The Fiery Saga of Maradona and Coppola: A Tale of Scania, Fireworks, and Exile

The unforgettable Scania: Maradona drives, Coppola accompanies.

On January 21, 2002, the covers of Argentine newspapers had titles such as “They analyze how to compensate savers” or “What to do with the money in the corralito.” A month after President De la Rúa resigned, the country was on fire. But that day, that Sunday, Argentina spoke less about its collective fire than about one in particular: that of the Barrio Parque mansion in which Diego Armando Maradona had settled after his tribute match in La Bombonera.

The house, located on Mariscal Ramón Castilla Street, had three floors, “a pool and a little green.” This is how Guillermo Coppola, the representative of Ten, described it every time he told why he had chosen to rent that home and not another. Years before, Mirtha Legrand and Daniel Tinayre had lived there. According to the newspaper La Nación at that time, they paid 11,000 pesos a month – almost 8,000 dollars – and the guarantor was “Guillote.”

Invited to Mirtha Legrand’s table, Coppola spoke about the fire in Barrio Parque

It was he who spoke with the head of the two fire crews who, for at least two hours, fought the flames that left the house in ruins – and which would cost Coppola very expensively. And it was he who spoke to the press when the reporters approached him on the sidewalk. “There was a short circuit in the electrical control of the sauna on the first floor,” he told them. That short circuit, the representative explained, had started the fire. And he confirmed to the journalists that Maradona had already left the house in which each of the two had a room: the Diez was out of danger.

The fire was the definitive red card that Barrio Parque showed Diego. Starting, of course, with the owner of the house. But the relationship between Maradona and that area of ​​Buenos Aires, perhaps the most exclusive in the entire Buenos Aires territory, not only ended badly. It had started badly.

Coppola remembers the fire of January 2002 in the Barrio Parque mansion

When Diego moved to Mariscal de Castilla’s house he already owned the huge Scania truck that he used to travel to some training sessions and on which he had stamped a sticker as if his DNA was involved. “DalGian,” said the stamp on the windshield: the first syllable of the name of the two daughters he had with Claudia Villafañe. That very tall truck, which became undoubtedly Maradonian due to its excessive size, knocked down the branches of the trees in the area in its path. First unrest in Barrio Parque.

Maradona shared an area with other protagonists of Argentine life: very close to him lived Mariano Grondona, Susana Giménez, Mauricio Macri, Marcela Tinayre and Flavia Palmiero, among others. And it was Susana, precisely, who more than once alerted Coppola about the fireworks displays that could be seen, and above all, heard from the house. At first, the representative would say, only at night. After “morning, afternoon, night… Diego did not measure himself.” If he didn’t tell Susana, the beach workers from Shell would tell him, which was a few blocks from the house and from which, of course, everything could be seen and heard.

Maradona’s famous Scania. On this occasion leaving a Boca training session

“Do something with Dieguito, this idiot’s house is going to set on fire,” Susana Giménez tells “Guillote” in the last episode of the series Coppola, the representative, which can be seen on Star+. The chapter is called nothing less than “Fireworks” and, inspired by real events in Coppola’s life, it reconstructs – with more or less licenses – those months in Palermo Chico. In the series, a shot of Susana’s Yorkshire dog – Jazmín, that monument to the nineties – trembling with fear from the pyrotechnics condenses those nights of noise. Second unrest in Barrio Parque.

But the fire was the crossing of all limits. The definitive discomfort. Maradona left the neighborhood. Coppola compensated the owner, a lawyer whose wife wanted nothing to do with the house being inhabited by Diegote and Guillote. With the diary of 2024: the lady saw it.

Coppola and Diego in the nineties.

Years had to pass for Coppola to deny his own version of the short circuit, or at least complement it, and really explain what had happened. Every time he did it in that tone that established him decades ago as a great narrator of anecdotes, without the details, not even the plausibility, mattering too much.

Almost every time he repeated this gag: “Diego didn’t come out of the room that was on fire, Pelé came out, damn.” Almost every time, when recounting his journey with the owner of the house after the destruction of the house, he concluded like this: “The guy was insulting me, he wanted to shit me, and I told him: ‘It would have been worse if you saw how he was.’ the house before catching fire’. And the guy had to laugh.” But what really happened?

“We were Los Roldán. Diego, from Fiorito. “I, from Constitución,” Coppola summarized at a lunch at Mirtha Legrand’s table, several years after the fire, to talk about the time of Scania, pyrotechnics and firefighters. “We lived there, I went back and forth to my apartment. Diego had the habit of fireworks and they gave him gifts, he had an artillery. One Sunday, I arrive with the brain ravioli that Diego liked and I see smoke. Smoke was coming out of the room. Marianito, the security guy, tells me: ‘Isn’t he having a barbecue in the room?’” Coppola said at that table.

And he continued: “Thank goodness I arrived. The neighbors started to insult me. I insisted to the fire chief that it had been a short circuit. And suddenly the fireworks artillery detonates. ‘Forget about the short circuit,’ the guy told me. It was not intentional”.

In an interview with TN, talking about the same episode, “Guillote” said: “It started in the sauna. I don’t know if he wasn’t cooking in that same room, smoke began to come out and the fire began to spread to other rooms.

In the Anecdotario Coppola cycle, in which the representative spoke with journalist Guillermo Poggi, he said: “It seemed like the whole fire was ending. Diego had a kind of fireworks warehouse in the garage. The house was destroyed, the people were evacuated (…) The flames at one point could be seen on Crónica TV, and suddenly, the explosion of the fires: everything could be seen on TV.”

In the series “Coppola, the representative” the parties that Maradona gave in his big house in Barrio Parque are fictionalized. (Star+)

In 2018, in the series Intruders, Jorge Rial tried to reveal the reason for the fire: “They told me that it was a problem with a slipper being plugged in, and that they had plugged in many dildos together.” Coppola was in the studio and responded, “Oh yeah? “It could be,” he told her, with a mischievous smile, and added: “Since I’m not a lover of those products, I don’t know. I am from a generation before Diego’s.”

Twenty-two years have passed since that Maradonian fire framed in the Argentine fire. An electric shoe with too much demand, an arsenal of pyrotechnics, an over-demanded sauna, a meal prepared in an inappropriate room, or all of the above, or none of the above. It is not clear the zero degree of that fire that burned just two days before Claudia Villafañe turned forty years old.

In the sixth chapter of the Star+ series, it is also not known what the spark that would end with the expulsion of Maradona and Coppola from Barrio Parque is. But fiction sets up the circumstances in which the fire occurs: sexual relations in two, in three, in many; a pelopincho full of foam in the middle of a living room; a man hanging from a spider whose hair is inevitably falling off; weapons; a roast made with a blowtorch under a fireplace; graffiti on the paintings that were already displayed in the house; a pony And fireworks. Lots of fireworks. It is as impossible to assess that fire so many years later as it is to know how much of all that party shown in the series really happened. But it does seem like a bacchanal worthy of what the real Coppola told the owner: that worse than seeing the final destruction would be seeing the path to it.

In the series you can see the short circuit. It’s between Coppola and Maradona. “Everything I tell you sucks, Diego. We’re not having a good time. We used to have fun but we respected each other, we took care of each other. “That’s not happening,” Juan Minujín’s “Guillote” tells the person he represents, over the phone. “I didn’t say about separating us. What I’m saying is that we take some time to be alone, think a little, settle our heads… I love you, Diego, but I can’t take it anymore… What do you mean, Diego? The representative cries and cuts because they cut him off. He looks out onto the balcony and sees Ten’s truck leaving. He cries more. The love of his life is leaving. And he just got red.

2024-03-23 04:42:00
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