NOBODY F**KS WITH THE JESÚS [Part 1]

The black and white newsreel depicts catastrophe. A crowd parts, unsure of where to look as the two ashen-faced men carry out the dead body. It is barefoot, covered in a sheet, maybe a tablecloth. Though this footage is grainy and 50 years old, the bovine shock that hangs in the air is still palpable. In the rubble-strewn foreground, we see a tumult of helpers and mourners. In the distance, the exposed foundations of a tower block are visible, standing next to the crane that had erected it—which has now become a gallows. Like some cruel allegory, we are witnessing the dreams of one man, suspended in time, and the brutal realities that followed.

My father’s side of the family are ardent Atlético de Madrid fans. Growing up, it felt like Jesús Gil y Gil was almost one of us, a godfather, always present on the living room TV with a quotable quip, his face hanging from every newspaper kiosk like a grinning Baron Greenback. If you follow football, you’ve probably heard of him. If you’re into Spanish football, it’s a given. While mayor of Marbella, he infamously hosted a live TV show from a jacuzzi surrounded by bikini-clad women (with a national screen-share of 40%). Fidel Castro gifted him a crocodile which he named Fury and adorned with a gold chain. (He would later threaten to feed his Atlético players to it). And though he died in 2004, his funeral attended by 20,000, to this day, on the streets of Marbella, you will hear him spoken about very much in the present tense. “He’s in Brazil, on a beach somewhere…” For the average former second-hand car salesman, any of these exploits would amount to indicia of a life well-lived. For Gil, they are but mere anecdotes. He is one of those rare men: whatever you’ve heard is almost certainly true. But it’s the stuff you haven’t heard about that will make your eyes pop.

 Gil was enormous in all senses, as though a thousand different luxuries and pleasures had snowballed into one man, glued together with corruption, forming a single gargantuan open-shirted, gold-chain-wearing, totem to naked ambition. Introducing him is an exigent task. Not because he’s a particularly complicated man to comprehend, at least on the surface, it’s more that there’s just so much of him—it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ll defer to the legendary Carlos Herrera who, in December 1995, on his eponymous talk show, described him thusly:
“Tonight, we have a man that doesn’t stop talking… even when underwater. The Vatican is thinking of naming him the patron saint of referees. What hasn’t been said about him? Direct. Loudmouth. Effective. Without taboo. Brilliant. Unconscionable. He likes to stomp in puddles and he does this without any complex… He wins the favour of people as though he’s playing Monopoly. He’s triumphed in business, politics, and now, also football. He’s mayor of the city with more Rolls Royce-owners than anywhere on earth except London and he’s proprietor of a team that could challenge for the title this year. He is, Jesús Gil y Gil.”

So emerged a mayor, a president, an owner—a man who would soon (if he wasn’t already) be looking libidinously towards the presidency of Spain itself. Gil stood there, his behemothic blazer hanging off his torso, as if someone had dressed a boulder in an expensive suit that morning, and, with a serpentiform smile, bathed himself in the réclame he loved so much.

Herrera’s first enquiry touched on his interviewee’s big break in business, doing up and flogging second-hand cars but Gil, as he so often did, viewed the question not as a blank to fill in, but as a trampoline from which to launch into another charismatic anecdote. “The truth is, I came to Madrid as a 17-year-old, thin as a skeleton. I moved into a brothel, I didn’t know it was a brothel, but the madam offered me the room for free if I kept her books. I was innocent, I was tender, I knew nothing. I was going to be a vet… But I left veterinary studies because when I saw a horse chucking up blood, I fainted. So, I took up economics instead.”

We’re left to ponder an improbable parallel universe wherein the tender Dr. Jesús Gil spent his life spaying and neutering pets. Spain would have been a very different place. Not just for Marbella and its skyline. Not just for Atlético Madrid, or club football in its entirety. Nor for the nation’s politics as a whole. But for the 58 people who died on the 15th of June, 1969. Luxury. Success. Defiance. Corruption. Fascism. Sex. Even death itself. All these elements orbited around Gil, sucked in by the gravitational pull of his charm, like so many planets in a solar system of avarice. He was a remarkable man, despite his protestations, a poster child for populism. Gil understood the value of masquerading in mediocrity and wore the mask of joe schmo convincingly, despite the axiomatic incongruity of being a wealthy property developer who owned a private jet, a pet crocodile and stables (he was fond of kissing his horses). “I’m not a saviour. I don’t condescend,” he said on June 15th 1991, the day he became mayor of Marbella. “I’m just one of you.” But what was he beneath the mask, beneath all that bluster?

(Credit: Pablo de la Fuente | Unsplash)

On Jesús Gil’s Wikipedia page, his life is split into three categories Business, Politics, and Football (followed by death). While the lines between these three estates often blur in Spain, they stand neatly as the pillars in the life of Gil. “He understood that the mix of real estate development, plus politics, plus football, would be an explosive one,” said Carlos Castresana, the public prosecutor that would eventually put him in jail. But this realisation would come much later. For all the éclat of Gil’s later life, his story has far less conspicuous beginnings.

 Gil was born on the 12th of March, 1933, in Burgo de Osma, a small, cobbled town quietly nestled around its 13th Century cathedral. Here he entered the world one week after the elections in Germany that would see Hitler effectively attain dictatorial powers, and three years before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. But while he was born into a generation of upheaval, it was his mother, Guadalupe Gil Hernando, that would shape his destiny above all else. Born to labourers in a tiny village, she was known as La Guadalupe (The Guadalupe), a sturdy woman that lived to 91, dying two years before her son. In 1931, at the age of 19, she married one of the richest men in Burgo de Osma. Gerardo Gil Elvira had a business fixing potholes and laying roads by donkey. He was a widower, with three daughters, and 25 years her senior. Guadalupe would later tell Gil biographer and journalist Juan Luis Galiacho: “I admit I married for money. I never loved my husband. I would’ve married a dog or a cat.”

Within two years she would bear her first child, naming him Gregorio Jesús. Given that she happened to have the same surname as her husband —women in Spain do not take their husband’s name in marriage— custom would presuppose, therefore, her firstborn would be christened Gregorio Jesús Gil Gil. Yet Guadalupe would, perhaps rather portentously, eschew convention and pointedly introduce a single letter —y (and)— between her son’s identical surnames, as though two blue-blooded families had interlaced their illustriousness, a union of stately consequence. Her son would not just be the mere offspring of a road-layer from a sleepy cow-town. Nay, her son would be Gregorio Jesús Gil y Gil, someone of two eminent blood lines, someone who would go on to achieve things, someone who would matter. This single letter aspired, it reached for more, and in cognominating her son thusly, it was almost as if Guadalupe had predestined the boy to an entire lifetime of PR and puffery. Small-town gossip can be cruel and the particulars of Guadalupe’s biography are not widely known but in this one detail, we can, perhaps, begin to envisage the manner in which she came to be known as La Fanfarrona, The Braggart, a nickname her eldest son would go on to inherit.

“His temperament, his insistence, his black marketeer mentality, that all came from his mother,” Galiacho told Vanity Fair. “Without her, [Jesús Gil] would have been less than zero. She was the one that created his persona of a businessman.”

Three children later and seven years after marrying her husband, she would have more than gossip to worry about. After a series of ill-informed business decisions, Gerardo Gil died in 1938. The little he bequeathed would be claimed by the three daughters from his first marriage, leaving Guadalupe, a widow at just 27, almost nothing with which to raise her three young children in the midst of a civil war. Jesús, then 5, would later recall a life lesson his mother gave him (in those hard days, one can imagine her whispering it just as much to herself): “Don’t let anyone step on you and have faith in yourself. Remember, you are a Gil.”

With her husband’s business now gone, La Guadalupe took out a loan of 25 pesetas and set up a tobacco kiosk in Burgo de Osma. It would soon become her command centre for a burgeoning black-market business. From there, she took over the town’s supply deliveries—wheat, salt, firewood—later seeing she could rent out the spare carts. Slowly, she grew her trade, eventually recovering her husband’s paving business. Franco’s fascistic Spain was in its infancy by now and new roads in good nick, as they do, took on political significance. Nascent regimes are ripe for clandestine kickbacks and it’s in this time that Guadalupe began to understand the bureaucratic ecosphere of local government. (I wonder, was her son watching?) She married again in 1942, already completely economically independent by then. “Just as with my previous husband,” she told Galiacho. “I never managed to love him.”

Fifty years later, on Carlos Herrera’s chat show, Jesús Gil would say of his mother: “I still have to call her three times a day because she thinks I’m still a little boy. She prays a lot. Lately, she prays now for Atleti. Same as my wife. But my mother, every day, she goes to twenty masses. Minimum. All the money I give her, she spends in church. But there’s no talking to her. And when I lose? She tells me: get rid of them!”

With a chuckle, Carlos Herrera would clarify: “You mean she says you should get rid of the (Atlético de Madrid) manager, get rid of the players?”

By then her son was riding high, having already won the mayorship of Marbella by a landslide four years before and was on the cusp of the crowning achievement of his career in football, winning the double with Atlético de Madrid in the 95-96 season. “Get rid of them all,” Gil replied, mimicking his mother with a sly grin. “They are tricking you.”

When he married in 1961, La Guadalupe did not attend her son’s wedding and they went several months without speaking. According to Juan Luis Galiacho, this would be the only thing that would ever distance Gil from his mother. For someone who took two husbands but loved neither, perhaps it’s no surprise that she didn’t understand her son’s devotion to María de los Angeles Marín Cobo, a pretty green-eyed bakery clerk. “Guadalupe wanted her son to marry upwards,” Galiacho told Vanity Fair. “In an effort to scupper the romance, she sent an anonymous letter assuring her firstborn was lazy, dishonest, without two coins to rub together. A cousin wrote the letter but Guadalupe dictated the thing. Gil only had to read the first line to know who the real author had been. She always despised her daughter-in-law. That relationship never improved but eventually they became accustomed to living like that.”
María Cobo would go on to tolerate almost every one of her husband’s antics, even when he would kiss his prized horse, Imperioso, during TV interviews. “Don’t worry, woman. I love you more than the horse,” he would wink. María would roll her eyes. “There is no difference between me and that horse.” More often than not, when asked for her opinion on her husband’s latest scandal, she would reply: “My husband talks enough for the both of us.”

Why exactly Guadalupe disliked María so decidedly isn’t known. Clearly, she held financial stability in matrimony above feeling. Maybe it was that she couldn’t accept her son had found something she hadn’t. That he had taken a different path. Or perhaps it was simply that Guadalupe never forgot the hardships in her own past, the wounds of surviving those days never healing. For all her son’s success, she knew how sharply fate turned—shark-fin quick.

We’re left to wonder, then, if she foresaw how high her son’s star would climb (and fall) when he left Burgo de Osma as that tender 17-year-old, afraid of blood. Unlike his father, who had made his fortune thanks to the humble donkey, Gil vomited when having to practice on them. Did Guadalupe hold her head in her hands when he told her he no longer wanted to be a vet? Did she march straight to mass when he dropped out of economics too? Or maybe, given her moxie in bootleg markets, she responded positively to her son’s decision to get into the world of business? Whatever her take, it probably won’t come as much of a surprise that Gil’s first venture would entail cutting a few corners. Renting garages in the neighbourhood of Legazpi, and later Vallecas, today a hard-left-leaning working class area, (and home to one of the finest little football clubs in Spain), he would buy old vehicles, do them up, at least cosmetically, and flog them on. If the gears would grind, he’d pour sawdust to silence the problem. To quote Mickey O’Neil: you bought it like you saw it. In this way, Gil would soon be able to purchase his first apartment. He would later tell the story of making his first million and sleeping on a bed of his own money that night, like some second-rate Spanish Scrooge McDuck.

Perhaps, born of a childhood of constant contretemps, he quickly developed a taste for the finer things in life. Good food. Expensive suits. Gold chains. Night clubs. Women. And how to woo them? At that time, it was said that he was driving one of three American convertibles in Spain—his was red (of course it was) and he called it The Meat Wagon (of course he did).  

By 1953, at the age of 20, Gil’s business had become a small empire. One imagines his innocence and tenderness turned to dust, replaced by street smarts inherited from his mother, sharpening his savvy with every deal he closed. Jesús Gil was making a name for himself. That he was doing well was beyond doubt. He could’ve stopped there. If wealth and success had been the goal, he had achieved that in a few short years, making his first million by 20, his métier straddling both cars and property. But at some point, as the Spanish say, it starts to fit a little small on him. It’s as if he goes to bed Jerry Lundegaard, and wakes up Gordon Gekko. What provoked this shift in weltanschauung is unclear. Perhaps it was a tête-à-tête with his mother. Or perhaps it was the motorbike accident he suffered in 1954 that disfigured his face and almost killed him. (Guadalupe would travel down from the village to the sanatorium, run by Carmelite nuns, and encourage the doctor there tending to Jesús Gil to give him the best possible medical attention thusly: If my son dies, I’ll take this knife in my bag and cut you open.)

Whatever the cause of his epiphany, at some point Gil starts to think a little bigger than girls, cocktails, and flogging dodgy motors. Amid the hue and cry of a construction boom, he raised sufficient capital to speculate on land, buying around Madrid and its periphery. “His acquisition of Los Ángeles de San Rafael was a visionary move,” said Galiacho. It would be this move that would catapult him towards the persona that would be soon become, towards his great victories in politics and sport, and toward the tragedies that would inevitably follow.

An hour’s drive from Madrid, across mountains bestrewn with juniper groves of ibex and Pyrenean Oak forests watched over by imperial eagles, one reaches the plains of Old Castile. This land, characterised by medieval hamlets and rocky, sweeping panoramas, is likely best-known for Segovia, the beautiful provincial capital with its iconic Roman aqueduct. But it is also home to another, altogether less visited town. And it exists because of Jesús Gil y Gil. “I am, or at least I see myself, as a creator,” said Gil himself on television in 1968. “I want to create a city for 20,000 inhabitants. The aim is to bring the sea and the mountain together.” Luckily, the mountains were already in place, they didn’t have to be imported (though one feels Gil would have dreamt up some way). A ski station was built with chairlifts with service to the nearest mountain, La Mujer Muerta, so called for its shape which resembles a dead woman. The sea, however, was some 350km away to the north. Farther in all other directions. Gil, of course, had a plan. “We’ll have an exclusive reservoir so residents can practice nautical sport activities at our yacht club. It will be admired by all.”

So it proved.

“It was the city of his dreams,” said Gil’s son, Óscar Gil Marín on the HBO series The Pioneer (2019). “He wanted to build a reservoir, a dam, to create pharaonic projects… Imagine, he gets there and sees only rural land that has absolutely nothing but cows, located almost two or three hours from Madrid.” On the Los Ángeles de San Rafael website today, the promotional video shows a woman in a bikini drenched in a slow-motion torrent of water. There is a close-up of a red cocktail. Young people in good shape splashing each other in a pool. Even a horse is kissed. One imagines Jesús Gil would have approved. Feel. Live. New experiences. The video drips dynamism, selling a place of exhilaration, joie de vivre, the abandon of a summer holiday. Indeed, the town still boasts golf courses. Paintballing. A pirate-themed restaurant and a ‘multi-adventure centre’ advertising jet skis, 4x4s, and banana boats. The infrastructure for summer capers is all in place. There are also some grandiose architectural touches, hinting at its bombastic creator’s character, dotted haphazardly through town. Two stone angels holding swords guard the entrance. A vaguely Soviet bronze statue in homage to womankind crowns a roundabout. Yet it is also a distinctly ordinary place. On River Street, the Coming Soon posters outside the cinema are blank. Next door, the patio of a bar is almost full, its clientele, mostly of retirement age, enjoying libations on two converted parking spaces covered by a canopy, the awning advertising drains and gutters. Los Ángeles de San Rafael is a pleasant gated community, smartly middle-class in parts, hedges and stone walls along quiet avenues. Streets are all named, almost as an afterthought, for far away locations—Naples Street, Paraguay Street, France Avenue. It is home to some 12,000 people, yet it feels sparse somehow. A little lonely. From almost any angle, mountains and plains can be seen beyond. Wherever one stands, one might view outside. It’s hard to imagine that such a town could act as the path along which a man might follow his destiny to greatness. Or that, at the same time, it could be the greased slope descending to a ruinous calamity. For Gil, it was both.

Despite this, if one looks for them, there are traces of him are everywhere in Los Ángeles de San Rafael. A small tile plaque on the foot of another vaguely Soviet concrete sculpture reads: To Jesús Gil y Gil, creator of this complex, where love meets the eternal. On the northern fringes of the town sits the Ciudad Deportiva Wanda, a sports centre where Atlético de Madrid establishes its summer training camp each year. (Gil would, of course, go on to become club president and later owner, while Wanda is the Chinese conglomerate that acquired naming rights to Atlético’s stadium in 2017). And on Venice Avenue, a bust of Gil sits in the centre of a rustic stone roundabout, kept company in the eternal by thriving lavender bushes, a slight smile molded into the ample bronze face. The inscription behind it reads: To Don Jesús Gil y Gil, for his excitement and passion, whose dream of a city is today a reality. Personally, it strikes me as strange that such a man could be held in reverence here, even if he did create the place—as though he were some sort of fertile yet vengeful god that must not be angered, else he taketh away.

 “He realised that Spaniards were starting to go on holiday,” said Gil’s younger brother, Javier Alfonso Gil. “To own a second residence. So he dreamt up a living complex. We went to Caja Segovia and Banco Hispanoamericano (former banks) asking for loans. He would project for them a reality. Look, he’d say. This is a reality. But it was absolutely only a utopia.”

The ‘Partial Plan’ for urbanization of the farmland known as El Carrascal was approved on the 28th of September, 1967. “He was already overseeing an enormous success,” continued Javier Alfonso. “He was selling lots of parcels and getting constant visits. Los Ángeles was starting to earn renown before the… problems that occurred. So, he starts hiring all the best artists. The best acts in Spain came to Los Ángeles on the weekends and people visited.” (Already, it seemed Gil understood the power of entertainment, something he would exploit to a massive extent, as though some crafty Caesar). “That was a golden epoch. He already had two restaurants but he wanted a new one, a bigger one—expand, expand, expand.”

On the 15th of June, 1969, Gil agreed a deal with food multinational SPAR to host a lunch and convention for some 300,000 pesetas (around £20,000 today). Given the high volume of SPAR employees (numbering in their hundreds), the lunch required the use of both the original restaurant and the new one, which was still under construction. Originally due to be completed at the end of July, Gil accelerated the schedule to mid-June, in time for his payday.

But by the morning of the convention, the cement had not yet set, and the mortar was still soft. Construction had taken place right up until the night before, the workers covering walls and partitions with tarps to hide unfinished areas. As a result, at 2:30pm, lunch would begin in a restaurant which had undergone no kind of official safety inspection whatsoever. Gil was in attendance initially, along with the deputy mayor of Segovia and the mayor of El Espinar. 150 people took their seats at several long tables, in an area of some 320 square metres. At 2:45 pm, everyone stood for the priest to bless the lunch. But there would be no blessing. The floor collapsed and the deck beams fell away, crushing a large number of people now below. “I remember June 15th well,” said Julio César Fernández, a journalist and former colleague of Gil (he had hired artists to perform in the town) and who was present in the restaurant. “When I arrived, people were already there. Whole families were there. It collapsed. When we fell down, until the first heads of survivors became visible, completely white, the silence was sepulchral. Silence. Not one cry. Nothing. Absolute silence… And then the mess began.”

(Credit: Mehmet Can Atik | Unsplash)

The dead lay in piles, the wounded crying for help. Later, there would be reports of looting amid the Dantean carnage and screaming. It would be the cook, Nemesio Santos Meco, that would first inform Gil of the collapse who, at that moment, was in one of the urbanization offices. “I have an image of my father surrounded by a mass of people,” said his son, Jesús Gil Marín. “He was trying to give instructions on how to recover bodies.” Having being pulled from the rubble, Julio César Fernández recalls a less decisive figure. “When I was taken out of there, I found myself face to face with Jesús. He asked me do you think there are any dead? I recall my reply. Just go over there, have a look for yourself. And I never saw him again.”

It was the mayor of El Espinar, who had survived the collapse by virtue of sitting on the VIP table which was supported by independent pillars, that gave notice to Adolfo Suárez, the then Civil Governor of Segovia. Suárez had only been in the role for a year and would go on to become the first President of Spanish democracy after the death of Franco. But in 1969, arriving at Los Ángeles, he could scarcely believe his eyes. Exactly what happened next is not known but some kind of fight or tussle broke out between Suárez and Gil leading to the latter being locked in a room under custody of the notorious Civil Guard. Perhaps due to the fight, or perhaps for fear of Gil being lynched. Either way, the two would never bury the hatchet.

In the following days, as the number of dead increased, Jesús Gil (and several colleagues), appeared in court. Before the Magistrate, Gil took responsibility for the compensation that would be due to the victims and their families but refused to acknowledge his guilt. He never would. During proceedings, it came to light that Gil had failed to request the necessary certificate for the expansion of the restaurant from the local hospitality union. Nor had he requested the necessary permit from the Ministry of Tourism. Nor had he requested approval relating to electricals from Segovia’s Delegation of Industry (electricals which had not, at any rate, even been installed). “He was not responsible [for the collapse],” said his son, Óscar Gil Marín. “It just came upon him. It’s like a plane accident. I don’t think, back then, my father knew the construction risks.” Despite this claim, during the court case, a letter was given into evidence from his surveyor, José María del Pozo Cubero, who wrote the following to Gil:

To take this seriously, you must hire an architect who analyses the structure and then reviews the work that is being carried out, so that he takes responsibility for it, [in order to avoid], when construction of a party room or restaurant is carried out, that some misfortune could happen. There is still time to repair this. You shouldn’t handle this project yourself. I can no longer act as your surveyor and, as consequence, no longer run this project.

The letter would exonerate del Pozo. Gil, having ignored the warning, (and others, such as from Segovia’s School of Architecture) was not spared. He was sentenced to five years in prison and obliged to pay a fortune in compensation to the victims and their families. It was one Francoism’s biggest catastrophes. For a man who’d made his first million at 20, Gil had risked it all for the sake of a few thousand pesetas and now almost 60 people were dead. Why he’d roll the dice when he was busy selling land and, presumably, earning far more significant sums, is hard to understand. Maybe those big loans necessitated swift repayment. Or perhaps cutting corners was simply baked into the cake. It had worked for him so far. But cut enough corners and, sooner or later, your house falls down. Los Ángeles de San Rafael was less than two years old on the day of the tragedy. Gil had achieved his dream and built a town. It had been the admiration of all. For a short while, at least. But that dream became a nightmare. As for that compulsion to expand, expand, expand? It was now confined to a 3x4-metre cell.

(Credit: Deleece Cook | Unsplash)

Gil entered Segovia’s jail in 1971. Decades later, he would recall his time in the clink with the legendary Jesus Quintero—you may have seen him losing his professional cool in the laughing man meme that went around the world (the original, incidentally, is far funnier than any of the spoofs that have been made). “What’s jail good for?” Quintero would ask.
“Jail is good for nothing,” Gil replied. “It’s a warehouse of human beings where you only create more delinquents.”
Quintero stayed on the topic. “Were you a leader in jail?”
Gil responded unflinchingly. “I’ve always been a leader.”

As with Carlos Herrera some years earlier, these succinct questions were met with sprawling, Cervantean answers. Gil didn’t do ripostes, he told stories. “I’ll tell you, the first time I was in jail—I’ll tell you a grave matter—it was for nine months after the collapse in Los Ángeles de San Rafael. It wasn’t my fault or anything but okay. So, a lot of people died. I had to go buying off corpse after corpse. It’s very harsh to say it like that. At first, they [the families of the victims] don’t want to hear it. Afterwards, it becomes how much? After that, it becomes no, that’s not enough. So anyway, in jail I was in with the lazy and the crooks. Those are the inmates I was with. One guy had raped a little girl but the mother had consented to it. Another guy was told by his wife that he had a better time with the donkey and the pig than with her. So, look. Spain has these people too, we shouldn’t close our eyes.” Quintero nodded indifferently at yet another peregrination, then checked his notes, about to ask another question. But Gil, as he so often did, launched into another anecdote in order to keep his audience’s attention. “We suffered terribly with the cold in jail. You couldn’t stop it with boots or coats or, that cold would get into your bones and you would die. So, I had to make an agreement with the priest. I said to him, there’s 80 of us. If you want us to go to mass, you let me run things on the inside. You bring us firewood and a stove, and every one of us will congregate. And God forgive us, we all went. Now look, I’m a Catholic. Maybe I don’t practise much but I’m the one who’s made the most churches in Spain. I’m up to nine churches. Go and ask the bishop in Malaga, you’ll see. Because I’m a believer and that. So, yeah, [in jail] we all went to congregate like little lambs, the priest couldn’t believe it. The first day, he didn’t have enough communion wafers. We had to split them four ways.” Quintero, shaking his head, had to suppress his laughter.

Gil had painted a picture of hardship in prison where he was forced to survive on his wits, surrounded by zoophiles and pederasts, making deals to warm the bones of inmates, all the while bringing them closer to God. Better the sinner that repenteth and all that. But was it true?

“Life in prison wasn’t hard for Gil. They set up an office for him, he played cards with the guards,” said Juan Luis Galiacho. As he wrote in El Cierre Digital: “He turned his cell, with a typewriter and carpet included, into an office serving as a branch of his business, a business that he did not intend to abandon. Thus, from prison he continued to hire workers and direct the running of the Los Ángeles de San Rafael complex.” Jesús Gil Marín, his eldest son, also derogates the Count of Monte Cristo story of bread and water, telling HBO: “At that time, Cándido was the best restaurant in Segovia and they brought meals to my father in jail every single day.” Inside, Gil became a foreman of sorts, divvying up wine, tobacco, coffee, and quickly establishing himself as a popular figure. These freedoms meant that Gil was able to organise meetings with prisoners and officials. “At siesta time,” wrote Galiacho in El Cierre Digital. “When the other inmates were confined to their cells, Gil gathered his guests in his ‘dining room’ and doled out seafood and roasts. It was how he kept the prison under control.”

But while Gil occupied himself in the slammer with the running of his business and ensuring the body of Christ passed the lips of his fellow inmates each week, his mother was on a very different mission. Though Gil had only been sentenced to (an exceedingly lenient) five years for reckless negligence, this punishment was unacceptable to La Guadalupe. Her philosophy in life was don’t let anyone step on you and she felt that the state had very much stepped on her son. She would meet with Pilar Franco, sister of the dictator. She would meet with a cardinal and archbishop of Madrid. Several ministers. Her grovelling letters were received at the highest echelons of Spanish power. As far as she was concerned, to quote John Turturro’s show-stealing cameo in The Big Lebowski: “Nobody fucks with The Jesus.” In February 1972, just under two years before being spectacularly smoked by ETA, Franco’s right-hand man and president of the government, Luis Carrero Blanco pardoned Jesús Gil y Gil. He had served only four months, less than a month for every fourteen people that lost their lives in his restaurant. “She is the one that saved him always,” Juan Luis Galiacho told Vanity Fair.

But free or not, his name was in ruins. Not to mention, he owed millions in victim compensation. What Jesús Gil needed now was a way to wash his reputation clean. What he needed now was a way to make a lot of money and fast. What he needed was a mug’s game. What he needed was football.

(Credit: Alberto Frías | Unsplash)

Part Two of Nobody F**cks with the Jesús will be out soon.