This text belongs to ‘Dossier Negro’, a newsletter inspired by the podcast of the same name, which Enrique Figueredo will send on Wednesdays on a biweekly basis. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
Criminal history, and Spanish history is no exception, is dotted with cases in which a criminal on the run becomes public enemy number one to be defeated by the police forces. The need to find a criminal, whose misdeeds appear on the front pages of newspapers and the main headlines of radio and television news, becomes so pressing in certain cases that controversies arise that reach the political arena. A clear example of the latter was the disappearance of the general director of the Civil Guard, Luis Roldán, in 1994, when accusations of embezzlement and bribery weighed against him. This flight from justice – 10 months later he was located and detained abroad – cost the then Minister of the Interior, Antonio Asunción, his job. The case of Rambo de Requena, who fled in the mountains of Teruel, armed and potentially dangerous, could have led to something similar, except that the armed institute managed to arrest him, but not without one of the agents being wounded by a shotgun at the hands of Pedro Lozano. We tell it in Dossier Negro.
Another notorious case of escape abroad was that of Dioni, a security guard turned Cheli thief who took all the money from an armored van he was guarding and went to Brazil. Like Roldán, he finally fell into the hands of justice. The smart guy from Dioni, with whom I had a long talk in a cafeteria in Madrid, was a friend of other people’s affairs, but not a type of risk taker.
Cruel and dangerous. The case of Manuel Brito and Francisco Javier Picatoste, two prisoners who escaped from the Ponent prison in Lleida in 2001, was the paradigmatic case of two unscrupulous criminals who, during the time they were hiding in the mountains of Barcelona, committed murders and sexual assaults. . I remember the day of the arrests seeing Picatoste arrive at the police station with a bloodied face after the clash with the police force at the hideout of both outlaws. The photograph shows that moment.
Armed revenge. A former security guard barricaded himself in a shed in a farmhouse in Riudoms (Tarragona). He took cover armed after having opened fire on three colleagues from his former company, wounding one of them seriously. A police officer was also wounded by a gunshot. Finally, the special forces of the regional police surrounded him and stormed the cabin. The fugitive was shot several times, but he survived. The events occurred in December 2021.
Acid cowardice. After a dangerous chase along Malaga roads, the Civil Guard managed to arrest a man suspected of having sprayed acid on the face of her ex-girlfriend and that of a friend who was accompanying her. Known as Melillero, the fugitive spent three days with the police force on his heels until he fell into the hands of the armed institute, as did five other people from his family circle and the criminal clan to which he belonged.
The hostage letter. The pursuit of a fugitive becomes much more dangerous if the suspect flees taking with him a hostage with whom he intends to dissuade law enforcement from eventually arresting him. In a masterful way, Clint Eastwood captured that assumption in his film A Perfect World. The relationship between the outlaw and the person being held – a child – becomes one of strange interdependence.