The crazy — and luckily brief — story of ‘Sport Artillero’, the sports newspaper of the King of Cachopo

One day in 2018, Cristian was watching television at home and saw that a certain César Román Viruete, who was nicknamed “the King of Cachopo” and who was supposedly missing, had been arrested for the murder of a 25-year-old woman named Heidi Paz. He did not remember the face, since Román had also characterized himself as a Venezuelan waiter to go unnoticed in Zaragoza, “but when they said his name I thought it sounded very familiar,” explains this journalist, today employed in a technology company. He looked at his phone and his WhatsApp group of college friends was boiling: “Damn, isn’t this guy…?”

Yes, it was the guy who had briefly been his boss six years earlier, at an obscure sports newspaper of which there is no trace left on the internet: Sport Gunner. “We had no contract, no signed paper, nothing I could prove that we had passed through there,” he remembers.

In the multiple profiles that have been made of Román since his arrest, his multiple deceptions have been detailed, his time in Falangist circles, his time as a hotelier in which this Madrid native self-declared his cachopo as the best in Spain with a fictitious contest and, of course, the events that led to his disappearance after kill and dismember your partner. But nothing was known about this episode in which Román became editor of a sports newspaper, a task for which got a group of kids from 2nd year of Journalism into trouble.

That autumn afternoon in 2012, Cristian and some of his friends showed up in a semi-basement at number 7 Marqués de Leganés Street, a small street behind Gran Vía. “Javi, a classmate, had been there since the previous summer working on a digital called The Sting and told us that they were going to expand the Sports section to basketball, specifically to the ACB League,” he remembers. “They didn’t even interview us, they just we show up there and we got to work.” He managed to gather five or six people, with continuous comings and goings. Every morning they went to class and, shortly after eating, they showed up at the newsroom.

The first day, a 1.52 meter tall man was waiting for them there who spoke to them as if he had been in an editorial office since he was born. “The guy spoke well and tried to impress us by saying things related to journalism, for example by correcting something that a teacher had told us about the headlines,” says Alberto Ramírez, now head of Sports at El Confidencial and then one more of that troop of beardless people. at the service of Roman. “But even back then, when we didn’t know what we know today, you could see in the two sentences that really the guy I didn’t have much of an idea what he was saying.“.

That man also told them that in that newsroom smoking was allowed, despite the fact that the law prohibited it since 2005 in the workplace. However, could a table in the middle of the living room of a gloomy three-room apartment, where the other was the editorial office, be considered such a thing? The Sting And the last one is Román’s office? “I guess there was a bathroom somewhere,” says Ramírez. “He used with us a old dirty journalist stuff“For example, he told us that if we had to work on a Sunday, but the night before we had gotten involved with an aunt… then we could call him without a problem to tell him that we wouldn’t be coming.”

They worked from Monday to Sunday, because that journalism I didn’t understand schedules or holidays.nor labor rights, contracts or salaries.

But where had Román learned, who actually had less media experience than some of its editorsto speak like a veteran editor straight out of the movie The Fourth Estate?

This is how he studied Journalism

In his criminal biography, the King of Cachopo had left many places sowing debts and enemiesas this baptismal article of The country in 2018, but even those who cursed having crossed paths with him highlighted his ability to fool anyone, which is a form of intelligence. The guy had a world, a lot of talk and a certain general culture, he was able to convince anyone that the most requested telephone numbers in Spain were on his agenda.

His new employees were unaware then that Román had just returned to Madrid from Málaga, where justice was looking for him to respond to a string of complaints: he was sought by the workers of the business federation he set up, whom he left in the lurch owing thousands of euros, and the advertisers of Now Malagathe neighborhood newspaper that he launched with great fanfare to try to get closer to those who handled political power in the Costa del Sol capital.

After vampirizing the knowledge of how the right-wing digital business works, he tried to replicate it, but in a big way

Román never stitched without a thread, as he discovered. Armando Robles. The journalist from Malaga, director of the page Digital Alert, met him at that time, when he called him to interview him as a source for a topic about Josep Anglada and his far-right party, Platform for Catalunya. Anglada had had Román as a representative in Madrid. They ended up becoming friends and Robles invited him to write on his page: Román gave him what he wanted, good conservative stuff with Catholic seasoning and, sometimes, a few drops of own information on the paths of the CDSwith whom he even appeared as a substitute for the 2011 elections, when the party was renamed El Centro.

How the podcast told The King of Cachopo (Spotify, 2021), Román repeated with Robles a constant in his career: after having vampirized the knowledge about how a right-wing digital works, he tries to replicate it in a big way and with him sitting on the throne. “It didn’t last very long,” Robles recalled upset, “because he I could have made a digital in a humble waybut no, he had to hire five journalists whom he evidently did not pay.”

One of them was Javi, a young 1st year Journalism student at the Complutense, who one day saw a poster in his college offering summer internships in an unknown environment called The Sting.

Fall and fall of El Aguijón

In his first attempt as a press editor, in Now MalagaRomán applied a predictable business model: he started by hiring salespeople, whom he paid daily, and then he hired people to fill the website with news that they copied from the On that of Malaga Today. He made money from campaigns and banners But, as his employees discovered, that It was never used to pay rent or electricity, much less their workers’ payrolls. By the time the situation was unsustainable and they found the office sealed, Román was already had disappeared.

In The Sting I would use the same mode of operation, but on steroids. Their page began as a blogspot on December 3, 2011, but even in that larval state, the page boasted of having brands of certain prestige, such as Antonio Miguel Carmona, Andrés Abrastur o Melchor Miralles. It was enough to scratch a little to find some of them published in other media three weeks before. Months later, she began to shape her next creature, something he had initially been The Sports Sting, but to which Román wanted to give a greater boost. In theory, a new sports newspaper; In practice, five journalism students looking at each other in a basement.

In theory, a new sports newspaper; In practice, five journalism students looking at each other in a basement

The publishing company of all that was Arquero & Brull Associates, the pompous name that masked one of the eight companies in which Román, who is serving a 15-year sentence in Soto del Real, continues to appear as sole administrator. The company, in reality, was created years before by Luis Miguel Triguero Gómez, the most famous creator of fake companies in Spain, linked at the time to Gürtel and the same one as two years ago sold companies such as Hot Wheels Ibérica to Víctor de Aldama, the businessman involved in the Koldo plot. Román acquired it in September 2006.

“It’s true that the guy had skill,” recalls Javi. “He was a pirate and a hustler, but he saw some business there.” The editor remembers that Román overwhelmed them with his great ideas, which no one there was prepared to understand, and he peppered the speech with names of him such as the son of Adolfo Suárez, whom had supposedly joined his Anti-Corruption League, other spin off with which he did not get far. “Over time I began to unravel that what I wanted was to create a medium like all those that have come out later, that they get the institutional money and run“, Javi reasons. “Maybe that was his plan: to put his head into the world of sports, sensing that there was money to be made there.”

The writing at the bar

Javi had spent the summer in a rented office in Getafebut the editor of all that had decided to give it one more boost, that is, to set up a second means of communication in a free room at the end of the hallway.

“In one of his crazy derivatives, he decided that he wanted to have a sports media,” explains Javi, the boy to whom Román entrusted the day-to-day work. “Basically we spent the week clicking on tickers to keep the website updated and on the weekends we would cover the games.” Covering the games meant watching the game on television and reporting on it. “There he started to say that he was going to pay us“.

October 21 is the first day on which archive.org, the internet newspaper archive, recorded the existence of Sport Gunner.

“That was a bit like Tócame Roque’s house,” Cristian remembers. “The relationship with César on my part was little more than a hello and goodbyehe told me “you are going to do this or that, go ahead”, and come on, in the editorial office it was between little and nothing“.

The only reference that the editors who worked at that table had was their colleague Javi, simply because I was two months older than them. They asked Román if they would ever get paid something and they always received evasion: “Yes, no, next week we’ll see, next month for sure…”

They remember the King of Cachopo as an everlasting patron of Mesón O’ Luar, the bar on San Bernardo Street that was closest to them. “When I was happy invited everyone to the bar“recalls Javi, who today works at an economic newspaper.

“When he was happy he invited everyone to the bar”

Ramírez remembers the same thing: “It happened more time in the bar downstairs than in the newsroom.” When revisiting the type of articles they published then, the journalist raises an eyebrow when he remembers one of his own, titled simply: Río Ferdinand turns 33 years old.

None of them joined the list of victims embezzled by the King of Cachopo, they simply left early and never claimed a euro: “We spent about a month in Sport Gunnerthen already We agreed and we all left at the same time.“says Javi. “He didn’t tell us anything, I think he saw it coming,” confirms Alberto.

The medium, however, It didn’t close that day. He continued wandering for a while longer, until mid-2015, uploading news copied from other sites without signing. By then, Román had already fulfilled his journalistic vocation and was preparing the opening of A Cañada Delic Experience, the Lavapiés cider house that earned it the nickname with which he would go down in history. First as famous and soon after as infamous.