Andromeda is a cannibal galaxy that devours everything in its vicinity. That’s what police have assured Antonia and Miguel, the leading couple of the Los Saavedra clan, who they accuse of filling the void left by previous drug cartels in Madrid in two years, to have done, all greatly shrunk by police operations. In their case, they were not devoured, but absorbed for incorporating into their structure members who had already worked with the disgraced clans. They even bought the property from one of them to be able to sell their wares from a strategic location. That’s why the police called Operation Andromeda, in which they arrested 24 of its members on March 23, 11 of whom were remanded in custody. Its territory was the Cañada Real, a regular place of pilgrimage for those looking for their dose, crossing bridges and roads and covering the kilometers necessary in search of their drug. They offered their products on signs like in supermarkets. “Here are good joints,” one of them read.
A farm with a house and an indoor pen functioned as a hypermarket for its products: cocaine, heroin, and marijuana. The place was an “all-inclusive” outlet, a place of consumption called a smokehouse, and a parking lot. There were also bouncers, drug addicts who were metered by the clan to control who entered and who didn’t. “In this area of La Cañada, you are either a consumer, or you work in security for the cartels, or you are a police officer,” summarizes the chief investigator of this operation, conducted by the Zonal Investigation Operational Group (GOIZ). In addition, it was at a privileged point, the first to have access to sector 6 of the Cañada Real and they had bought it from Los Kikos, the former drug lords. “The reputation of having a good product was cemented among consumers,” emphasizes the researcher. The surveillance work was practically impossible and it was necessary to intervene many drugs in small quantities to justify entering and searching the place.
In this house, the key room was the bunker, so called by the agents for obvious reasons. It was where they kept the medicines they intended to sell that day, they made between two and three trips a day to get them. When monitoring, the agents came to check up to 500 customers in the same day. To get into this room without ventilation, you had to go through four armored doors and two iron bars. Inside, a stove burned constantly alongside the drugs, regardless of the weather outside, to lock himself in if the police arrived and to destroy all possible evidence. Narcotics and tickets. Indeed they did when the operation that landed them in prison was deployed, albeit not fully. Agents searched the ashes and found several fire-eaten bills and cocaine that was no longer white. “They tried to burn so much and so hard that they caused a fire in the house,” emphasizes the police officer who led the investigation.
The couple who were pulling the strings did not set foot in La Cañada, they managed business from their chalet in the Madrid municipality of Morata de Tajuña, 40 minutes’ drive away. There they were arrested at six in the morning. They had built their private paradise and filled it with a walk-in closet with hundreds of branded sneakers, piggy banks full of bills that go in the dishwasher, and jewelry of all kinds, including a submachine gun-shaped pendant with diamonds and several necklaces and bracelets in the shape of a bear a well-known brand.
But most of the money and drugs were not found there, but in hiding places in their vehicles with bays, as holes are called to hide something, scattered all over Madrid. “We have requested several cars but they may have more. It’s a very safe method, you hide the medicines or the bills in holes, you park it anywhere you want and you only respond to it when you need it, for example to pay for an apartment,” explains the main researcher. The cops acted the day they knew the detainees needed one of the cars, in which they kept a white-handled pistol.
One of the heated cars they hid drugs, guns and money in: Jaime Villanueva
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During the operation, 125,000 euros in cash, seven kilos of cocaine, two heroin and 10 firearms with 700 cartridges were seized. Among the weapons, a gold-plated stylus capable of shooting and being “deadly” at close range. There was also a stick, the handle of which was disassembled into a dagger. Agents have been after this clan for over two years. “Some have prior arrest experience and that’s why we found that over the years they’ve learned police techniques and taken note of court procedures, therefore have ovens to burn evidence, hide it in cars while on the move…” he points out principal investigators point out. For this reason too, the leaders in La Cañada did not show up and introduced innovations in the distribution of their goods.
The police realized that the members of the clan were busy sending many packages, many, to countries in Eastern Europe. Once one of them intervened to confirm his suspicions: there was cocaine in the bottle of cocaine inside. “They ended this type of funding back then,” says the police officer who coordinated the operation. The clan were aware they were in the crosshairs as new drug lords, but that didn’t stop them until the police did. Who takes his place in this illicit business that devours everything it touches?
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