Luis Bárcenas is better than 13 years ago (and he is 69). His physique and his hair —what hair!—, somewhat like an American movie gangster, white, slicked back, like Alessandro Lequio or Mario Conde, very much from Madrid’s Salamanca neighborhood. Hair, in short, that is a reflection of an era in Spain, and that has barely lost volume. Neither has the era.
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He goes up the stairs of the Audiencia Nacional dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, matching handkerchief, black tie, and a plastic bottle of mineral water —at certain ages it is always recommended for the bladder, even more so with these summer April heats— and heads towards the bathroom. Minutes later, he re-enters. Halfway through his statement, he has asked the judge a couple more times:
—Your Honor, a few minutes to go to the bathroom?
—Oh, fantastic.
—Ten minutes?
—Five is enough; it’s because of age.
—No need to explain.
And she gives 10 minutes, you never know. The bathrooms of the Audiencia Nacional are spotless, shiny, white. Bárcenas had previously received the focus of more than 20 television cameras, questions from journalists, whispers, glances:
–There’s Bárcenas!
Before entering the courtroom, even the former PP Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz observed him sitting on a wooden chair next to his lawyer. Díaz was talking about the Copa del Rey final lost by Atlético de Madrid on penalties —what do you talk about when you’re under investigation in a case like this? About defeats?— and there Bárcenas himself appears at his feet, whom he watches out of the corner of his eye. Bárcenas turns. The former PP minister bows his head. Who knows if out of shyness or rather reverence. And he leaves, but not to the bathroom, but to a room.
Here, an alleged illegal parapolice operation organized by Díaz’s ministry to spy on the former PP treasurer is being judged. That is, national police officers stole personal information from him during the investigation of the Gürtel case, even through Bárcenas’s own driver.
This Monday, the seventh day of the trial, by the way, only one other investigated person was absent, Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo. Perhaps because it is already recorded by video by default, and in plain sight of everyone. These investigated police officers and inspectors are called “patriotic police”. That is to say, for Spain, the PP has gone so far as to spy on one of its own.
Bárcenas has recounted that when he went to private meetings, he left his two mobile phones in the car, with the driver, but not just anywhere, but in an envelope. Yes, Bárcenas’s relationship with envelopes is enough for another trial. Already in prison (pre-trial detention, where he spent almost two years) he said that at first everything was very good with the officials, but then —oh, friend— everything went wrong, suddenly: the espionage was already underway.
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That one day they handcuffed him “in an inappropriate way” when he had to be transferred to the hospital due to a very severe allergy episode. That another day they subjected him to a full body search. That they wanted to put a camera in his shower. That he noticed everything had changed, in short. “In short, unbearable,” he said.
Months earlier, however, Bárcenas contacted an inmate in prison who was an IT expert. There are prisoners who look for drugs behind bars and then there’s Bárcenas. “I gave him a task,” he recounted. The inmate charged him about 4,000 or 4,500 euros for the mission. The former treasurer’s instruction was very simple: destroy three recordings that were in a digital file where –mind you– even a President of the Government was implicated. The inmate’s reaction upon receiving such an order was not questioned.
In the digital cloud there were three recordings. One, where Bárcenas himself explained how the PP’s accounting worked. “Off-the-books” in the former treasurer’s jargon. Another, shorter one, where Mariano Rajoy appeared in the Genoa office and spoke about the party’s accounting activity and was even handed an envelope, which he kept and, later, destroyed a paper. And a last one, in a restaurant in Seville and more extensive, with deputy Javier Arenas, where the former treasurer explained his accounts in Switzerland (47 million euros).
Bárcenas explained to the inmate that to delete this file, a username and password were required. The prosecutor has insisted a lot on this matter:
—How did you give him the keys?
—In writing.
—How was an inmate going to carry out the task?
—Because he was on leave and that was when he could.
—And did he do it?
—He must have done something. In the cloud, when I left, there was nothing.
Bárcenas has not seen the IT inmate again, as prison officials took measures to prevent him from speaking with him after completing the mission. He didn’t know where on earth he would go afterwards. The court −very clever, as things are− then showed him a photo of the inmate at the trial, in plain sight of everyone. Bárcenas looked at it for a second. And immediately approached the microphone to give his verdict:
—He has an unforgettable face.
Of the recordings, by the way, nothing is known.