2023-10-16 03:50:00
Since the end of the coronavirus pandemic, vehicle theft increased considerably in the city of Córdoba and its surrounding areas. For this reason, the Attorney General’s Office ordered, in June 2021, to concentrate investigations into criminal gangs dedicated to this type of crimes in the District 1 Prosecutor’s Office Shift 4, headed by Rubén Caro. One of the investigations was also led by the Deputy Prosecutor, Daniela Maluf.
Since then, the result of the work of Caro and his team, in coordination with the Department of Automobile Theft Investigations and the Judicial Unit, was the dismantling of six organizations dedicated to removing cars from public roads or parking lots of shopping centers, ‘cool’ them in a workshop or garage, and then introduce them to the market with apocryphal documentation. True SMEs dedicated to the sale of stolen vehicles, which demand a smooth distribution of roles and complicities.
m were processedmore than a dozen files con 108 charges For the crime of illicit association, half of the accused remain in preventive detention, convicted or awaiting trial. There are also several fugitives, that is, accused with an arrest warrant. This last aspect is not minor because throughout the investigations it was detected that those who fell following moving into the shadows of Justice, in reality continued operating and the arrest of part of the gang did not affect their continuity.
The six identified gangs acted in different ways, although it is possible to recognize a common matrix: following a car was taken off the public road, it was ‘cooled’ – it was taken out of circulation – for a time, while apocryphal documentation was prepared and the buyer was there for delivery. They managed a million-dollar flow of money.
Although the cars were stolen in this Capital and Greater Córdoba, many were sold in towns in the interior of the province. Also in the cities of Catamarca and Santiago del Estero. In the first of these provinces, a police chief remains detained. He, along with two brothers, had even enabled a line of savings plans for the sale of cars. None of these organizations were linked to or used the front of a car dealership.
The majority of the members of the gangs dismantled in the last two years are close to being tried or have already been convicted in abbreviated trials, where minimum but effective sentences were agreed upon, following confessing their respective participations.
What cars were stolen. Therein lies one of the differences between the bands. Some only specialized in getting auto parts to order. Others were dedicated to selling cars.
The stolen vehicles were high and mid-range: Chevrolet brand, Onix, Sonic and Aveo models; Toyota Hilux; Ford Ecosport; Chery Tiggo; the Fiat Mobi, Siena and Uno; Peugeot 207; Renault Sandero, and Volkswagen Gol and Caddy were some of those located in the procedures.
TIRE THEFT
One of the organizations, with eight defendants, had as its objective the theft of tires. It operated in Córdoba Capital, Los Reartes, Anisacate, Villa General Belgrano, San Antonio de Arredondo, Carlos Paz, Villa de Pocho, Jesús María and Colonia Caroya. Once removed from the vehicles, they were sold in a legal business.
This gang used inhibitors and Pandora equipment, which interfere with alarms and/or copy their passwords to enable criminals to access cars and garage lift gates.
When the investigators managed to find this organization, a new investigation was opened into another gang with similar characteristics, which currently has 15 accused of illicit association and 12 for possession of a firearm and concealment.
or the files have the characteristic of having detected more than 50 incidents with injured individuals who came forward to claim their vehicles. Thanks to this participation it was possible to verify how the thefts were carried out and the vehicle was entered for subsequent sale.
On the other hand, there were also scammed people who bought the cars in good faith, without knowing that they were stolen and their identification was altered.
In trouble. On the long list of hundreds of defendants is Evaristo Alvarez, son of the renowned comedian ‘Negro’ Alvarez. It is not the first time that he has been arrested. He had previously been in preventive detention for family violence. When he regained his freedom he joined one of the car theft gangs and there he was arrested once more, a condition in which he remains today.
CATAMARCAN POLICE INVOLVED IN ONE OF THE GANGS
On October 3, Control Judge Anahí Hampartzounian sentenced 10 members of a gang led by Hector Fabián Astudillo (50), who was sentenced to five years in effective prison.
The rest of the members of the illegal association convicted were: Gerardo Salvador Acosta, Julio Alejandro Acosta, José Antonio Burgos, Carla Alejandra Milano, César Adrián Moyano, Diego José Fidani and Juan Andrés Salcedo, who received a sentence of three years in effective prison, and Edgardo César Luján, three years of suspended prison. Finally, Carlos Alberto Soriareceived a sentence of three years and one month in prison, with a declaration of recidivism and it was unified with the sentence previously imposed by the 9th Crime Chamber in five years of prison with effective compliance.
Police officer Cristian Acosta did not enter the abbreviated trial. An appeal from his defense keeps his case under analysis in the Accusation Chamber.
In the ruling that sentenced 10 people, Judge Hampartzounian stressed the importance of the content of the wiretaps. “The dialogues (…) show – with unusual clarity – the nature and modus operandi of the organization, its members, the territorial expansion of the illicit operations carried out, its objectives and purposes that arise from the literal nature of the conversations”.
“The tenor of the captured dialogues revealed – in addition to the circumstances set out – the regularity with which the band carried out the plans drawn up, due to the familiarity and the manner in which the interlocutors treated each other, together with the assiduity of communications”, Indian.
How they operated. Astudillo was the head of the organization, he gave the orders to store the vehicles, he commissioned the preparation of adulterated documentation, and he procured the apocryphal license plates. Soria’s function was to prepare the documentation and apocryphal plates.
But, in addition, in an operation carried out on April 21 of last year, several weapons were seized, which led to a breakdown of the file for which he was already convicted. Moyano hid the vehicles that Astudillo gave him in a warehouse in Montecristo, until it was time to transport them to their final destination, in the province of Catamarca. Salcedo was another person in charge of cooling the cars in a mechanical workshop he owned, located in the Ituzaingó neighborhood. Luján was in charge of transporting the vehicles with trout documentation to Catamarca.
Cristian Acosta is a police officer from Catamarca. Together with his two brothers, Gerardo and Alejandro, he had set up a stolen vehicle business in that province.
When analyzing the operation, the judge highlighted that “it necessarily involved having a wide network of contacts and relationships that allowed, for example, taking vehicles outside the provincial territory to later market them in different areas, making the detection of the maneuver and an eventual recovery certainly unlikely. of what was stolen.
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