The legend of Galician drug trafficking was not wrong José Ramón Prado Bugallobetter known as Sito Miñanco, when he felt his project would end in tragedy. “I’m screwed, I’m worried.” It was October 2017 and the Police had boarded the ship Thoran at dawn, near the Azores, while it was transporting 165 bales containing 3.3 tonnes of cocaine hidden on the kitchen floor. Its entire crew, of Turkish nationality, had been arrested.
According to the police investigation, Miñanco still had the boats at sea, about 200 miles from the Galician coast, ready to transfer the white powder into the meeting pointwhen his worst suspicions were confirmed: the ship had fallen.
Neither his increasingly extensive experience nor his increasingly sophisticated methods, according to the sources consulted, prevented him. Nor the great level of resources he already had at that time to be able to follow the “mother” ship minute by minute. Up to 700 thousand euros reportedly invested in a communications encryption system which, when push came to shove, proved useless. “I don’t know why there is no cover-up, there is no explanation (…) but now the communication is failing. It’s crap, 750 thousand euros stuck in there. “Nothing, they don’t read it, do they?” he lamented in an intercepted conversation.
Miñanco, originally from Cambados (Pontevedra), was then 62 years old and was on semi-release, having served part of his sentence. 16 years and 10 months in prison that the National Court imposed on him for offenses against public health in 2004, and followed another precedent. By day he was an apparent mistress who worked as a security guard in a car park in Algeciras, while nights were spent at CIS Manuel Montesinos in the city of Cádiz.
At the same time, according to the investigation, he took advantage of his prison permits to restructure his organization and personally supervise operations of “introduction, distribution and sale of drugs”. The legend of Galician smuggling and white powder was still active, now with links in Colombia and the Netherlands. And police surveillance and listening systems, hidden in cars and houses, had revealed a double life that Miñanco radically denies.
After the Thoran fiasco in October 2017, according to the anti-drug prosecution, Miñanco would not be long in trying again. Nor by receiving a second shot, the other stage of Operation Mito. This time by the Dutch police who, a month later, in November of the same year, intervened in a warehouse located in Den Hoorn, a town located in the southwest of the Netherlands, a container with 615 kilos of cocainealso attributed to the network of the historic Galician drug trafficker and which he also denies.
The operation resulted in two arrests. And with that, Miñanco and his people would lose 600,000 euros (the amount they had invested). Also the trust of Colombian drug traffickers, drug suppliers, who they demanded proof of the police operation to rule out that the cocaine was in their possession. This, or payment for the merchandise, is included in the summary.
The Colombian Luis Enrique Garcia Arangofriend of Miñanco since they met in the now-defunct Carabanchel prison in the 1980s and whom he considered his right-hand man, allegedly served as an intermediary in the affair and they were worried. “Do you know that they can shoot Quique’s brother and his mother?” the Miñanco couple asked in another intercepted conversation.
Despite this failure, according to the anti-drug prosecution, Miñanco kept “different avenues open to continue the operations”. He also continued to send cash to Colombia with the help of human couriers. And that’s what he did until his arrest. February 5, 2018. Operation Mito, named in his honor, culminated in his downfall.
At his home in Algeciras, he kept a sofa inside 377,320 euros in a plastic bag (we suspect he may have many more hidden) and an iPhone 6 in a TV cabinet drawer. Udyco also seized a payment document, notes on sea speed in boat knots and others related to the pseudonyms he used with his alleged collaborators over the phone. His name was Mario.
When Miñanco returned to the pretrial prison in 2018, he looked older, the passage of years reflected on his face. He was cautious, as usual. And the proof is, recall judicial sources, that in the lining of his jacket he had kept 6,000 euros with which to guarantee a good life behind bars.
The truth is that he knew what it was like to be in prison because since his arrest in 1991 in Madrid, he made prison his home and drug trafficking his way of life. Gone are his beginnings as a glider pilot smuggling tobacco in the Galician estuaries, his jump into hashish or cocaine and money laundering. Those charged with following his footsteps say he was motivated by ambition for easy money, adrenaline and the interest in proving, even in his final stage, that he was still the most important trafficker of drug from Europe, the Spaniard Pablo Escobar. .
“Endless Cadence”
“He did nothing other than be in prison and return there in an endless cadence, as if linked to the wheel of a destiny shared with many other people who also devoted themselves to the same criminal dynamic,” explains a source. “It’s like a kind of inertia that drags them down, without diminishing the responsibility they bear in this choice and the damage they cause to public health and to the thousands of people who are victims of this trafficking.” In the words of the drug prosecutor of the time Ignatius of Lukecollected in his indictment, is the story of a man who “lacked the slightest desire to rehabilitate himself and reintegrate society”. While the judge Marie Tardon He would refer, in his indictment, to his “unbreakable criminal will”.
Alone and on semi-freedom, Miñanco will arrive next Monday, now aged 69, for the trial taking place against him before the National Tribunal for Operation Mito, in which he risks 31 and a half years in prison. to try to introduce four tonnes of cocaine into Spain in 2017, through the Thoran and the Dutch container and to create a business structure for laundering.
Judicial sources explain to ABC that Miñanco denies the facts; The Thoran was not his and he knew nothing about the download in the Netherlands. According to him, the telephone tapping, consented to upon obtaining the third degree, was motivated by the fact that he had a criminal record and that he had met people with criminal backgrounds with whom, he defends himself, he had interacted after spending his entire life in prison. He also claims that unlimited police wiretapping of homes exceeded what was legally allowed.
Alongside Miñanco, fifty alleged collaborators will sit on the bench, who carried out “in an almost reverential manner” what the “boss” demanded. García Arango (aka ‘alan’, ‘the old man’ or ‘the old man’) stands out – his eyes, his voice and his hands, in these meetings, organized in the most varied places (Colmenar Viejo, Pontevedra or Puerto Banús) for the “endless preparations” for the two unsuccessful acquittals, for which the prosecution requested 22 years in prison; Juan Antonio Fernández (alias “Chus”), another of his trusted men – with whom he also participated in drug trafficking operations -, who faces more than 17 years in prison; or Gonzalo Boye, known to be the lawyer of the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont and former defender of Miñanco, accused of money laundering 889,620 euros that the police intervened at Barajas airport. They are asking for nine years for him.
