The municipal elections of April 11, 1931 acted as a true plebiscite between monarchists and anti-monarchists and determined that the country was severely divided. The number of votes was much higher for the anti-monarchist councilors but in terms of the overall number of councilors, the conservative side was higher, although the large cities voted for renewal. All this meant the departure of the king and the proclamation of the second republic. This transcendental change was also due to an exhaustion of the dictatorial management between 1923 and 1930 by Miguel Primo de Rivera. The acquiescence of the monarch that caused him very important personal wear.
Between April 14, 1931 and July 18, 1936, the beginning of the Civil War, there were 20 different republican governments, 11 of which were right-wing and nine left-wing. It was quite common for several governments to last a few months or even a few weeks. There were only two presidents of the republic, first Alcalá Zamora and in 1936, Azaña.
Alejandro Lerroux, born in La Rambla, Córdoba, in 1864, was a politician of modest origins who led a Spanishist and labor movement, as well as anticlerical one. Before, at the end of the century, he had worked in several newspapers as a journalist, such as La Publicidad, until he was fired from it and founded the newspaper El Progreso. Lerroux had great charisma among the working-class emigrant population of Barcelona and was nicknamed the Emperor of the Parallel for his ability to rally and enrage his followers. His first party, Republican Union, was gaining followers among the incipient Catalanism, which made Lerroux abandon it to create the Radical Republican Party, with a clear anti-Catalanist tendency.
At the age of 58, in 1923, he graduated in law from the University of La Laguna (Tenerife). In the same day he obtained several honor certificates.
But the success of the Radical Party is also due to another character with traits common to Lerroux, also charismatic, also of humble origins and with little training. This is Joan Pich i Pon, (Barcelona 1878-Paris 1937), who led the party in Barcelona, ??becoming mayor, commissioner of the Universal Exhibition and undersecretary of the Navy. The link between both characters was undoubtedly the nephew and godson of the first, Aurelio Lerroux Romo de Oca, (1907-1983), who, affiliated with the Radical Party, managed to be a deputy to the Cortes and be a director of important companies. The Radical Party, which had begun its journey as a left-wing alternative, gradually positioned itself on the opposite parliamentary side and used its influence to obtain economic advantages in multiple businesses and especially in those that needed the protection of power.
Pich i Pon bought in the 20s, a beautiful property of 6 hectares in Sant Vicenç de Montalt, then Sant Vicenç de Llavaneres. A property that had belonged to the stockbroker, Marcelino Coll Brugada, on which he had built a three-story mansion in 1909.
Pich i Pon took advantage of the visits of Forestier, the most famous French landscape designer, a disciple of Haussman, which he had to make regularly for the design and execution of the Montjuic gardens, as part of the works for the Universal Exhibition, to landscape his Maresme property. .
Pich i Pon was a pragmatic man, in addition to his political positions, he had numerous businesses. Mainly the Electrical Fluid Company in Barcelona, ??(Pich was an electrician by training). He had to rely on numerous trusted men to be able to attend to contracts and investments that were part of his daily work. Thus, he placed his right-hand man in the electrical company, José Badía, in a property adjacent to his and also Luis Torner, his attorney, in another, also in Sant Vicenç de Montalt.
The Pich i Pon house was a meeting and banquet center as well as a film screening room with the attendance of North American businessmen and actors at these parties. Cinema was a bet for the future for Pich, which the Civil War frustrated.
Alejandro Lerroux also visited the area, as he spent seasons at the Titus hotel, in Arenys de Mar, in an area next to Caldes d’Estrac. Also, of course he visited the mansion of Pich.
There were numerous business projects that came to Pich. One of them was introduced to him by a Dutch Jew named Daniel Strauss. He had invented and patented an electric roulette wheel about 45 centimeters in diameter, covered by glass and with the circumference separated into quadrants. Depending on the quadrant where the ball landed, the number bet was subtracted from the winning number and generated a series that was relatively easy to deduce to win. When the bettor was encouraged and was confident in his winning bet, the dealer activated a button that increased the speed of rotation, which almost certainly broke the deduced series, causing the house to take the prize. This roulette had been patented under the name of its three inventors: STRAUSS, PERLOWITZ and LOWANN. That is, by its initial syllables, STRA PER LO. Strap it.
The game had been banned during the Primo dictatorship and the right thought, since it had risen to power again – now in the Republic – that it was a good time to relaunch it. The first attempts were aimed at a minor permit, such as a parlor game, whose administrative granting was simple as proposed by the Lerroux government. The idea was to place these roulette wheels in the lounges of luxury hotels in the main Spanish cities.
Strauss came to Pich i Pon through Hugo Cyril Kulp Baruch, alias Jack Bilbo, a German, born in 1907, who proclaimed himself to be Al Capone’s former bodyguard, and who lived in Sitges. Strauss explained that he had left Germany because of the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, but the truth is that the roulette wheel had been closed for being fraudulent.
Bilbo organized with the businessman Joaquín Gassa, a boxing evening between the champion Paulino Uzcudun and Max Schmeling, in March 1934, at the Montjuic stadium, presented as a rematch between the Basque and the North American. This evening served to introduce Daniel Strauss to society. Pich i Pon and his business group wanted to provide the Montjuic facilities with tourist and leisure content to give life to what was declining after the 1929 Expo.
Thus, Pich i Pon drew up a contract by which the profit was shared 50/50 with Strauss and his partners. Pich was with Aurelio Lerroux and they should also commission the boxer Uzcudum, the theater promoter Gassa and the journalist Santiago Vinardell with 5% of the profits. There was no talk of Alejandro Lerroux’s participation.
Shortly after, Luis Torner, Pich i Pon’s attorney, modified the contract, leaving aside the three commission agents, leaving Aurelio Lerroux i Pich alone with 50% and the Strauss group with the other 50%. Perhaps it was written in Maresme, after a talk between neighbors. Strauss had advanced a lot of money and jewelry (gold watches) to buy politicians’ wills and facilitate administrative authorizations.
In September 1934, a roulette wheel was installed in the great Casino of San Sebastián. Strauss received news by telephone that the authorization was about to be granted by the Council of Ministers and he decided to start it up. A few hours later the police entered. in the casino and seal the facility. The two groups then decide to opt for the Formentor hotel in Mallorca. In December it begins to operate and the police close the hotel after 3 days.
Strauss returned to Holland, frustrated, wrote to Alejandro Lerroux, then president of the government, and asked him to pay him compensation for the expenses incurred. Lerroux does not even answer him, because he knows that there is no signature of his on the contracts and that the possible shock wave will not reach him. Strauss then commissions lawyer Henri Torres to prepare a complaint with all the documentation and the people involved. Meanwhile, Pich i Pon and Aurelio Lerroux return an amount of money to Strauss’s lawyer that he considers insufficient.
The government receives Torres’ complaint but decides to do nothing. The socialist Indalecio Prieto, at that time exiled between Paris and Ostend to flee from some revolutionary accusations being processed by the Lerroux government, finds out and manages to contact Strauss and convinces Azaña to meet with Stauss. In the summer of 1935, Azaña met with Strauss at the Carlton Hotel in The Hague (Netherlands). A few days later, Lerroux’s government, on September 25, 1935, entered into crisis and Lerroux himself resigned as president, assuming the state portfolio (foreign affairs) and Joaquín Chapaprieta becoming head of government.
Then the news circulates that Azaña is going to give a big meeting and explain the Strauss case, Chapaprieta goes ahead and presents the dossier to the Prosecutor’s Office, and parliament opens a commission to determine responsibilities. On October 28, 1935, the commission of 21 parliamentarians from all parties came to the conclusion that the list of those involved, all from the Radical party, had acted criminally. It is revealed that Aurelio Lerroux has registered several patents for different inventions, Chapaprieta remodels the government by removing Lerroux and other radicals, but it is not enough. The scandal is advancing at a full gallop and a clean slate must be made, so on December 14, 1935, the President of the Republic, Alcalá-Zamora, entrusts the government to Portela Valladares and suspends Parliament until January 1, 1936. It can be said that the Radical party and its members were extinct at that time, on December 30, 1935, Portela remade the government again, the president dissolved the Cortes and announced elections for February 16. It will be the victory of the Popular Front and to a large extent the accelerator of the coup d’état and the Civil War.
The legal case against Lerroux and his men from the Radical party will be archived due to lack of consistency, but the war is already underway. Lerroux fled to Lisbon on July 17 from his estate in the Guadarrama mountain range. He returned to Spain in ’47 and ultimately embraced the Catholic faith, dying two years later.
Pich i Pon flees to Paris where he will die in 1937. Aurelio Lerroux Romo de Oca, who will continue to have judicial problems in the 1950s, will die in Madrid in 1983.
The word ESTRAPPERLO has remained in the Spanish lexicon as a scam, smuggling, illegal business. Specifically, the DRAE says: “Illegal trade in items intervened by the State or subject to tax. Synonym of smuggling, smuggler, fraud…”
Strauss made a big mistake with his trick roulette. When a secret involves more than one person, it ceases to be a secret. The approach of needing an accomplice in each machine made this fraudulent business unviable.
Historical coincidence, Manuel Azaña, being president of the Republic, in 1938 requisitioned the Pich i Pon house in Sant Vicenç de Montalt. As an anecdotal fact, Azaña’s paternal grandmother was from Arenys de Mar. She settled in Pich’s house in the summer of 1938, but without leaving the Salvans family house in Matadepera, she had a 70-meter air-raid shelter built with two tickets, which he had to use a night of aerial bombardment and from there he marched to the Perelada castle, as a preliminary step to the definitive exile, it was January 1939. In those turbulent dates no one knew where the President spent the night, his houses were full of security guards. security and the entry and exit of cars with curtains on the windows, did not allow the occupants to be distinguished.
