When Emilio Sánchez hung up the phone he could hardly believe what he had heard. An unknown voice, from a hidden number, had just threatened him: if he did not hand over the amount of 500 million pesetas – the euro would enter circulation on January 1, 2002 -, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario would be kidnapped. It happened between the end of November and the beginning of December 2001. The message was short but very clear, although they did not tell him when or where to make that delivery.
Weeks later, Emilio received another call from the same unknown caller with an identical message. In an unspecified period they would send him precise instructions to hand over that money in exchange for not causing harm to his daughter. He couldn’t recognize the caller’s voice or discern whether it was a prank call or a scammer: that winter of 2001 wasn’t the first time he’d gotten calls like that. How someone was able to find out the number of a relatively unknown person, without a phone tap or access to their personal data held by the company, was a question that Emilio would ask himself many times four months later. This is how a source of total solvency explains it to this newspaper.
Arantxa’s father had not forgotten the sinister calls, but he had pushed them out of his immediate horizon when the envelope arrived. It was April 2002. A consignment in his name that he received at the old family home, located in Sabino Arana street in Barcelona, ??still owned by the Sánchez Vicarios. It was an envelope delivered by FedEx with a stamp from Bogota (Colombia), the contents of which froze his blood: a series of photographs showed an exhaustive follow-up of the tennis player in different places in Barcelona from June to November of the previous year. Emilio himself and his wife, Marisa Vicario, in addition to Arantxa’s coach and other people from his closest circle, also appeared in the snapshots. The report was accompanied by a folio with a chilling sentence: “We’re all having fun here and we’ll talk about what it will cost later. See you later, Mr. Sánchez”. That’s when he really got scared.
That spring of 2002, Arantxa’s situation was as follows: the previous summer she had separated from her first husband, the sports journalist Joan Vehils, whose wedding – held in July 2000 – was attended by more of 600 guests and first-level personalities, including the then president José María Aznar. He had already forged his legend as a tennis player and although he would not win another major title after 1998, his last Roland Garros, he continued to compete in WTA tournaments: Miami, Doha, Helsinki, Tokyo… In fact , he would retire in November of that year to return in 2004 and participate in the Athens Games. He was still a star. It was then that her conflict with the Treasury erupted: in February 2001 she was sentenced in the first instance to pay 3.5 million to the tax authorities for the years 1989 to 1993. Anyone who read a newspaper could infer that Arantxa was a millionaire and , therefore a target for a gang of criminals.
Emilio weighed what he should do, mainly whether to tell his wife and children, including Arantxa herself. He preferred not to worry them and shoulder the responsibility of fighting the threat on his own. As a manager of the interests of an athlete of that stature, he had resources and contacts. He moved threads and brought the case to the attention of the Government Delegation in Barcelona, ??whose head at the time was Julia García-Valdecasas. From that stratum down, things moved quickly. Emilio Sánchez explained to a high official of the National Police what had happened, from the first call to the receipt of that envelope with the sample of the follow-up to his daughter. In addition to being afraid of the body, it was extremely disconcerting to him that an anonymous criminal could know the full address of what was the family home (street, gate and flat), as well as that they had found out his mobile number.
“The case came to us, but it was passed to Group 1 of Organized Crime. That was many years ago, but without a doubt it came to nothing: extortion attempts like that were quite frequent at that time”, a command of the National Police tells La Vanguardia. And whether it was by chance or because the criminals got scared, there were no more calls and no more threatening letters arrived.
