Those of us who follow Maradona’s life, also after death, know well the brilliant secondary players with whom he surrounded himself and who, once the myth was established, have all acquired the role of spin-off (extension), a type of satellites that already have the rank of their own planet. That’s why Argentina took a while to make a series about one of the most bizarre and amazing guys in the Maradonian universe: Guillermo Esteban Coppola, his representative. Guillot for everyone because one day The ten, deified and therefore with powers, told him: “Everyone calls you Guillermo or Guille. I will call you Guillote.” He was devil and angel for Diego. “I never broke down a door, I should have done it,” he said about Maradona’s addictions, but many reproached him for tolerating them and even encouraging them.
Coppola made room on a bench and from there only Diego Maradona took him out: the best player in the world told him that, if he wanted to represent him, it would have to be him alone and get rid of his portfolio of players. He and Coppola began a love relationship that had, like all great love stories, wild declarations, jealous passions, bitter fights and a traumatic separation (with judicial accusations of theft by Maradona) that merited a reconciliation ten years later where These things usually occur: at a funeral (Diego’s father’s), when we are more aware that one day we are here and another we are not, and the grudges with the people we once loved only waste our time. Shortly afterward, Coppola would carry his friend’s coffin at the funeral. “I was insulting him inside. In Cuba I had told him: ‘The day you take me, remember to ask that it be happy, that they do not cry, if we always celebrate life, we live large, we have fun, we live good and bad, ups and downs. Don’t abandon me, take me to the end.’ And he told me: ‘Stay calm, old man.’ And I took it. I carried it!” In Cuba they spent the two four years and a lot of time alone and much more time uncontrolled; In Cuba, where he went to be cured, Maradona hit rock bottom and Coppola, who went to take care of him, too, at least as a caregiver.
Coppola has a series today on Star+ in Argentina (the darkest shadows of the representative are avoided), he is played by Juan Minujín and the real Coppola is in overwhelming media mode, which is his thing: telling battles and more battles until he burys us all . These days I have swallowed with great pleasure hours and hours of interviews with Coppola on television and radio, and that interest of mine in knowing about Maradona ended with the involuntary and exhaustive knowledge of the great charlatan and trickster that Coppola was, who under Diego’s slipstream was collecting so many anecdotes that there is not a minute from which I do not publish a novel.
Such an absurd and crazy life also had to experience prison. Coppola was locked up for 93 days in 1996 because the police found 403 grams of cocaine in a vase of his. The news went around the world and Maradona, who was still playing for Boca and admitted to being an addict before the judge “but I was always very careful not to consume before games”, not only did he not abandon his friend, but he defended his innocence. and he went to the prison to visit him, to howl behind its walls and give him things (Coppola’s stories in prison deserve another chapter. “Undress,” the guard told him; “but there is a lady in front of you,” the representative replied; ” “It’s not going to impress her, she’s my wife,” the guard closed).
The process was pure Argentina. The judge and the police officers who arrested Coppola ended up being sentenced to prison: the cocaine had been “planted” in the vase, the crime scene was prepared and the fraud was revealed. The ten He had turned 36 months before and, as on some of his most brilliant occasions, he was right when he said: “I don’t feel good because my best friend is in prison paying for guilt that he doesn’t have and on top of that I have to listen to all the atrocities that are said. they say. Coppola is not the saint of the sword, but he is not a drug dealer either. Drug traffickers traffic thousands of kilos of cocaine and Guillermo was found only 400 grams and no one knows how the drug appeared there. He must be the poorest drug dealer in the world.” That day of his birthday, Diego left a masterpiece to criticize Coppola’s rapid imprisonment: “Bernasconi (the judge later convicted) is very fast, well capable of putting a suppository in a hare.”
You can follow The USA Print in Facebook and xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
_
