Francisco Marco, former director of the Method 3 detective agency, during an appearance at the Parliament in 2015 in Barcelona. Carles Ribas
At 4:33 p.m. on September 11, 2018, the paparazzi Gustavo González grabs his mobile phone to send a battery of WhatsApp messages to Francisco Marco, a well-known Barcelona detective, an investigator for the extinct Method 3 agency. “Remind Enrique that tomorrow he starts school and it would be important to start now”, writes the gossip reporter, the epicenter of the so-called
Sálvame Deluxe case
, where he is accused of obtaining personal information from dozens of citizens, many of them famous, through the police officer Ángel Fernández Hita, who accessed confidential databases.
More information
'Operation Save Me Deluxe': the case of the policeman who passed information to a paparazzi
At that time, as reflected by the Police in the summary, González and her partner, the former porn actress María Pasqual,
María Lapiedra
, want to know more details about the life of Marc Amigo Amargo, her ex-husband.
"Maria claims to have certain problems, with legal complaints involved, with her ex-partner, the father of her daughters," explain the investigators of
the Sálvame case
.
So they commission some detectives to "monitor" Amigo Amargo, "for the issue of custody of the girls," they add;
and they emphasize that the journalist then provided Marco with confidential information, such as license plate numbers, which he had obtained irregularly through the police officer Fernández Hita.
“You never have to start just when school starts,” Francisco Marco replied to the paparazzi at 4:36 p.m. on that September 11, 2018. “You have to let it adapt and start a week, 10 days later.
At first you will be attentive to children.
Listen to me.
We talk tomorrow and we coordinate things well to start on September 20.
I will need: pictures [of the] children and names;
father's address and photos;
ditto [of the] grandparents;
cars etc
and anything”.
The name of Francisco Marco —which hit rock bottom a decade ago, when he was arrested in 2013 for an alleged espionage case against Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, then leader of the Catalan PP, which ended up shelved— thus returns to the front line and sprouts in a summary that has revolutionized gossip television in recent months after its content was made public, which includes the popular program
Sálvame
, its production company (La Fábrica de la Tele), its network (Telecinco) and its communication group (Mediaset) .
Contacted by EL PAÍS, the detective explains that his presence in these investigations is accidental.
That he, a "friend" of Gustavo González, limited himself to putting the couple in contact with another detective, Enrique Muñoz, and that he never knew that the information the reporter gave him came from Fernández Hita.
“I did not know that man, the policeman,” insists Marco, 49, who came to testify before the judge as a witness on January 23, 2019. “I did not receive any commission from Gustavo referring to any private investigation,” he repeated. that day to the magistrate.
Tandem Operation
Francisco Marco and Method 3, an agency founded by his mother in the eighties of the last century, have walked the razor's edge for decades.
They have delved into some of the darkest cases in the recent history of Spain.
In 2004, they rose to fame for participating in the search for and location of Francisco Paesa, the spy who was investigated by the GAL and who fled after faking his own death.
Also, in addition to working for different political parties, they dedicated themselves to looking for the hidden money of Juan Antonio Roca, the brain of
the Malaya case
of corruption in Marbella.
Their success even earned them the parents of the girl Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in 2007 in the Portuguese Algarve, to hire their services.
But everything was blown up with the arrest in 2013 of four senior members of Method 3. The agency ended up closing, according to Francisco Marco on April 7, when he appeared in the first trial currently being held at the National Court against retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, one of his declared enemies.
"Villarejo sought my destruction," he stated during his testimony as a witness.
“Villarejo must have some kind of enmity with my family because, in the 1990s, my mother investigated him in the case of an insurance company fraud.
Villarejo asked my mother not to put her name.
But my mother refused, and she explained who Mr. Villarejo was.
So Villarejo swore to persecute my family, ”Francisco Marco assured the court prosecuting the case, where he is in person as a victim of the illegal activities of the former National Police agent.
He has also written a book about it.
In fact, the summary of Operation Tandem, focused on the retired commissioner, is precisely another of the issues that has returned Marco to the front line.
On June 9, 2020, the detective stood up at the Police to denounce that he knew of a person who was selling information that Villarejo, then in prison, had "treasured in recent years."
His alert caused the opening of a new line of investigation that ended with the dismantling of the alleged plot hatched by Villarejo from prison to sell police documents, some of them subject to the official secrets law.
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