In the summer of 2017, Josep Lluís Trapero reached levels of popularity unbecoming of a police officer. He major of the Mossos d'Esquadra, now removed from leadership, was the firm and calm voice that rose above the chaos of the jihadist attacks on Barcelona's Rambla. With hardly any time to assimilate this sudden popularity, the illegal 1-O referendum – in which the Catalan police avoided charging against the voters – turned him into a hero of the independence movement and a villain of the State, which put him on trial (he ended up acquitted) for sedition. But in November 2009, Trapero was a complete unknown. Not even people who had made information trafficking a way of life knew about it. “Who is Trapero?” Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo asked two police officers with whom he was conspiring in a restaurant in Madrid. He was soon going to find out. It was the beginning of a relentless hunt for man. The revenge of a group of national police of the old guard, friends of Villarejo, to whom the major had taken him to jail for corruption.
EL PAÍS has agreed to the complaint that Trapero presented two months ago, when the conversation in the restaurant (among other recordings and notes by Villarejo) came to light. All this material confirms what he had intimately suspected: that a group of police officers affected by his investigations had influenced the development of a judicial case (the Macedonia case) to achieve his indictment and return part of the damage he had caused them. “Organized crime was established for a long period in official offices,” states the complaint, a memorial of grievances that the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office is already studying. Trapero assures that the almost 10 years that these “maneuvers of personal destruction” lasted caused him “obvious physical and emotional discomfort,” left him in “a state of continuous alert” and forced him to give “explanations within the family and staff”. “In an unfair, perverse and illegitimate way they persecuted me for 10 years of my life.”
With the collaboration of third parties (lawyers, Mossos union members, journalists, private detectives and even a pseudo-union ultra), the police carried out a “perverse and prospective investigation” against him, acted “with total impunity” using public resources and “deceived and influenced” a judge in Barcelona to charge him with protecting a drug trafficker, something that finally It didn't happen. “It was the price I had to pay for doing my job,” laments Trapero, who even then, while the events were taking place, knew he was in the eye of the storm. “I knew I was being persecuted and at different times I expressed it to the Prosecutor's Office and the president of the TSJC.”
In this story of corruption, revenge and betrayal, it can be said that it all started with a car parked on a street in Barcelona. On May 28, 2009, a trafficker, Juan Miguel Bono, picked up a bag from the trunk that supposedly contained more than 50 kilos of cocaine for which he had paid 600,000 euros. A tip from a rival, who set a trap for him, allowed the Civil Guard to arrest him red-handed. Transferred to the cell, Bono received a strange visit from an inspector of the National Police Corps of Cornellà, Ramon Santolaria, who just a few days before had come to the conclusion that Bono was part of a group dedicated to drug trafficking led by a certain Manuel Gutiérrez Carbajo.
Gutiérrez Carbajo is a determining character, Ariadna's thread that leads to the conspiracy hatched against Trapero. Although he was never convicted of drug trafficking, he had excellent connections to the underworld in the Barcelona area. And he became a police informant. His testimony was decisive in two operations that discredited part of the leadership of the National Police Corps in Catalonia. In it Red Prawn case, which broke out in 2005, helped uncover a plot by police officers who profited from drug trafficking through the port of Barcelona; One of the detainees was Inspector Antonio Giménez Raso, who after his fall from grace was taken in by Villarejo as a partner and became his man in Catalonia and the main promoter of the vendetta. In it Riviera and Saratoga casethe confidant pointed out veteran police commanders who were paid in exchange for protecting the activity of those two luxury macro-brothels in Castelldefels.
Under the direction of Trapero, then head of investigation of the Mossos, the arrests for the brothel plot were made in March 2009 and included a police commissioner, Luis Gómez, who had been chief in Cornellà, the same police station since the one when the inspector arrived to question Bono about the incident with the drugs and the trunk. Timing is important. Only two months had passed since Gómez's arrest. The episode became even stranger when it turned out that most of the cocaine was just sugar and gypsum, leading Barcelona judge Joaquín Aguirre, who was investigating the case, to think that the civil guards might have given the commodity. And eight months later the talk came, in the restaurant in Madrid, between Villarejo, Giménez Raso and the head of the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF), José Luis Olivera, also a partner in the retired commissioner's companies.
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From the key witness to the head of the investigation
At that meal, the foundations of a conspiracy are laid that, at first, focused on Gutiérrez Carbajo as a witness for the prosecution (they want to tap his phone and maintain the thesis that “he leads an organization where there may be civil guards, waiters, [sic] d'esquadra”); in the Anti-Corruption prosecutor David Martínez Madero, whom they plan to falsely accuse (“we would already slip into the note that the madero receives 7,000 euros every month; that is set up and then explained”); and, to a lesser extent, the still unknown Trapero. Discrediting them was not an end in itself, says the major in their complaint, but a means to “improve or influence” the judicial cases they faced for corruption.
The sudden death of the prosecutor in 2011 and, above all, the development of the judicial case on the drugs in the trunk, put Trapero in the center of the target. Judge Aguirre wanted Trapero to ask him to tap the phones of 15 members of the Civil Guard group who had participated in that incident. Trapero replied that he had no indication and was not going to do it but that, if he ordered it, he would comply. The relationship broke down. And the judge quickly became suspicious of the mossos, to the point that they were held accountable for eight long years (they were exonerated without going to trial). Villarejo's group found in that instruction, called Macedonia casethe ideal opportunity to accuse Trapero, a possibility that arose during the endless investigation of the process.
The Prosecutor's Office moved away from the theories of the judge's suspicion, which allowed Manos Médicas – a pseudo-union ultra directed by Miguel Bernad— exercise the popular accusation. Trapero suspects, based on Villarejo's notes, that this operation was not accidental, but part of the conspiracy, and that a lawyer involved in the Riviera-Saratoga plot paid for the criminal action. The brief indicates that the judge “uncritically” followed the requests of Manos Cleans, which “set the course of the investigation,” increasingly focused on whether the Mossos had deliberately hidden the alleged involvement of their confidant Gutiérrez Carbajo with drug trafficking.
What began as a revenge by resentful police officers became an official assignment starting in 2012, with the appointment of Commissioner Eugenio Pino as Deputy Director of Operations (DAO) of the Police. The group began to approach Trapero's surroundings and contact his enemies. Villarejo recorded all this in his notes: “A high level of penetration of the circle of Tripi [apodo con el que llamaban a Trapero]. At the same time, relations with their enemies are strengthened” (2013). Giménez Raso himself met him at a public event and told him that he was very bad and hurt for his people. It was all part of a “strategy” to get closer to Trapero, who that same year had been named head of the Mossos. “I learned that unknown people from the CNP were interested, in informal circles, in all kinds of information about my life,” the complaint states. They even contacted the former PSC mayor of Sabadell Manuel Bustos, accused by the Mossos of corruption and who, as Villarejo wrote, asked for “help to alleviate as much as possible” his accusation. And they relied on private detectives who charged 1,000 euros per month paid with reserved funds.
![Eugenio Pino, former deputy operational director (DAO) of the Police.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/XxhDPit9uetDKtlYyRY5AXmeqyE=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/IVFJMEH63VG53AJRDL43UVWWPQ.jpg)
“They manipulated and deceived the judge”
The culmination of the persecution against Trapero occurred in 2014 and 2015, when the group achieved its objective of influencing the Macedonia case and speculated on the possibility of arresting him. With the accusation in Hands Cleans in clear withdrawal (indications of extortion against Miguel Bernad had begun to emerge) and without having obtained any indication about the alleged police corruption, the judge commissioned a report from a so-called Case Analysis and Review Brigade, dependent of the DAO, to analyze the summary. Based on Villarejo's notes, Trapero assures that they “manipulated and deceived” the judge, with whom they managed to establish a “direct dialogue” so that he agreed to commission the report, which concluded that the Mossos had not revealed certain relationships although, according to Trapero, was riddled with errors, falsehoods and “gratuitous assertions.”
Not even with that report, the judge saw enough to charge Trapero, who finally emerged victorious from the Macedonia case but converted into one more objective of the so-called Operation Catalonia, already with the independence process at cruising speed: “Objetivo Trapero”. “Try to control mortadelos“Wrote Villarejo, who also wrote that the investigation against him is recorded in the official Police database. “The Jodorovich family [un histórico clan vinculado al crimen organizado de Barcelona] “is protected by the current head of the Mossos d'Esquadra, Mr. Trapero,” says a note dated as close to 2016, already in full swing. processes and with the patriotic police pending to control the independence movement.
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