The dark gang from Punta Lara that lost because of a woman

"Only with the clock of the mine ahead and the one of the point that goes behind, we spend the holidays and go on vacation."

The "Dwarf" used to boast of having a good eye for such things. He had once managed to make the entire pavilion explode in laughter when during a ranchada in Unit 5 of Mercedes he said: "From here, 20 meters away, I can tell if it's good gold or plated crap." And to finish it off he threw: "I should have been a jeweler but I would have worked on myself."

That early morning of February 2, 1985 was rarely hot because it had not been what is called a good summer, if by that you mean days of oppressive sun and nights of hardly being able to sleep. Antonio Néstor Ruiz was 24 years old and was happy, among other things that life gave him, with the possession of one of the cars that marked fashion and status at that time: a Renault 18 GTL. But distrusting the user's manual, that night he decided to stop at a service station 10 kilometers from General Rodríguez, to reinforce the load of the gasoline tank. The beach man indicated one of the pumps on the right and Ruiz parked the car right in front of another pump. There he was waiting for the load of half a tank of a super white Ford Sierra, another high-end of the time. Inside were three guys who barely talked.

The Panamericana bridge from where the Renault 18 fell

THE CLOCKS

From the passenger seat of the Renault 18, Claudia Patricia "Pachi" Ferraioli, also 24 years old, put her right arm out the window and hung it, as if tired of waiting. Behind her, who knows what reflection, her friend Hugo Horacio Basso, 23, did the same: he stuck his arm out the window and showed that he was also wearing his watch on the right. Inside the Sierra el Enano Sergio Daniel Morales made a sign to his companion, Pedro Antonio “El Loco Velis”, who at 24 years old had already established himself as the head of the little band that Héctor Ricardo García completed from the back seat. García was also a young and little read guy. Hence, it had taken him a few years to understand why he had been nicknamed “El Periodista”.

El Enano, who at 22 years old was already a tanned rogue, then unfolded his theory about the value of those watches and what they could do with them. give approval to the plan that would be put into action.

This is how “the original” Massacre of General Rodríguez began, whose name would be usurped 24 years later by another massacre with different edges and context, with the gunpowder of politics and the spectacular nature of a cinematographic and suspicious leak. Curiously, when Internet search engines are asked “General Rodríguez Massacre”, the answer is “General Rodríguez Triple Crime”, and it drops data on what happened on August 7, 2008, when the disappearance of the businessmen Sebastián Forza, Damián Ferrón and Leopoldo Bina. They were found in General Rodríguez on August 13 of that year, shot to death and showing signs of torture. The fact had the seal of a mafia linked to the trafficking of chemical precursors to cook cocaine.

WEDDING

What came after that stop at that service station was the sum of all horrors. On a section of bridges in the Western Access, the Sierra was put on par with the Renault 18 and they made signs to the young Ruiz to "stop or I'll shoot you", while they pointed an Itaka at him. It was never known where the first bullet came from, whether from the 22 pistol that the boy was carrying under the seat or from the guns of the criminals. Under a rain of fire and at full speed the Renault 18 fell from a bridge. Ruiz, his girlfriend Pachi and his friends Hugo Basso, Héctor Lioi, his wife Virginia Astro de Lioi and the children of that couple died on the spot: Micaela, two years old and Gerónimo, 45 days old. . The group was going to spend a few days off at the stud farm owned by Pachi's father, where they were also going to put the final touches on the preparations for the upcoming wedding.

A witness said that after the explosion that caused the fall of the Renault, another car stopped next to the destroyed guard rail and that three men had gotten out to stay for a few seconds looking down and immediately plow towards the federal capital.

THE BOLT TECHNIQUE

The first known version was that of a supposed traffic incident, a confinement and a big car that had ended badly, as 15 years later would happen with one of the most commented cases in the Argentine police chronicle: the death of the cuartetero Rodrigo Bueno on the highway La Plata -Buenos Aires, minutes after leaving the Escándalo de City Bell bowling alley where he would give the last show of his life.

The hypothesis of car thieves to pass them to Paraguay was also considered. The bands of "hunters" had copied the method of the Asphalt Pirates, a criminal modality that only targeted trucks loaded with merchandise and that came to lead the crime statistics, long before satellite trackers and other security technologies ruined them. Party. Long before insecurity took perhaps simpler but also more violent forms from a phenomenon that would grow exponentially: that of stealing and killing for a few pesos to buy drugs.

"There was an exchange of shots," said a police chief and the case began to unravel "

They called the Panamericana the Bermuda Triangle and it was recommended not to travel at night even though the robberies occurred at all hours. With democracy still in its infancy, a lot of “unemployed labor” remained on the streets, as former members of the security forces who had formed gangs to commit crimes were called, taking advantage of the weapons and the contacts they had managed to maintain. They were commando hits, like those attributed to the gang of Aníbal Gordon and Eduardo Ruffo, close to the Clan Puccio. But there were also common criminals who had found a way around the matter. And it would be known that Enano Morales' gang specialized in "the bolt technique." This technique consisted of pulling from the bridges, tied to a cable as if it were a fishing rod, a bolt, thick screws or pieces of iron that, when they hit the windshield, caused havoc. To stop was to indulge in looting. The gang would grow in firepower after the arrival of El Loco Véliz and would leave its mark in assaults on Buenos Aires routes between Mercedes, Luján, San Pedro and even Rosario. The modality would always be the same: get alongside the car of a potential victim and if it did not stop, they would open fire, as the General Rodríguez Massacre had begun.

Ruiz's father hired private detectives and lawyers Alak and Amondaráin. Another sketch on the brutal attack of the "hunters" of motorists

AN ITAKA AGAINST A 22

The entire country had been perplexed by the Massacre and society demanded answers that were slow in coming. And it is already known that inaction is a bad advisor or, in these cases, a disseminator of hypotheses and confusing versions in the country of opinion experts. In a matter of days the media planet had been filled with "detectives". To make matters worse, the then chief of the Buenos Aires Police, Walter Stafanini, would be in charge of cleaning up the issue further. “There was an exchange of fire,” he said, adding that one of the weapons used, a 22-caliber pistol, was registered to one of the victims, the boy Ruiz. They had shot him with a 45 caliber, with a 9 millimeter and even with an Itaka and the young man had answered with a 22. What he said gave the case even more mystery and controversy and it took a long time before they were convinced that the victim, in an attitude to say the least reckless, he had shot himself with the thieves. There it emerged that due to the volume of money that Ruiz used to handle, he was carrying a weapon registered in his name and this further obscured the investigation.

THE DELIVERER

Based on this premise that no matter how unpleasant it may seem, no investigation should rule out the victim, the data emerged on the link between Ruiz, the murdered boyfriend, with alleged activities in the so-called Financial Bicycle and his consequent handling of large sums of money. cash, especially dollars. The trail of the boleo robbery began to branch off and that of a "job" with previous intelligence in which the fortune of Pachi's father, Ruiz's girlfriend, was also taken into account.

That was the conclusion reached by the private detectives hired by the father of the murdered boyfriend. From the beginning, there was no way to convince the man of the “casual robbery” hypothesis or of the stories about the “hunters” of the Pan-American Highway and the Bermuda Triangle. The man suspected something more elaborate. They say that he obtained the services of a Buenos Aires detective agency that, they said, had connections with colleagues from the United States who would have traveled to Argentina to deal with the matter, parallel to the police action, but without raising the question. When they had elements to request formal arrests, they did so. And so it was that in mid-July, the police broke into a charming bar on 400 Ayacucho Street in Recoleta, to arrest two patrons who would lead to a series of raids in which foreign currency, checks, promissory notes and even a kiosk on Corrientes Avenue that in its back store concealed a purchase and sale of gold. They believed they had found the alleged "delivery" of the assault on the Pan American, but all would be released.

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Joseph Daniel White

THE FRENCH KNOW

Meanwhile, the first firm clue appeared hooked once again that old adage of French criminalistics: "Cherche une femme", looking for a woman. “Behind every criminal action there is usually a woman who sheds light on the shadows of a dark investigation. You just have to look for it." Little more than a decade after the General Rodríguez Massacre, another shocking case that kicked the board of power, would be clarified from the "cherche une femme". It would be the Cabezas Case, when the detectives arrived at the then wife of former police officer Gustavo Prellezo. Her testimony was essential to order the arrest of the czar of postmen, businessman Alfredo Yabrán. And further back in time, it would be a disgruntled woman seeing her husband with another woman leaving a hotel accommodation, which would allow the authors of the so-called Robbery of the Century to reach, when they burst the safe deposit boxes of the Acassuso branch of the Bank River and escaped through a tunnel.

Thus, in the case of the General Rodríguez Massacre, the "femme" was called Patricia Miriam Trossero, a Mercedina by profession a hairdresser who, perhaps unintentionally and contrary to what tradition dictates, one afternoon spoke more than one of the clients of she. The woman was a partner or friend of Loco Véliz and she, perhaps because she wanted to help him, told the police "she told me: I'm afraid, we didn't want to kill them."

THE PLATENSE SEAL

The first thing that appeared when pulling that thread was the track from La Plata. And it was learned that Sergio Daniel Morales, alias El Enano, who lived in Column 275 of Almirante Brown coastal avenue, in Punta Lara, was in the white Sierra that night, and that the gang was made up of José Daniel Blanco and Héctor Ricardo García, domiciled on the same avenue at column 366. The police could not find anyone in the area who recognized them as neighbors. No one had seen them. Either they were false addresses or a pact of silence was in force in the area.

With the case unsolved, politics had been severely punished by the versions about an act of "unemployed labor", a ghost that haunted the first years of the democracy won in 1983. Hence, as soon as there was evidence of the nature of the event, "common crime", the government sought a way to reassure the population and it would be the then Secretary of Security of the Province, Héctor Bertoncello, who would come out and say that the Massacre had been the work of "dry criminals, of significant danger." He ran from the scene in the shadow of the infamous Triple A and Aníbal Gordon's band, "for being baseless versions."

However, a few years later, the lawyer Jorge Omar Irineo, representative of one of the families of the victims, that of Emilia Ursula Mazzuco, mother of Antonio Ruiz, filed an appeal that restored mystery to the case. According to the lawyer, the Massacre could be linked to the shadowy Puccio Clan and its kidnappings for ransom. The lawyer listed a series of "coincidences" with those facts and stopped at the rare circumstance that, as had happened with the kidnapping of the businessman Sivak, a witness to the Massacre had appeared who was a former Police driver, and that when filing the complaint would confuse a red Ford Taunus with a metallic Sierra. "The alleged error gave the criminals time," it was stated, while recalling that the arrest of Colonel Franco, an accomplice of the Puccios, had been made in the same building where one of the victims of the Massacre lived.

Pedro Antonio Véliz, alias El Loco Antonio; Elvio Alberto Rodríguez, alias Beto; Leonel Alberto Alfonso, alias El Loco Daniel and a subject that was talked about a lot but his identity was never known: El Rengo, would complete the cast of the dangerous relationships of the Punta Lara gang that tried to reorganize. The holdouts on the 74th diagonal towards the river were no longer safe and someone proposed to carry out a coup to get away from the country by land to Brazil and there "hold out" in a safe place in Porto Alegre.

Sergio Morales, aka the "Dwarf"

A BIRTHDAY IN CITY BELL

This is how they agreed to carry out the coup proposed by Morales and Blanco from La Plata. It was the assault on the birthday of businessman José Veiga Rodríguez in the fifth house of City Bell. That night they cut down 15 people and made off with a significant sum of cash, expensive jewelry and watches. During that assault they tortured the owner of the house by giving him current with the bare cable of a nightstand.

For regulating the seat, he shot himself in the foot. He would have the nickname of El Rengo

In the development of criminal engineering to deliver that hit, something happened that seemed stolen from The Three Stooges. They went out to "get" two cars to use in the robbery and when one of the gang members got into the one he had to drive, he found that the seat was very far forward. And when he wanted to activate the mechanism to throw it back, he did it with the gun in his hand, a shot escaped him and hit him in the foot. The police always suspected that this was the famous "Lame" who never appeared.

The only one who would continue with the plan to flee to Brazil would be García. The other two insisted on staying in La Plata and a patrol from the Los Hornos police station was able to hunt down Morales. They said that the information on his whereabouts had been given by an informant who would have exchanged his presumed responsibility in the escruche to a store selling sportswear, for the information that would allow one of the perpetrators of the General Rodríguez Massacre to be reached at the time. . The third member, Blanco, would surrender before the first shots during a frustrated assault in the Conurbano. The band had lost its way. Blanco would hand over his weapon to the police, who would later verify that it was the one that Morales had left him before fleeing to Brazil, one of the weapons used in the Massacre.

The case acquired a stamp from La Plata when the lawyers Julio Alak and Juan Amondaráin presented themselves as representatives of the affected individuals, that is, the families of the victims. Alak would be mayor of La Plata some years later and Amondaráin, senator. As a lawyer for the victims, Alak requested the extradition of García, who at that point was on the loose in Brazil.

“It was very shocking. We came to the case because of Ruiz's father, who was a Peronist militant from the federal capital and the man was desperate, not knowing where to go,” recalls Alak, almost 40 years after the case.

THE WEIGHTS OF TARRAGÓ

On July 22, 1985, Loco Véliz was eating at a grill on General Belgrano road, in the Florencio Varela area, when he noticed that the same yellow Dodge 1500 had already passed through the door more than twice. It was an "unidentifiable" cell phone of the police who were looking for him. In the shooting he fell next to the other diner. In another fact almost traced, months later Morales lost, who would surrender before being shot down as would happen to the other thug who accompanied him that noon, a certain Antonio Frank.

One midday in March 1986, the “Dwarf” Morales, would make good use of the commotion that was in the Mercedes prison for the presentation of a musical show to entertain the inmates. The invited artist was another resident of City Bell, Antonio Tarragó Ross.

Morales managed to escape. It was a scandal and the details of the escape were never known, but it was assured that the "Dwarf" would have managed to mix with the technicians who assisted the artist to leave the prison at the end of his performance.

A work that in the music environment, beyond some changes imposed in English by a certain modernity, has always been called "leads".