The appointment is at seven in the morning at the Mossos d’Esquadra police station in Sant Adrià de Besòs, in the heart of the Mina district. The head of the court of inquiry 4 and dean of Badalona, ??Josep Maria Noales, attends from a corner of the meeting room the last instructions of those responsible for the operation. The corporal in charge of the two ARRO teams that will storm the home remembers the protocol. They are very present. They were there a couple of weeks ago at number 30 Carrer Mart. That time, the marijuana plantations were on the eighth floor, and this time the target is on the top floor.
The good thing about the Mine is that you walk there. So much so that, this time, the police entourage led by the policemen who will carry out the assault, followed by the investigation unit, a pair of paramedics from the Medical Emergency Service (EMS) and two inspectors from Endesa, only has to cross the street behind the police building. The procession is closed by the magistrate and the lawyer from the court’s administration of justice.
It is the first time that the police have brought down door four of the ninth floor. As expected, there is no one inside.
“Without exceptions, this is the pattern we are in. Small plantations, distributed in several rooms and whose caretakers visit once a day to check that it is in order”, the corporal in charge of the police of the investigation unit of Sant Adrià explains to La Vanguardia. Last week, however, a woman and a small child suddenly ran out of one of the two flats they accessed on Carrer Llevant. They slept on a mattress in the hallway and barely had a bathroom and a bit of a kitchen. They weren’t even paid to be there. The mafia responsible for the plantation let them live in the place so as not to raise suspicions.
The marijuana boom is reaching enormous proportions and in the small and singular neighborhood of the metropolitan area of ??Barcelona the incidence is dramatic. Dean Josep Maria Noales tells it, at the head of the judicial entourage that accesses the house on Tuesday. “This neighborhood provides mafias with empty flats that no one claims and which are increasingly profitable as plantations”, he says.
This time, it is a home of a 71-year-old woman who has not been located. The last tenant left all their belongings there, which the traffickers piled in any way they could in the kitchen and part of the hall.
Whoever lived there painted, and did it bravely, because on top of an old built-in sofa in front of the stove rests a mountain of unframed canvases under the dust. Some have been saved, like the portrait of a minor, who could well be the author’s granddaughter. They have respected a large frying pan hanging from what must have been a wood stove.
The plantation occupies the two old rooms and part of a dining room in which the wall has been removed in any way. To the point that the third space is so precarious that traffickers had stopped planting for fear that the roof would fall on them. In fact, the judge ordered to notify the municipal police and the City Council technician; and just as the entourage was leaving the flat, part of the false ceiling collapsed.
For some time the Mossos d’Esquadra have been trying to find new systems to detect marijuana crops in flats. It’s about innovating and trying to be more skilled than the traffickers, without discovering the systems they use. It works for them at the moment. Despite the fact that the most common is the measurement of amperes, the light power that marks the suspicious floor and which is barbaric in relation to the consumption of any family in the summer. The reading that the police had done the previous day in the house exceeded 100 amperes, when the consumption in the summer of a normal family does not exceed 12 with the air conditioners on full blast.
Over time, the traffickers have also perfected the systems of hooking the electrical network by hiding the junctions. There were two connections on the Mart Street floor. One above directly on the counter of the stairs and one underground, hidden under the tiles of the landing.
“If you go down the stairs, you will see that tiles are missing. They start them to replace the ones they break to make the junctions in the power line”, says one of the policemen.
Despite the barrage of banging, hammering and shouting, not a single neighbor dared to poke his head out to ask or gossip about what was going on. for what In La Mina, judicial entries in flats dedicated to the cultivation of marijuana have become our daily bread. Only the Mossos de Sant Adrià have made, since April 11, 27 court entries. All positive. That is, one planting every week. There were plants in all of them. On Tuesday, they counted 305 plants, which one of the agents measured to incorporate into the report.
Tuesday’s was not a particularly well-maintained plantation. In two or three weeks they would have picked it up. After the minutes, of which the lawyer takes good note, and the approval of the Endesa technicians who confirm that they have cut off the light supply, the police destroy all the material on the site. It is authorized by the judge at the interlocutory hearing. “All this, lights, air conditioners, fans, is an instrument of the crime, but taking it to the police station is not necessary. For this reason, its destruction is authorized because it is only used for this type of plantation”.
