The 'angel of hell' who wanted to reign in Mallorca

A fight is not uncommon at night in

, Mallorca's main German tourist ghetto, dotted with nightclubs and beer halls.

The Police are used to rows and ethylic riots in the most conflictive streets of the area.

However, in that incident in mid-August 2010, something was different.

It was a fight with

.

A special violence that set off alarms in the information services of the Civil Guard.

Two motorcycle gangs had clashed in the open, with 19 detainees, most of them German.

One of the groups burned the Harley-Davidson of a rival gang leader.

A territorial control message.

According to the investigation, two organizations had challenged each other.

One, known as Gremium MC.

The other, with a more fearsome resonance: the Hell's Angels, a motorcycle gang with global ramifications and a feud in

Hamburg's

They were the Hell's Angels, the bikers whose emblem is a skull with a crown of feathers, in the style of the American Indians.

That brawl was one of the events that put the Majorcan police authorities on the track about the gang led by

, a giant of

tall and 58 years old, who was a boxer and who this week defined himself before the National Court as "private security and gastronomy business entrepreneur".

They present themselves as a legal association of motorists with 5,000 members, and Hanebuth defends that he has never been convicted in Germany.

However, that is just the facade, according to the Spanish police authorities and the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, who maintain that

and is linked to all kinds of alleged illegal businesses, such as prostitution, trafficking drug trafficking, extortion and money laundering, in alliance with other transnational underworld firms.

Investigators' testimony

"So we already knew that that organization wanted to set up a chapter in Mallorca," explains one of the agents who investigated them and prompted their arrest in the summer of 2013, when Hanebuth was remanded in prison by a court in Palma.

A

is what they call one of their delegations, a tentacle that serves to weave an alleged criminal network dedicated to all kinds of crimes.

"They wanted to organize a branch of the Hell's Angels in Spain in Mallorca but to operate

," say Civil Guard sources, who stress the danger and "extreme violence" of the band.

One of the powerful motorcycles seized from the gang in 2013.

With years of delay (something that plays in favor of the defendants), now Hanebuth and half a dozen people sit on the bench of the National Court prosecuted by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor.

Initially there were 47 people who together faced requests for

.

A majority of them have agreed with the Prosecutor's Office, accepting crimes and changing the penalties for fines, leaving the group of defendants very small, with Hanebuth as the most visible head along with two of his lieutenants, Khalil Yousafi and his brother Abdelghani, both of Turkish.

According to the lieutenant colonel of the Civil Guard who investigated the case, Hanebuth personally directed the operations that others carried out and was the one behind the money invested in Mallorca.

In the first phase of the process, the members of the gang were preventively imprisoned accused of drug trafficking, money laundering, illegal prostitution, illegal possession of weapons and extortion.

Among the activities attributed to them in Spain, wanting to organize a network of prostitution and drug trafficking in the main tourist areas of Palma, offering private security to locals and establishing an alleged network of front companies to

and divert funds from their activities international illicit

The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, in its letter, emphasized that the group's criminal activity was based especially on the use of

as an "intrinsic part" of its conduct and reputation.

Forced to have surgery

According to the judicial indictment, the members of the gang brought women to Spain who looked like tourists and forced them into coercive prostitution.

They moved them between Germany and the island and even

, according to the testimony of the investigators.

They are also accused of having offered concealment and protection to a member of the gang who was being investigated in Germany for an alleged murder.

The Prosecutor's Office maintained that this establishment of 'HAMC' in Mallorca was a consequence of the band's strategy at a European level, "motivated by its geographical location, the existence of hostess businesses and the presence of a foreign resident population, which facilitated practices". .

They deny it, defend that they are a motorcycle association and have requested the

of the trial.

True to form, when the gigantic Hanebuth stood up to testify before the magistrate on Tuesday, he smiled for a few initial seconds.

Visibly calm despite the request for a 12-year sentence, he said he did not understand any Spanish when the judge asked him if she spoke it, to which she replied: "Then how could you answer me?"

He then continued to testify with an interpreter.

The leader of the Hell's Angels pleaded not guilty and refused to answer questions from the Prosecutor's Office.

He only replied to his lawyer by saying that her biker organization opened a branch in 2009 and closed it in 2011, two years before his arrest.

, and distances himself from the attempts to take over one of the best-known brothels in Palma (called Globo Rojo) as well as the accusations against the gang for having men allegedly in cahoots with the Local Police.

"I have never owned property in Spain,"

said the leader of the motorcycle gang in his statement, denying that he ran the gang from a Mallorcan estate called Son Paraíso, valued at two million euros and allegedly bought through front men.

When he was in pretrial detention in Spain, in the maximum security prison in Puerto de Santa María, Hanebuth spent his time

.

Now, free but surrounded by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, he faces another kind of combat.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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