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 La Mina neighborhood. The head of the investigating court 4 and dean of Badalona, ??Josep Maria Noales, attends from a corner of the meeting room the latest instructions from those responsible for the operation. The corporal in charge of the two Arro teams that will carry out the assault on the home remembers the protocol. They keep it very present. They were already at number 30 Calle Marte a couple of weeks ago. On that occasion 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. So much so that this time, the police delegation led by the policemen who will carry out the assault, followed by the investigation unit, a pair of toilets from the Servei d’Emergències Mèdiques (SEM) and two Endesa inspectors, just have to cross the back street of the police building. The magistrate and the lawyer of the administration of justice of his court close the procession.
It is the first time that the mossos have broken down door four on the ninth floor. As they expect, there is no one inside.
“With few exceptions, it is the pattern that we are finding. Small plantations, divided into several rooms and whose caretakers visit once a day to check that it is in order”, the corporal in charge of the mossos of the Sant Adrià investigation unit details to La Vanguardia. Last week, however, from one of the two floors they entered on Calle Llevant, a woman and a small child suddenly ran out of them. They slept on a mattress in the corridor and barely had a bathroom and a small kitchen. They weren’t even paid to be there. The mafia responsible for the plantation let them live in that place so as not to arouse suspicion.
The marijuana boom is reaching enormous dimensions and in this small and unique neighborhood of the Barcelona metropolitan area its incidence is dramatic. It is recounted by the dean Josep Maria Noales, at the head of the judicial committee that yesterday agreed to the house. “This neighborhood provides the mafias with empty apartments that nobody claims and that are increasingly profitable as a plantation,” he says.
This time it is a house owned by a 71-year-old woman who has not been located. Her last tenant left all her belongings, which the traffickers piled haphazardly in the kitchen and part of the hall.
Whoever lived there painted, and did it piecemeal because on top of an old built-in sofa in front of the stove, a mountain of unframed canvases rests under the dust. Some have been saved, such as the portrait of a minor, who could well be the author’s granddaughter. They have respected a large paella pan hanging from what must have been a wood stove.
The plantation occupies the two old rooms and part of a dining room whose wall has been haphazardly removed. To the point that this third space is so precarious that the traffickers had stopped planting, for fear that the roof would collapse on them. In fact, the judge ordered the municipal police and the City Council technician to be notified; and just as the entourage was leaving the apartment, part of the false ceiling collapsed.
For some time now, the Mossos d’Esquadra have managed to find new systems to detect marijuana crops in flats. It’s about innovating and trying to outsmart the dealers, without figuring out the systems of how they do it. At the moment it works for them. Although the most common is the measurement of amps, the power of light that marks the suspicious floor and that is outrageous in relation to the consumption of any family in summer. The reading that the police had carried out the previous days in that house exceeded 100 amps, when the consumption in summer of a normal family does not exceed 12 with the air conditioners at full blast.
Over time, traffickers have also perfected their systems for connecting to the electrical network by hiding the connections. In the apartment on Calle Marte there were two connections. One directly above the stair counter and one underground, hidden under the landing tiles.
“If you go down the stairs, you will see how the tiles are missing. They rip them out to replace the ones that break to make the connections to the electrical line”, shows one of the policemen.
Despite the noise of blows, hammering and racket, not a single one of the neighbors dared to stick their heads out to ask or chatter about what was happening. So that? In the Mine, judicial entries in floors dedicated to marijuana plantations have become our daily bread. Only the Sant Adrià Mossos have made 27 judicial entries since April 11. All positive. That is, one planting per week. In all there were plants. Yesterday, they counted 305 plants that one of the agents measured to incorporate into his report.
Yesterday’s was not a particularly well-kept plantation. In two or three weeks it was going to be harvested. After the act, of which the justice lawyer takes good note, and the green light from the Endesa technicians confirming that they have cut off the electricity supply, the mossos destroy all the material on the spot. The judge authorizes it in his order. “All this, lights, air conditioners, fans, is an instrument of crime, but taking it to the police station is not necessary. That is why its destruction is authorized because it is only useful for this type of plantation”.
