Three days before withdrawing more than a million euros in jewels from a jewelery shop in San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid), Mitesku, 40 years old and of Albanian origins, bought a car. An old Hyundai Santa Fe, for which he paid 4,000 euros. The owners, a married couple, later told investigators from the anti-robbery group of the National Police of Madrid that they were on the verge of not selling it to them, because they had not even shown up to pay, but had instead sent another person with an excuse. But what they couldn’t even imagine was that he was an expert jewel thief, with at least five different identities, claimed by Belgium, the Netherlands and Greece. “A professional”, in the eyes of the police, who saw the opportunity to carry out his great robbery in the great blackout of April 28, which left all of Spain without electricity.
With the entire country paralyzed and immersed in general chaos, Mitesku waited for night to begin to fall and left Alcobendas’ apartment where he had temporarily rented a room. He got into his newly purchased gray Hyundai and headed to the Plaza Norte 2 shopping center, where on the top floor of the imposing glass-domed building on the banks of the N-1 is the José Luis jewelry store, with the “JL” logo. In his backpack he had a radial, a screwdriver, a hammer and some ropes.
He left the car a few blocks from his destination and presumably arrived on foot, as he then left. Investigators still haven’t been able to figure out how he got onto the mall’s roof, but, after reviewing more than 500 hours of recordings from area security cameras that continued to run on their own generators, they first saw him cloaked, carrying a backpack and taking references with his cell phone at the top of the building. “It’s as if he was arguing with someone even though he was in the right place, that is, right above the jewelry store,” warn the investigators, who managed to follow his movements almost inch by inch until they put handcuffs on him.
Mitesku, this is the surname with which he appeared on the passport when he was arrested on October 21, began carrying out tastings, making holes in the roof with his ray, until he found the exact position. The precision of his movements and the apparent knowledge he had of the details of the building make investigators think that it was a robbery that he had carefully studied, with a lot of information. “He probably believed that with the blackout the ideal opportunity had presented itself and he acted,” they underline.
Under the roof of the building he broke the plasterboard panels that made up the roof of the jewelry store and climbed inside. Once there, the cameras show how, patiently, he unscrewed the cases and took the precious loot: 2,200 pieces of gold, diamonds and diamonds. “His movements show that his backpack, which he filled with jewellery, was very heavy,” the officers say.
With the furniture from the jewelry store he built a ladder with which he climbed back onto the deck and out onto the roof. There, at night, the cameras record him loaded and show how he first lowers the backpack with a rope and then descends, for about 8 meters to the ground, through a sort of canal.
After 11pm, when the power has already returned to much of Madrid, the security cameras lose him as he walks towards Avenida Valdelaparra, in the direction of Alcobendas.
a professional
Until that moment, the only thing that the robbery investigators at the Madrid Police Headquarters have clear is that their mysterious thief is not a common criminal, but a true professional. A painstaking six-month pursuit begins based on complicated viewings of poor-quality videos and a lot of field work.
In one of the recordings recovered from one of the many security cameras in the area, around midnight on the day of the blackout, they see the lights of a vehicle parked in a street come on and decide to continue their journey, because it more or less coincides with the time of the thief’s escape. It is a gray car, which appears to have a cow on the hood and has five-spoke aluminum wheels. Consecutive monitoring of cameras along its route allows us to see that it leaves San Sebastián de los Reyes and crosses the nearby municipality of Alcobendas, until it enters a parking lot. The mysterious man leaves that parking lot shortly after with his backpack on his shoulders. It’s him.
At that moment, two parallel investigations were opened and continued for weeks: one to identify that vehicle (comparing models and characteristics) and another, combing and kicking the area block by block, to find the driver. They manage to ascertain that the owner of the car is registered in the area where they saw the man with the backpack. But when they manage to identify him, they verify that the day after committing the robbery the vehicle left Spain through the Junquera pass, presumably driven by him.
Days later, with all the police tools to locate the fugitives in hand and after throwing the data against the Europol bases, they discover that the car has been resold in Romania and that its owner moves nimbly around Europe with at least five different identities and is reported by three countries for similar acts, as well as being wanted by the courts of Seville and Malaga also for robberies.
The investigators can only wait for him to make a mistake. Confident, the alleged thief returns to Spain, leaving one of those identities at one of the border crossings. On October 21, after tracking him in another vehicle, detectives from the robbery group surrounded him and arrested him.
He appears calm, convinced that no crime can be attributed to him because he has a new Albanian identity, with which he feels safe. “I am a truck driver, I come from Romania, where I live with my wife and daughter, there must be a mistake.” But his face and attitude change when the officers start calling him by the different names that appear on their passports and he is finally defeated when they ask him about the golden crucifix he is wearing.
– My daughter gave it to me, he says as he is taken away during the routine search at the police station.
His confidence and arrogance vanish when they show him the initials engraved on the gold piece: JL, from the José Luis jewelry store. The thief had evidence of his crime hanging around his neck. The rest of the thousands of jewels have not yet appeared.
