Prosecutor Ignacio Stampa leaves the National Court in Madrid in October 2020. Andrea Comas
Ignacio Stampa, the first prosecutor in the Villarejo case, says that when the police’s Internal Affairs Unit (UAI) proceeded to carry out the first search of José Manuel Villarejo’s home in November 2017, the retired commissioner stared at him at one point. Under the agents’ guidance, the former agent had just returned home from hospital after allegedly faking a heart attack when he encountered Stampa and his partner Miguel Serrano, both of whom were then assigned to the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office (the former would end up ). be pushed aside). “I remember when he came in. and looks at me like [diciendo]: “That scum, what are you doing here in my house,” Stampa recalls years later, before detailing how they discovered the suspect’s secret file in a safe in his living room: “There was so much computer equipment, microcassettes and stuff that you say to yourself: ‘It’s true, he’s not a legend, it’s true that he’s been recording everything for 40 years.’
The words of the former member of the anti-corruption agency – Serrano still sits in the prosecutor’s office – resonate with enormous force. They do it in the Spotify-produced podcast entitled El País de los demonios, with journalist Álvaro de Cózar directing and co-writing the screenplay with Eva Lamarca. An exercise in reporting with which De Cózar, author of V, las cloacas del Estado in 2016, returns to the obscure figure of Villarejo, the policeman who has moved in the shadows for decades. “I wanted to find a story that would come full circle,” explains the director, after the curator has also appeared in three other audio series he directed: XRey, about King Emeritus Juan Carlos I; The papers about how EL PAÍS published the Bárcenas papers in 2013 and the PP tried to remove evidence; and 22,424 in the Bankia case.
With 10 episodes of about 30 minutes long, Stampa takes part in the leading role in El País de los demonios, the first two chapters of which this newspaper was able to hear. The State Ministry official, now attached to the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office, is the first to publicly share his experience as the first prosecutor in the Villarejo case: since Manuel Moix, then head of the anti-corruption department, was put in charge of this specialized area shortly after he landed (“As soon as you arrive, you know “that this is a brown, a problem; and that it’s not a gift. I immediately thought why are they giving it to the last one to arrive”) until you separate him from the investigation after being attacked alongside attacks from the extreme right and Villarejo himself faced a campaign of media harassment.
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“It’s a story about how the system gives you an order and how it later abandons you,” De Cózar summarizes the podcast, in which the journalist even claims: “In the end, the system swallowed the prosecutor Stampa.” In the first few episodes, Stampa explains that he ended up from the small anti-corruption prosecutor’s office in Arrecife (Lanzarote), where the “main cacique of the island” had already launched a media campaign against him – “it was very painful, but that was nothing to do with that , which occurred to me later”, he continues -. He believed he was reaching the top “because of the importance of the issues examined there,” but little did he know what was to come.
His partner, Miguel Serrano, himself warned me on the podcast, according to Stampa: “Miguel Serrano, with his own wisdom that he has shown me on this matter, has told me two things that have come true: First, the worst that will happen will be the kind.” Fire; and secondly, we will not reach the other side of the coast together.” Another time, the former anti-corruption prosecutor also recounts the terror that befell Francisco Menéndez, a former client of Villarejo who dared to collaborate with the prosecutor and who provided the first documents that were used to launch the investigation against the commissioner: ” Menéndez shows us how scared he is. The first thing he tells us is: “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?”, he remembers.
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Stampa’s story also focuses on one of the big moments of the investigation. That moment when the prosecutors and internal affairs officers discover the safe in Villarejo’s room. And they open it. And they discover this vast body of material that has prompted the National Court to open 36 lines of inquiry into the retired commissioner’s machinations: including spy contracts from Ibex 35 companies and Operation Kitchen, the interior para-police conspiracy hatched at the ministry, to order from the popular Stealing ex-treasurer Luis Bárcenas compromising documents that he could keep with senior PP officials. “[Lo que contenía] it was a demonstration of technological evolution: microcassettes, floppy disks, cds, flash drives… everything! It was the whole spectrum.”
Stampa explains that with such a volume of material, one police officer looked at the prosecutors as if to say, “But what?[nos llevamos] all? Everything everything?” And that he thought: “Yeah, we’ve come this far. You have to take it.”
Waiting for the verdict
The prosecutor’s first investigation ended up before the Central Educational Court 6 of the National Court, currently headed by Judge Manuel García-Castellón. Villarejo has spent more than three years in provisional detention since his arrest in November 2017. He was released in March 2021 as it was impossible to hold his first trial before completing four years in prison – the maximum allowed by law. Finally, at the end of 2021, the oral hearing against the commissioner for three suspected espionage orders that he had received began, which was scheduled for sentencing in September 2022. The court has not yet rendered a verdict.
“When we were doing V, the state sewer, there were a lot of things I was told that I couldn’t record because I couldn’t prove it. But that has now been shown,” recalls Álvaro de Cózar. “I wasn’t able to assess Villarejo well. To me he is an enigmatic figure. Because what did he want? Was it just for money? I don’t think so. It seems to me that it has more to do with power… With the power that information gives you,” adds the journalist.
The first two episodes are already available on Spotify, with a new episode of the podcast appearing on the platform every week, ending on April 18th.
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