“Doesn’t the court believe that much of the conversation was a lie?” It turns out that according to the controversial former Police Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, who has turned politics and even the Monarchy upside down from the Ibex, for doing shenanigans with some and with others, it was all the product of a farce, of a created character. It’s been Donnie Brasco for decades.
“Joe Pistone’s life is the true reality of Villarejo.” This is how the former commissioner’s lawyer has defended him, who has drawn him as a patriot who has fought against the mafia and corruption, as Pistone did.
The life of this FBI agent has served for several film scripts. A real life transferred to the big screen. His deed was not for less. For a decade he was undercover under the identity of Donnie Brasco. He posed as a jewel thief until he managed to get into one of the mob families that ruled New York in the 70’s, the Bonannos.
He rose to become a high rank in this crime family. His work earned the FBI more than a hundred federal convictions and dismantled the New York mafia, responsible for drug trafficking, murder and extortion in the city.
For Pistone it had its consequences. His wife and his children had to live with fictitious identities ever since. For the lawyer, Villarejo is Pistone and he was Brasco when he recorded the conversations that are now coming to light as a kind of warning to navigators.
It is not what the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office thinks, which requests 86 years in prison for him. More than a selfless agent who risked his life to fight against mafias, murderers, terrorists and criminals, what the prosecutors maintain is that he took advantage of his condition as a police officer for his benefit and personal enrichment, selling confidential information to third parties: “a person who , wrapped under the flag of the patriot that he likes so much and under the smoke of a language, coarse, homophobic, sexist and if you want a little gothic, what he hides is the corrupt police officer, “said the prosecutors in their report exposed to early this month.
For this reason, for his lawyer, Villarejo must be acquitted in the first of the thirty trials he will face. The lawyer believes that a “manipulated and biased” account of the former commissioner, arrested in November 2017 and sent to preventive detention for more than three years, has been offered.
This was stated during the report of final conclusions defended by the lawyer during the hearing that has been held for months at the National Court and that is already coming to an end. Villarejo was present yesterday. Next to his lawyer. Undaunted. Dark suit, eye patch and holding his hands through the pads. At 71 years old, he risks spending the rest of his life in prison.
His thesis is that it is all a lie. “This smells like it sucks, ladies and gentlemen,” snapped the lawyer, who limited himself to defending that the jobs go to the well-to-do Cereceda family; the contract with a law firm to spy on a rival; or the efforts made for the businessman Juan Muñoz, husband of the television presenter Ana Rosa Quintana to extort money from a lawyer, it was all for Spain, work ordered by the National Intelligence Center (CNI). “This is not a trial, it is a firing squad,” lamented the lawyer.
Villarejo feels Pistone, but there is no evidence that his work has served to imprison terrorists or gangsters. But as his lawyer defends, his work was so secret that nobody or almost nobody knew what he was doing. Like Pistone’s, “which only a handful of FBI agents knew about.”
For Villarejo, all the hours of recordings he kept in his house of all the conversations he had with characters of all kinds have been his Achilles heel. For years, he thought they were a safe conduct to keep uncomfortable judges, prosecutors or police officers at bay. But now, once his business is uncovered, it is difficult to deny certain businesses, meetings and conversations.
But Villarejo always has a way out. What he says now is that the Villarejo of the recordings is not the real Villarejo, but a mere actor, an undercover agent and he said whatever it took to do his police work. And that was known by the ten interior ministers for whom he worked. “Where are they?” lamented the lawyer, who warned the Chamber that all the “friends” of the former commissioner have disappeared from his side. “Approaching Villarejo is personal destruction and nobody wants that in life,” he snapped.
