The Supreme Court confirmed this Wednesday the four-year sentence imposed by the judge of the Provincial Court of Cáceres on the wine thieves of the Atrio Hotel-Restaurant in Cáceres in one of the most famous robberies of recent times. The estimated value of the 45 bottles stolen by the couple made up of 49-year-old Romanian-Dutch citizen Constantin Dumitru and 29-year-old Mexican woman Priscila Lara Guevara on October 27, 2021 is 1.6 million euros. But the owners of the award-winning restaurant in Cáceres, chef Toño Pérez and his partner José Polo, accepted compensation of 750,000 euros, the value that the insurance company gave the wines. The Supreme Court's ruling is in response to the appeal of the robbers' lawyer, Sylvia Córdoba. The police never found the wine.
Dumitru and Guevara have been in Cáceres prison for a year and a half, after being arrested on July 18, 2022 (nine months after the robbery) while crossing the Albania-Croatia border in their car. His lawyer has always defended that the incidents should not be classified as robbery with violence, but as theft, since the cellar door was not broken, but opened with a master key that Dumitru had allegedly previously taken from a box found in the hotel reception.
However, both the court in Cáceres and now the Supreme Court consider that it was a robbery with violence and they reject all the other allegations made by the defense regarding possible irregularities in the chain of evidence, unjustified telephone interventions or possible prospective investigations back to the police.
“It is clear from the judgment under appeal that the evidence analyzed by the accused is overwhelming, that there is direct and indicative evidence and that it is solid and varied, without being deprived of its accrediting force by the applicant's allegations,” the judges Supreme Court.
The judges therefore consider the two convicted perpetrators to have committed a crime of robbery with violence in a publicly accessible facility “of particular gravity”, a crime for which they were sentenced – in addition to four and a half and four years in prison respectively – and joint compensation of 753,454 Euro, the money with which the appraiser and the insurance company valued the wines.
According to the account of events, the two convicted men roamed and examined the restaurant in the summer of 2021 to plan the robbery. After examining the area, they decided that the woman would stay at the Hotel Atrio on October 26, 2021, for which she registered with a fake Swiss passport and an empty backpack.
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That same evening, Dumitru came to dinner and stayed with the woman “without announcing herself.” After the lavish dinner, they took a tour of the venue's famous winery and went up to the room. Priscila Guevara persistently called the front desk starting at 2:10 p.m., “asking for a salad and kept asking how long it would take to be served” in an attempt to distract the receptionist. This allowed Dumitru to access the master key and later the warehouse without being seen, except for a few surveillance cameras that recorded his movements.
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