the Abertzale leader Santiago Brouard. “I don’t know, because I am not aware of the Police informants,” declared Rafael Vera on this issue.
After several judicial comings and goings, sometimes as a defendant and other times as a witness in the processes arising from his complaints, Federico Venero entered the Santander Provincial Prison on June 20, 1991 to serve a two-year sentence for illicit possession of weapons. of fire issued in 1988 by the Provincial Court of Cantabria. Days later he was transferred to the Nanclares de Oca prison, in Álava, where he began a hunger strike because he feared that his status as a ‘snitch’ would settle accounts within the prison.
Since he was released from prison, Federico Venero began to live in Santander like another citizen, although with a certain elusive and suspicious air. He continued running his small jewelry store. He frequented the bars in the area with a group of friends. He did not want to speak to journalists, he politely declined to comment on that uncomfortable past as the protagonist and witness of the first disappearance of democracy, the great police corruption scandal of the 80s. The truth of the ‘El Nani’ case remained underground, like his own corpse and the 40 kilos of gold that never appeared.
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