José Moreno, the historic owner of one of the largest brothels in Europe, dies without facing his great trial

The Paradise nightclub, in La Jonquera. Gianluca Battista

All the police tirelessly followed in the footsteps of José Moreno.

The objective was to lock up the businessman from the world of prostitution for sexually exploiting women in brothels.

But they never succeeded.

The exhausting police investigations ended in nothing, or with penalties not linked to the trafficking of women.

Moreno was slipping away like water through his hands.

Until in the end, the agents followed the money and accused Moreno of tax fraud in a macro-case supervised by the National Court.

But Moreno will not be able to sit on the bench in his big trial, in which the Prosecutor's Office asks him for 10 years in prison and the State's attorney, 52. The businessman died yesterday, at the age of 72, due to an illness.

Moreno, originally from Granada, lived a life full of surprises.

Before the investigations linked to prostitution, he ran restaurants in Platja d'Aro, one of the mythical places on the crowded Costa Brava, where tourists still come to party.

He later opened a brothel in Mont-ras, Eclipse, and another in Pla de l'Estany, Eden, where police investigations that linked him to trafficking in women immediately began to affect him.

But his definitive rise to fame came when he began a fight with the City Council of La Jonquera, on the border with France, to convert a 2,700 square meter industrial warehouse into one of the largest hostess clubs in Europe: Paradise.

The path was not without danger.

Moreno is one of the few people who, without being a target of terrorist gangs, has seen a car loaded with TNT and several butane cylinders placed at the door of his premises, on a busy day in 2012. It did not explode because it failed. the device.

The Mossos opened an investigation, named Rockefeller, in honor of the doll of their namesake, the ventriloquist and producer José Moreno.

The investigation was never able to prove that they were attacks commissioned by the competition, with the aim of ruining the company's business.

Five years later, one of the alleged perpetrators, Xavi, alias

, died from the sticky bomb that was placed in the undercarriage of his car, in the parking lot of his house.

“You only talk bad about me,” Moreno, who never lost his southern accent despite spending most of his life in Catalonia, responded to the phone.

Aware of the proverb that the only thing worse than being talked badly about is not being talked about at all, he inaugurated the Paradise in style in 2010, and opened the doors to the press, although without women or clients inside.

The journalist Esperança Padilla won an award for posing as a prostitute and managing to work without too many difficulties in Paradise, with a false identity.

During the pandemic, an already exhausted José Moreno was forced to close, like the rest of the brothels.

Dozens of women were left on the streets overnight in a situation of lack of protection.

“There is no other option,” he assured this newspaper, and confessed that he was tired of the difficulties that every day plagued his business, which had left the years of controversy behind and was discreetly moving forward.

By then, he had already closed Eclipse and Eden.

The Paradise resisted with a clientele that was mainly weekend, and French.

José Moreno, as the

has reported , died yesterday in Malaga.

In recent times, he himself explained that he spent long periods away from Girona, where he built his life as a businessman in the world of prostitution.

With his death, the criminal case opened against him ends, for allegedly defrauding the Treasury and not declaring the commissions they charged to customers who used the premises' own ATMs to withdraw cash.

A macro process, known as Operation Pompeii, with numerous businessmen from the world of prostitution investigated, and in which his right hand man is also accused.

Paradise is still open, with his brother at the helm.

“He left everything ready while he was still alive,” says one of his managers, who regrets that no one tells us that Moreno “fed many families.”

And he considers that if his funeral had been held in La Jonquera... “The highway would have had to be closed due to the number of people who would have come.”

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