«He tells me, with his own serenity that he has shown me in this matter, two things that have been fulfilled: One, that the worst is going to be friendly fire. and two, what we will not reach the other side together From the shore”. The prosecutor Ignacio Stampa, who in the spring of 2017 was commissioned to investigate the retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, recalls in this way one of the first conversations about the case that he would have with who was his partner in the investigations and who is still in the currently in charge of the so-called Tandem case, Miguel Serrano.
And he does it for Álvaro de Cózar and Eva Lamarca, the journalists in charge of the podcast ‘El País de los Demonios’ that will premiere this Tuesday on Spotify, a ten-chapter portrait with Stampa as the common thread to gut the origin of the Tandem case and raise a question critical reflection on the high cost of investigating what has been called «the sewers of the State». He, as is known, did not renew his position in Anticorruption and thus lost the position and the reins of the case in October 2020, in the midst of a bitter controversy over the decision that depended on the then State Attorney General Dolores Delgado.
“All the people who have investigated Villarejo, in the end, have fallen,” reflects De Cózar in statements to ABC. He focuses on Stampa, “how the system commissions an investigation and then it is the system itself who lets it fall», but also in the first group of Internal Affairs that focused on the commissioner, with Marcelino Martín Blas and Rubén Eladio at the helm, or the «emblematic case» that in his opinion constitutes that of Jaime Barrado, the commissioner who opened proceedings for the attack on the dermatologist Elisa Pinto and ended up being reviled. “He’s been through too many times,” he comments.
As he explains, it is no longer just a matter of the “friendly fire” that Stampa referred to, but that the prosecutors in the Tandem case are “in a perfect storm.” Thus, he rejects that there was a single conspiracy, a single black hand, “but a confluence of interests in which, in the end, it is dropped” because, he says, they were “in the wrong place and at the wrong time.”
The key, in his opinion, is that “Spain is a country of gossip, where everything is told in a low voice” and Villarejo, “did well” in that world, where “everything is recorded” and yet nothing ends up being transparent. And the prosecutor, in this context, ends up being “a person who has suffered.” “Now is the time to tell the story from his version, not just his version of the story,” adds the journalist.
The safe and the “demons”
During the prologue and the first two chapters, to which ABC had early access, the production focuses on reconstructing the birth of the case, with the pseudo-anonymous complaint filed by computer scientist David Vidal, the change of head of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and the entries and searches in the Villarejo premises, for which they use what was declared in the trial of the commissioner in the National Court by the head of the investigative police team.
Also that moment in which they found a safe full of storage media that, in the end, were going to constitute the entire arsenal of audios and reports from the commissioner: «The key was when the safe in the living room opens, which opens and there was such a large amount of computer equipment, cassettes and things, that you say ‘it’s true, it’s not a legend, it’s true that it’s been recording everything for forty years,’” Stampa says in the podcast. And from there, a question that has inspired the title of the podcast: “Are we going to let all the demons out of a country?” says De Cózar.
Up to 36 pieces opened later in the National Court and rivers of ink with material from the commissioner seem to outline an answer. But it will be a weekly episode and until April 18 when Stampa and the two journalists reach their own conclusions.
