Image of the searches carried out by the National Police along with agents from Europol and Interpol during the first phase of Operation Conifera in June 2022.
It was on June 21, 2022, 15 minutes after midday, when Luis Alberto LM, forward of CD Rota, a modest team of the Andalusian Second RFEF (the former Third League), accompanied by a public defender, sat down in front of two agents of Center National Police for Integrity in Sports and Gambling (Cenpida). A few hours earlier, he had been arrested as an alleged participant in the betting and match-fixing plot uncovered between June and November last year in the so-called Operation Coniferous, which eventually resulted in 44 arrests, including 20 active footballers, teams from the modest football, and six other people investigated more. The interrogation takes place at the police station of Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz) and is not very long, just over 45 minutes, but the footballer’s answers leave no doubt. “The party that opposed it [CD] Broken with CD Pozoblanco on April 24th [que terminó con victoria local 3-1] Was it tampered with?” was the first question the agents asked him. Luis Alberto’s succinct answer left no room for doubt: “Yes, it was tampered with.”
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His testimony is one of the key pieces of evidence of corruption in humble football uncovered by the National Police in Operation Conifer. According to this newspaper’s census of the data appearing in the summary, there are already 37 suspicious meetings. 20 matches will be played in Spain (mainly by the First and Second RFEF, the old Second B and Third, although there are friendlies too), 11 in Gibraltar and a further six in Andorra. Most of them were played in just three months from April to June 2022. This data coincides with the last days of this season, one of the moments that police experts consider more vulnerable to manipulation, since many teams do not play there There is a risk that some footballers lend themselves to this type of fraud.
In his testimony, the CD Rota player tells police how he contacted a footballer from the opposing team by phone and suggested “making some sort of agreement with the result” so that everyone could bet through intermediaries (the players are banned). from doing so in games of the category they compete in) and win a significant amount of money. As the statement says, his interlocutor agreed, but did not want to agree on victory or defeat, but on the number of goals that can bring more benefits. The next day, the pozoblanco player Luis Alberto proposed two options for the agreement: “More than 2.5 goals [marcados en el partido] or more than 3.5″. After that, the CD Rota footballer created a group to exchange messages with four teammates via the Telegram application with the idea of letting them participate in troubleshooting. “With four or five players you make a match. You don’t need all the staff,” sources close to the investigation said.
Among the participants in this group was Adrián RR, whom the police consider to be one of the suspected masterminds of the dismantled plot, along with José Miguel BL, his friend and close to Atlético Sanluqueño, a team that is also a member of the Second RFEF. This had experience in the gambling field, where he had worked as a so-called tipster – betting consultant – before allegedly turning to the plot of the plot. According to the investigation, the mined network operated in a similar way to a co-op, where the players involved did not receive any amount for manipulating the game they were playing, but rather the advantage gained through third-party betting thanks to the network, the two alleged ringleaders.
Luis Alberto’s testimony points in this direction. The footballer assured the agents that his interlocutor on the opposing team tried to terminate the agreement because, according to the reasoning, the coach of his team found out about it. “I told my Rota teammates to withdraw all the money invested”, both because of the team’s victory and the fact that the result would be more than 2.5 goals, but they told him that they didn’t could more. “I put 300 euros into it,” admitted the footballer, and other colleagues would have put in significantly higher sums: “Up to 6,000 or 7,000 euros.”
The footballer added that faced with the impossibility of withdrawing the bets, he tried to convince his Pozoblanco team-mate ‘that the agreement goes through’ but that he told him it ‘no longer depends on him’. After this conversation, he assured that he had not spoken to any player of the opposing team. However, the final score, 3-1 in favor of the local team, allowed them to rake in a sizeable sum. According to the police reports included in the summary, a bettor received a prize of 13,506 euros. Luis Alberto justified his intervention with the regulation that his team did not pay him: “I have not received a salary for five months, I have children and I am in a delicate financial situation,” he told the agents. Police reports indicate that the conspiracy brought in nearly €500,000 in profits. One of the ringleaders had intervened at his home with 40,000 euros in cash and the second 20,000.
35 bets in 100 seconds
The summary of Operation Conifer describes that in one of the rigged matches, the one that took place on May 15, 2022 between UD Montijo and UC Tamaraceite, which ended in the score 1-7, six members of the conspiracy were coordinated to place 35 bets in only 35 bets to place 100 seconds on such a massive away win. According to a police report, the “so compulsive” behavior of two bookmakers in Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz) resulted in their terminals being blocked when they could only gamble €1,430. They wanted to do it for around 2,500, which would have gotten them a price of 9,320 euros. In the end, they made a profit of 5,720 euros. Despite the partial success, Adrián RR, one of the suspected ringleaders, bragged about it in a phone call tapped by court order: “We made money, but not everything we could, but for a used car we’re there.”
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