The National Police has dismantled a criminal group specialized in robbing footballers’ homes. The group was made up of six members, three of whom are already in prison.
Among the affected footballers is the Real Madrid player, Rodrygo, and the Colombian forward of the Rayo Vallecano Radamel Falcao, among others. The jewels were then sold in a gold sales establishment, located on Montera Street in Madrid.
Eight robberies in the homes of famous athletes committed since July 2022 are attributed to this group of alleged thieves, most of whom are Moroccan nationals.
The robberies have been carried out in homes located in Alcobendas, Pozuelo de Alarcón, Torrelodones and Madrid.
To choose their objectives, they resorted to social networks, studying photographs and videos that the athletes and their entourage published from inside their homes. Among those arrested are the two perpetrators, three collaborators and the recipient of the stolen effects.
In the house in Alcobendas, possibly in La Moraleja, they stole jewelry and watches worth more than 500,000 euros. And in Aravaca, in Falcao’s home, they detained the housekeeper while they took the loot.
The investigation of the so-called ‘Operation Cartuja’ focused on a robbery committed last May 2023 at the home of the Real Madrid player, Rodrygo, in Alcobendas, where they managed to steal effects worth approximately 500,000 euros. among which high-end watches and pieces of jewelry stood out.
In this case, the agents managed to locate three men at the scene of the events, who managed to access the house after jumping a fence, subsequently fleeing in a vehicle.
Police investigations related this robbery to a failed attempt, in that same home, perpetrated ten months earlier, on this occasion by two individuals who fled after being surprised by a worker.
By relating both events, the investigators managed to identify one of the two vehicles, focusing the investigation on its owner, her romantic partner and another man.
The analysis of the movements of these three people managed to link the events in Alcobendas with another robbery, in this case with violence or intimidation, committed in Falcao’s home in the Madrid district of Aravaca, in which the perpetrators even detained a housekeeper while they got their loot. In this case, to arrive and flee from the home they used a stolen car and a motorcycle with a modified license plate.
The progress of the investigation managed to identify the collaborators who provided the two alleged perpetrators with information on possible targets. All of them were people with high purchasing power who lived in single-family homes located in exclusive urbanizations in the Community of Madrid.
Thanks to this information, the police presence was reinforced in sensitive points and new robberies were thwarted in towns such as Pozuelo de Alarcón and Torrelodones.
Likewise, the agents tracked some of the stolen effects and identified a man who ran an establishment dedicated to the purchase and sale of precious metals in Madrid as the recipient of the same, thus collaborating as the last link in the criminal group.
As the investigations progressed, those investigated began to adopt more security measures, using a multitude of telephone lines and vehicles to make police work more difficult. For this reason, on February 13, a device was created for his arrest, with four entries and searches in the municipalities of Escalona (Toledo), Sotillo de la Adrada (Ávila), Lozoya (Madrid) and in the Madrid capital itself.
In this operation, the six members of the criminal group were arrested – five men and one woman – and ten watches, various pieces of jewelry, more than 3,300 euros in cash and two compressed air pistols were seized, among other items.
Those arrested were placed at the disposal of the judicial authority as alleged perpetrators of eight crimes of robbery with force, a robbery with violence or intimidation, document falsification, receipt and money laundering, as well as membership in a criminal group. This decreed the provisional imprisonment of three of them, the two alleged perpetrators and one of their collaborators.
They tracked social networks and completed the information to choose their targets. This criminal group used the audiovisual content that the athletes themselves, their families or people around them published on social networks, showing some of the highly valuable effects they had on their homes, as well as their spatial distribution and location, and even reporting when they were absent from their homes.
This information was subsequently contrasted and completed on the spot by members of the criminal group, who visited the interested homes to carry out checks on the security systems installed and the viability of access to them, demonstrating a high degree of professionalism.
