- Pandemic: Paco 'el Pocero' dies from coronavirus
The biography of Francisco Hernando (Madrid, 1945-2020), popularly known as 'El Pocero', ventured in its subtitle that he would die the day he stopped working. Perhaps that is why, because it was now in its lowest business hours, the coronavirus has taken it in a withering way.
Paco 'El Pocero' had a movie life. He was born in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Madrid, in a "shed" on Calle Cantueso de Tetuán, and when he was just three years old he had to move with his family to an even more humble home: a patio of his uncle in Pinos Bajas street that had no rooms or kitchen.
That space was covered with uralite and he lived there for five years, crowded with his parents, the pitman Pedro Hernando and his wife Filomena, and their four brothers. He collected cereals in the lots that would house the Plaza de Castilla, acted as a delivery man for a butcher shop on Calle Goya and got his first source of income by carrying pitchers of water next to a hydrant in the Vallecas neighborhood and later selling water with a car . Of course, never again, he repeated with crushing pride, he had to ask for alms.
He did not get his first salary until he was hired by the construction company Urbis to do as his father, a well-man, in the Moratalaz neighborhood. Then he went down to the bowels of the Glorieta de Quevedo, where he took out with a collector the earth left over from the construction of the sewers in the area and was imbued with a smell that "would not leave him for months."
"I know Madrid better because of the sewers than above," he used to boast as he wiped away the tears that came from an eye disease that dragged on from those years of incessant movement through the subsoil.
The sewers became his springboard and he earned the first million of his life by solving the problem that put a Villaverde gas station on the ropes, which almost closed because its tanks had water leaks.
'The passion to build'
He always apologized saying that he could not even sign the dedication of the copies of the hagiography that he gave to all his friends, entitled The passion to build , because he had no studies and had never read a book. He justified himself by alluding to the fact that the struggle for subsistence prevented him from training but that, thanks to his passion for work, he had come to sit at the same table, on his brand new Clarena yacht, next to King Don Juan Carlos, in the crystal clear waters from Mallorca. In the appointment he caused with the monarch, he waited for him with a watch and seafood brought the same day from Galicia. Don Juan Carlos rejected the gift and ended up accepting it after pleading with Hernando that it was not a gift as a King but as a "friend".
Always with a bottle of Vega Sicilia and a plate of caviar in front , which became an icon of his business success and with which he always entertained his diners. To the extent that he once contacted the Russian supplier of the great Spanish fortunes to get all the annual production and become the key player in obtaining this product in our country.
He made the leap to construction when he was 20 years old, but he started earning real money transporting merchandise at the birth of Mercamadrid . He mounted a fleet of trucks and concrete mixers, managed for the first time to live in a house with a shower and at the age of 40 he bought the first yacht, Lady Monica , named after his daughter, for which he paid out 1,000 million pesetas at the time .
But his great biblical dream would come much later, when in the presence of his family, almost like a prophet, he planted himself in the desert that surrounded the Toledo town of Seseña and said that he would build a city there. So it was.
Stage in Seseña
He baptized it for posterity as Residencial Francisco Hernando , put a statue of his parents in a gazebo and that mass of brick seen emerging from nowhere made him abandon anonymity. He projected the largest urbanization seen by the times at kilometer 33 of the Andalusian highway: 13,500 homes . And he did it in his own way: as he always lost the dream of getting into debt, he bought the concrete mixers and the cranes freehand so that he owed nothing to anyone.
In 2006, he gave EL MUNDO the first interview of his professional career at his headquarters in Toledo. When he already guessed that the economic crisis was just around the corner, he said that he was not worried at all because he had paid only one euro per square meter and that he would resist without problems. Nor was he concerned about the water he had to carry in trucks at that time amid accusations of theft from the deposits of Canal de Isabel II. "I bring it from China if necessary," he said.
At that time he deployed his staging on the Spanish scene. He already had money, but he lacked the social recognition he so longed for and which became his Achilles heel . It tormented him that they despised him for his rude appearance on the millionaires circuit. In a Montecarlo tobacconist he bought all the stocks when he was looked down on by the seller and did the same on a trip abroad when he saw a new model of sports car for his son.
For this he gave a great blow of effect that would consecrate him, he thought, in a businessman of true postin. He had always docked his yachts, the cove that succeeded the Lady Monica, and the Clarena, in the Mallorcan Puerto Portals, where he settled at the Flanigan restaurant from the first hour. There were the great builders of the country tied up, so nothing more shocking than buying the port.
Yachts and planes
Knowing, thanks to the complicity of Captain José Eraso , that Portals had a serious problem with the terms of the mooring concessions, he became ignorant and at the same time the encounter with the owner, the German Klaus Graff.
He clouded him saying that he would pay him for Portals 110 million euros but that he had to sign a document right there. The owner of Teka and the marina, bit the hook despite his experience and signed. Immediately afterwards, "El Pocero", advised by his seasoned lawyers, went to court and claimed his right to stay in the port, but for only 9 million, alluding to the legal problems he had.
The German replica did not wait and his Clarena yacht was expelled taking advantage of one of his exits to the Cabrera archipelago. Finally, and after promising that he would turn Portals into Monte Carlo and build a hotel with underwater views, he lost the lawsuit , was left without a port and had to reluctantly take refuge in the Club de Mar.
It was purchased while the best private jet in the world, the Global Express carrying Steven Spielberg. A plane in which he was passionate about looping even at the cost of terrorizing his family and who accompanied his great dream: the Clarena II. He ordered an unprecedented ship from the Italian shipyards Ferretti that would fly the Spanish flag and that would be 72 meters long, so it would not fit in his long-awaited Portals. To get an idea, he was twice the Fortuna of the Royal House.
So that no one would forget him, in the middle of the Mallorcan summer, he broke into those years at the helm of his first Clarena (named after his wife Clara Audena) with a cap and bare chest in the race course of the Copa del Rey de Vela while one of the tests of the competition was disputed.
Real estate crisis
Finally the crisis in the sector caught him squarely, he could not even throw away his new whim, which he tried to acquire 'in extremis' without exchanging it for flats of his urbanization, and began his unstoppable decline.
The Tax Agency seized the urbanization, placed him among the top ten defaulters in the country, and went to Equatorial Guinea, having built a third of his Toledan residential. In Africa, where he planned to build 36,000 homes , he signed his final debacle and ended up claiming Teodoro Obiang 450 million euros for the investment he had made and which was not ultimately supported.
The fiasco of African adventure restored him back to anonymity and shadows, taking with him some of the best-kept secrets of his biography. For example, how did he get the Junta de Castilla-La Mancha to approve his city in the desert, how did he develop his intimate friendship with José Bono and what was, for example, the true price that the former Manchego president paid him, if it existed, for the works that Hernando always presumed that he had carried out on his properties.
He circumvented the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, which was unable to prove the payment of bribes, and leaves thus without one of the spots that most worried him: that of being a suspected corruptor. However, he carries the guest book of his yacht under his arm, which he proudly taught, with the rubric of King Juan Carlos that he exhibited exultantly and of the main businessmen and politicians of the country, an unforgettable memory that there was a day in the one that emerged from the sewers and touched the sky with his hands.
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