Andromeda is a cannibal galaxy that devours everything near it.
That is what the police assure that Antonia and Miguel, the leading couple of the Los Saavedra clan, had done, whom they accuse of having occupied the gap left by the previous drug cartels in Madrid in two years, all of them greatly diminished. for police action.
In their case, they were not devoured, but rather absorbed, because they included in their structure members who already worked with the disgraced clans.
They even bought the plot of one of them to be able to sell their merchandise from a strategic location.
That is why the police named the operation Andromeda that way, in which on March 23 they arrested 24 of its members, of whom 11 have been sent to pretrial detention.
Its territory was the Cañada Real,
Habitual point of pilgrimage for those looking for their dose, who cross bridges, roads and cover the kilometers that are necessary in search of their drug.
They offered their products on signs like those in supermarkets.
"Here are good joints," read one of them.
A farm with a house and an interior corral acted as a hypermarket for his products: cocaine, heroin and marijuana.
The place was an "all inclusive" point of sale, place of consumption called smokehouse, and parking.
There were also doormen, drug addicts who were paid in doses by the clan to control who entered and who did not.
"In that area of La Cañada, either you are a consumer, or you are in security work for the cartels, or you are a police officer," sums up the main investigator of this operation, carried out by the Zonal Investigation Operational Group (GOIZ).
In addition, it was in a privileged point, the first to access sector 6 of the Cañada Real and they had bought it from Los Kikos, the previous drug lords.
"Among consumers, their reputation for having a good product had been cemented," stresses the researcher.
In that house, the key room was
the bunker
, baptized like that by the agents for obvious reasons.
It was the place where they kept the drugs they were going to sell that day, they made between two and three trips a day to supply it.
In the surveillance, the agents came to verify up to 500 clients in the same day.
To get to that room without ventilation, you had to go through four armored doors and two iron bars.
Inside, in addition to the drugs, there was a stove burning permanently, regardless of the weather outside, to lock himself in if the police arrived and destroy all possible evidence.
Narcotics and tickets.
In fact, they did so when the operation that took them to jail was deployed, although not completely.
The agents searched through the ashes and intervened several bills eaten away by fire and also cocaine, which had ceased to be white.
The couple who pulled the strings did not set foot in La Cañada, they controlled the business from their chalet in the Madrid municipality of Morata de Tajuña, 40 minutes away by car.
They were arrested there at six in the morning.
They had built and filled their private paradise with a walk-in closet with hundreds of brand-name sneakers, piggy banks full of bills stuck in the dishwasher, and jewelry of all kinds.
Among them, a pendant with diamonds in the shape of a submachine gun and several necklaces and bracelets in the shape of a bear from a well-known brand.
But most of the money and drugs were not found there, but in hiding places inside their vehicles with coves, as holes are called to hide something, scattered throughout Madrid.
“We have requisitioned several cars, but they may have more.
It is a very safe method, you hide the drugs or the bills in holes, you park it at any point and only when you need it do you go for it, to pay for a flat for example”, explains the main researcher.
The policemen acted the day they knew that the detainees needed one of the cars in which they kept a white-handled pistol.
One of the heated cars in which they hid drugs, weapons and money. Jaime Villanueva
In the operation, 125,000 euros in cash, seven kilos of cocaine, two of heroin and 10 firearms with 700 cartridges have been seized.
Among the weapons, a gold-plated pen capable of shooting and that can be "lethal" at close range.
There was also a cane whose handle is disassembled to be a dagger.
Agents have been after this clan for over two years.
“Some already have experience with arrests and that is why we have detected that, over the years, they have learned police techniques and have taken note of judicial processes, hence having stoves to burn evidence, hiding it in an itinerant way in cars…”, points out the main researcher.
Also for this reason, the leaders did not let themselves be seen in La Cañada and innovated in the ways of distributing their merchandise.
The police realized that the members of the clan were engaged in sending many packages, many, to countries in Eastern Europe.
On one occasion, one of them intervened to verify his suspicions: inside the bottle of cocaine that it contained, there was cocaine.
"At that time they ended that way of financing," says the policeman who coordinated the operation.
The clan was aware that as new drug lords they were in the crosshairs, but that didn't stop them, until the police did.
Who takes his place in this illegal business that devours everything it touches?
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