The Red Book of Poachers

In the book, a kind of “registry or diary with reddish covers”, the taxidermist wrote down, in a non-exhaustive manner, “the names, surnames, or nicknames” of his clients, the animals that received them and the place where that they had been hunted, recalls an agent from the Seprona de Ávila, the nature protection service of the Civil Guard.

Just a few days earlier, last May, the same agent had overheard a conversation between hunters in a bar who were talking about taking "a series of illegally hunted pieces" to a taxidermist in Móstoles (Madrid).

And even there he moved with his team.

In a dilapidated and dirty industrial warehouse, next to the red book, they found 13 roe deer trophies, a wolf skull, a freezer with non-native species (nanday parrot) pending taxidermy,

four trophies of male ibex and 123 hunting seals (labels on which the species killed and the date of hunting are marked).

Of the seals seized, most of them had been tampered with.

They called it Operation Ro3buk.

In that client registry book, obtained by the taxidermist after decades of work dedicated to dissecting animals in legal companies, in which he became a benchmark in the world of taxidermy, appeared names of illustrious people from the Spanish aristocracy such as Alonso Álvarez de Toledo y Urquijo, Marquis of Valdueza and owner of important hunting reserves in Spain, and his nephew Gonzalo Ciriaco Vicente-Mazariegos;

Juan José Franco y de Suelves, one of Franco's great-grandsons and manager of hunting reserves;

the businesswoman and owner of a well-known armory in Madrid, Beatriz Fernández de Córdoba Ruiz de Ocejo, as reported on Wednesday by

.

The taxidermist "did not collaborate", but a total of 23 people, including lawyers, bank employees and businessmen, were discovered thanks to the annotations in that red notebook and subsequent checks by Seprona agents in the corresponding delegations hunting provinces.

They are charged with crimes of false documents, against flora, fauna and domestic animals (poaching), cover-up, reception and criminal group.

“What they did was tamper with the seals, a kind of bridle that is mandatory to put on the animals once they have been hunted and in accordance with the permits that have been established for hunting grounds after the mandatory hunting studies of each place, for example, in Burgos or Soria, a seal to hunt a roe deer can be around 2,000 euros”, the researchers explain.

"That is, each preserve has an assigned number of seals, but what those involved in this plot did was use the same seal for several animals in cahoots with the taxidermist," they add.

That way they could hunt more animals for a lower price.

The taxidermist, who can charge between 60 and 100 euros to dissect a roe deer skull, agreed to do his work, even to animals without a seal, the agents say.

His "business" was in an illegal situation,

lacking an environmental license.

He was not registered as self-employed with Social Security, nor registered with the Department of the Environment of the Community of Madrid, nor was he up to date with payments with the Treasury.

The investigations of the Seprona agents determined that 60 preserves distributed throughout the provinces of Castilla y León, Extremadura and Aragón, together with those of the provinces of Guadalajara, Albacete, Toledo, Málaga, Castellón, Tarragona, Madrid, including the Regional Reserves of Hunting of Castilla y León and Aragón, had been affected.

And, although the taxidermist's workshop has been closed and sealed, there are still a dozen entries in that unidentified red book.

Pulling the same thread and following the same pattern, Seprona agents have investigated another 74 people for trying to give legality in a Burgos taxidermy to 258 animals (roe deer, fallow deer and deer) hunted irregularly.

They have baptized it as Operation Corcyl and among those investigated are, in addition to two taxidermists, hunters and managers of hunting reserves.