MARADONA: A VERDADE VEIO À TONA

Who was this person? What did he take from Maradona’s room that night? And above all, who told her to go there? We will arrive. Don’t go anywhere. Because to understand what happened in that tiger’s house, you have to go back much further, 60 years. There is a slum south of Buenos Aires. There’s a boy who kicked a rag ball down a dirt street and a mother who lied for 12 years so that no one would know the truth.

Vila Fiorito, province of Buenos Aires. October 30, 1960. Diego Armando Maradona, the fifth of eight children, was born there. The father, Dom Diego Senior, known as Shitoro, was a fisherman and laborer. I worked in a factory that processed animal remains. He was returning home smelling of blood.

The mother, Dona Tota, was a housewife. She cooked for 10 people with what she could feed four. When she couldn’t, she would say that she had already eaten; she would lie. She would sit in a corner of the kitchen and watch her children eat without touching anything. When Diego was 6 years old, Dona Tota lost 10 kg in 4 months, 6 kg in the first month, and four in the following months.

The neighborhood doctor, a certain Dr. Kan, treated her for free. Diagnosis: severe malnutrition. He asked what was happening. Dona Tota did not respond. The doctor insisted, and the mother of the future best player in the world spoke only five words to him. Five words that would stay with Diego until his last day.

My children eat first, doctor. My children eat first, doctor. That phrase, that invisible sacrifice, was the first pillar of the guilt that Maradona would carry for the rest of his life. Diego only found out 12 years later, at 18, when he was already playing for Argentinos Juniors and earning more money than his entire family had ever seen combined.

That afternoon, in the kitchen of the house he had bought for his parents in a decent neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Diego asked his mother why she didn’t eat with them when he was a child. Dona Tota looked at him for a moment and replied with seven words. Mom, you’re never hungry, my love. Mom, you’re never hungry, my love. Diego left the kitchen without finishing his dish, walked to the bathroom, locked the door, and cried. She cried for 40 minutes.

Diego Armando Maradona, who in a few years would become the best player on the planet, was crying in his mother’s bathroom because he had just discovered that the woman who had given birth to him had gone hungry for years to feed him. And from that afternoon on, he started bringing gifts to Dona Tuta whenever he could.

Food, jewelry, house, car— as if they could be returned. Even on the last day of his life, he never stopped trying. The ball came into his life when he was 3 years old. It was Uncle Cirilo who gave him a leather ball as a birthday present. Diego slept hugging that ball for three years straight. The mother had to wait until he fell asleep to take the ball away and wash his hand, which was covered in dirt.

At seven, he was already playing better than the neighborhood kids who were 13. At eight, he was discovered by a scout named Francisco Cornejo. I would control him for 40 years. A man whose name appeared more often in Maradona’s final months than those of professionals. 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 touches without letting the ball drop.

The Argentinians couldn’t believe a boy would do that, but Diego wasn’t playing for money, he was playing to get his mother out of Vila Fiorito. And that obsession, that debt to a woman who had lost 10 kg for him, was the driving force behind his career and also the beginning of his downfall. At age 15, he made his debut for Argentinos Juniors 10 days before turning 16, in a match against Taleres de Córdoba.

He came on in the second half, touched the ball five times, five dribbles past three defenders 10 years older than him, a perfect assist, and a free kick. The critics didn’t know what to write. César Luis Menotti, the coach of the Argentine national team at the time, uttered a phrase two weeks later that became historic.

“That kid,” Menot said, ” is going to be the best player the world will ever see.” He was right, and without knowing it, he was also predicting a tragedy. At 17, he reached [amount missing] of dollars, a fortune in 1982. His father, Don Diego, couldn’t read. Dona Tota didn’t understand the legal clause either .

And then he appeared, Guilhermo Copola. Coppola was 40 years old when he entered Maradona’s life. He was a former banker, had worked in finance, had connections with European clubs, and offered Diego a simple deal. You play, I take care of everything else: press, [music], travel, houses, women, you just play. Maradona accepted without reading, and from that day in 1982 until the last day of his life, Diego signed the entire document without reading it.

Just like Garrincha 49 years earlier, just like Adriano, just like Ronaldinho. Four poor men from the world of football who trusted another man for everything except playing football and [music]—the four of them ended up destroyed. Did Coppola steal from Maradona? Yes, we’re not going to argue otherwise here, but the dome is just one piece, a large, important, central piece, not the only one.

And the person who entered Tigre’s house in the early morning of November 25, 2020, was not Copola, it was someone else. A person who, for 38 years, had access to Diego Armando Maradona’s body , a person who was present at every important moment of his career, without anyone knowing who he was. Stay with me.

Before Coppola, there was something else, something that happened at a Boca Juniors training camp in 1982 that would mark Maradona’s body for the next 40 years. A syringe, a white substance, and a teammate whose name appears in no official investigation. There is a 47-minute interview, conducted by an Argentinian journalist named Jorge Lanata.

In 2015, five years before Maradona died, Diego was in Cuba, in a house that Fidel Castro had lent him, recovering from an overdose. Lanata interviewed him with permission. Part of the recording was broadcast on the channel where the journalist worked, but 60% of the content never made it to television. Lanata died in August 2024, 3 months before the start of the trial against Maradona’s doctors .

And the journalist’s family still keeps the complete tape to this day. In that recording, Maradona confesses four things. We ‘ll get to four, but not yet. The first time Maradona used cocaine was in 1982, in Buenos Aires, at the home of a Boca Juniors teammate, whose name Diego never wanted to reveal.

He was 21 years old, he had just signed his first million-dollar contract. I had pain in my knee. The partner offered a career. He said it was to rest better, that it was nothing, that everyone did it. Maradona snorted cocaine, and from that day until the day of his death, 40 years later, not a single year passed without him using it. 40 years old.

This is the number that the Argentine press has never spoken aloud. And yet this man won the 1986 World Cup. Imagine being addicted to cocaine from age 21 to 60, without stopping. And even so, win two cups, a UEFA Cup, two Napoli titles, be elected the best player of the 20th century.

The question nobody wants to ask in Argentina is: what would Maradona have been like without cocaine? It probably wouldn’t have been Maradona. The white powder was what allowed him to withstand the pressure of playing in front of 45 million Argentinians. Diego, the boy who had grown up watching his mother starve to death because of him, couldn’t let anyone down.

But there’s one more thing, something that few people know. The person who made that first run in 1982 wasn’t a teammate from Boca, it was someone else. And that same person would be by Maradona’s side for the next 38 years. We’ll get to her name eventually, but not yet. Napoli arrived in 1984. 10 million dollars.

Italy, the poorest city in Europe. The most fanatical fanbase on the planet. Maradona arrived in a city that had never won anything, where the rich north laughed at the poor south, where northern Italians called Neapolitans dirty Africans. And that city, those 7 million Neapolitans hungry for glory, gave Maradona something he had never received before.

They loved him as a son, as a god. And Diego, for the first time since leaving Vila Fiorito, felt like he was home. But along with the love of Naples, something else arrived, something that few people appreciate with the strength it deserves. Then came the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, the men who controlled the city from below.

Juliano’s brothers, leaders of the Forcela neighborhood, took him in. They offered protection, they offered friends, they offered, above all, high-purity, unadulterated cocaine, straight from the ports of Naples. Maradona accepted and entered, unknowingly, a network that would control part of his life for the next six years.

June 29, 1986, Mexico, Azteca Stadium, Argentina vs. England, World Cup quarter-finals . Four years after the Falklands War, Maradona rises alongside English goalkeeper Peter Shilton. Put your hand in, your hand, the ball goes in, the hand of God. Four minutes later, Diego receives the ball in his own half, dribbles past five opponents in 60 meters, and scores the goal that FIFA would later choose as the best of the 20th century.

Argentina 2, England zero, for the dead of the Falklands, for the boys of the war. And that afternoon, in the locker room, Diego cried for 15 minutes straight . Not out of joy, but out of relief. What few people know is that on that same night, after the game, Maradona used cocaine alone in his hotel room, sitting on the floor with the game trophy beside him.

And, as he himself recounted in the Lanata recording years later, it was the first time he had thought about killing himself. These are the exact words : “That night of the World Cup,” Maradona said, “I was the happiest man in the world and at the same time the loneliest. I was beating England, winning the war, overcoming the deaths of the Falklands boys.

But now, what? What comes next? I had no one to call. My mother was far away, my father was far away. And that hotel room in Mexico was the emptiest room of my life. I thought about jumping out the window. I didn’t because I was afraid of making a mistake and becoming paralyzed.” Diego Maradona, at the most glorious moment of his career, thought about jumping out of a hotel window and still played the final against Germany.

Argentina won, becoming world champions. Diego was the best player of the tournament and returned to Buenos Aires with 45 million Argentinians waiting for him. 3 million in the streets. The motorcade lasted 6 hours. Diego in a convertible waving, not understanding that that day was the beginning of the end.

But before the motorcade reached the obelisk, something happened that the Argentine press never… It was covered up. Something that only appeared in the memoirs of the convertible driver, a man named Hector Bellini, published in 2016. Bellini recounted that in the middle of the motorcade, a person approached the car from the crowd. A person that security let through, a person who handed Maradona a sealed envelope.

Diego opened the envelope. Inside was a key, just one key. Diego turned pale, put the envelope in the inside pocket of his suit, and didn’t smile again for the rest of the motorcade. Whose key was that? And why did it make the happiest man in Argentina stop smiling? We’ll get to that . From 1987 onwards, cocaine use ceased to be occasional; it became daily.

Maradona used 2g a day, then three, then five. The Camorra supplied whatever he asked for. Cola, his manager, knew, but kept quiet. As long as Maradona won games, as long as Napoli won championships, nobody said anything. Diego won Napoli’s first Scudetto in 1987. The city came to a standstill, a week of celebration, and Maradona in a Rome hotel room.

After the celebrations, he almost died of an overdose. Cola found him, put him in a bathtub of ice water, called a private doctor, paid for his silence, and the next day Diego was back training as if nothing had happened. But the private doctor who revived Diego that night in Rome wasn’t Italian, wasn’t Neapolitan, spoke Spanish, Rio de la Plata dialect, and worked for someone who wasn’t Coppola, or the Camorra, or Napoli.

He worked for the person who had handed over the envelope with the key at the obelisk parade. Stay with me. We’re close. Let’s answer the question now. The person who entered the house of the tiger, Mario Bodri, a 52- year-old Argentine lawyer, romantic partner of Veronica Ogeda, mother of Dieguito Fernando, Maradona’s youngest son. But Bodri wasn’t just that.

For the previous six months, Bodri had been the man who managed Diego’s real estate assets without a contract. Signed. The man who had the passwords to three bank accounts in Uruguay, the man who knew the secret of the safe that Maradona had in his house in Tigres. In cash. The second, a gold chain that Diego had received from Fidel Castro in 198, but not yet.

The nurse who saw Boldre enter that morning was called Gisela Madrid, sister of Dayana Madrid, the official nurse. She had gone to relieve her sister that night because Dayana was ill. When the prosecution questioned her three weeks after the death, Gisela told everything. She saw Boldre enter, walk straight to Maradona’s room , open the safe, and leave with a black bag.

But six months later, Gisela recanted her statement. She said she had been mistaken, that it wasn’t Boldre, that it was someone else. And from that day on, she lives under judicial protection in a province in southern Argentina, whose name the prosecution keeps secret. Current trial. But there’s one more thing, something that connects this whole story with what happened 38 years earlier and that will make You’ll finally understand who destroyed Maradona.

Stay with me. Mario Boldre, [music] in 1982, was 14 years old. He was Hugo Boldre, a personal friend of one of Diego’s teammates at Boca Juniors, the same teammate who gave Maradona his first line of cocaine. Yes, that first line at a teammate’s house at Boca wasn’t offered by the teammate; it was brought by a visitor that night, a 40-year-old visitor, a union leader, a friend of the teammate, Hugo Boldre, Mario Boldre’s father, the same person who 38 years later would send his son to the house of Tigre in the early morning of November 25,

Hugo Boldre died in 1999, three months before Dona Tuta. But before dying, he left instructions for Mario. Specific instructions about Maradona. They had to do with the brown notebook, leather cover, the same notebook that would disappear from the safe in Tigre 21 years later. This notebook, according to Veronica’s confidential testimony.

Ojeda’s notebook in February 2022 contained the names of every person who had supplied cocaine to Maradona for 40 years and every person to whom Diego had done favors in return. Argentine politicians, Uruguayan businessmen, world football executives, journalists, judges—a network. And that notebook was the only written record.

That’s why Mario Bodri intervened at 4:20. Not for the money, not for the Fidel Castro chain, but for the notebook, to make it disappear. And that’s why Gisela retracted her statement, because she understood in time that the people who appeared in that notebook had enough power to make a nurse from the Tigre neighborhood disappear.

But this leaves an open question, an even darker question. If Hugo Bodri in 1982 was the one who got Maradona into cocaine and if Mario Bodri in 2020 was the one who erased the evidence, then what happened in between? Why did Veronica Ojeda, the mother of Diego’s youngest son, end up… Right next to the son of the man who had ruined the father of her son? We’ll get there, but first we have to finish telling the story of the fall.

By the end of 1990, Maradona’s body was already destroyed. The Italian press was suspicious. In 1991, a surprise anti-doping test. Positive for cocaine, suspended for 15 months by FIFA. Diego returned to Argentina, 30 years old, European career over, Boca Juniors, Sevilla. Newell’s, Boca again, but he wasn’t the same anymore.

And then, in 1994, at the World Cup in the United States, came the last hope. What happened in that World Cup has never been fully told. Maradona was about to turn 34. He had spent months preparing in a clinic in Buenos Aires with a Cuban doctor named Daniel Serrini. Serrini gave him a cocktail of substances. Some legal, others not.

Diego didn’t ask what they were. He trusted, as always. He arrived in the United States in the best physical shape of his years. He scored a goal against Greece that He celebrated by shouting in front of the camera, his eyes wide and his teeth clenched. That image became iconic, but no one in Argentina saw what was happening inside Diego.

Four days later, a positive doping test. Ephedrine, Serrini had given it to him, the Maradona expelled from the World Cup. Argentina, without him, eliminated by Romania. And Diego, in the Boston hotel, cried for an entire week, without eating, without stopping, alone. The Hand of God had been replaced by Serrini’s hand, full of white powder, and Maradona never recovered.

Who had hired Serrini? That’s another question the 2025 trial is trying to answer. Serrini was recommended to Diego by a Buenos Aires union leader who was already dead in 1994. Hugo Bodre had died 5 years earlier, but his network continued to operate, and Mario Bodre, at 26, was already inside.

The following two decades were a spiral. Overdose in Punta del Este, 2004. Psychiatric hospitalization. Weight loss surgery. Cuba with Fidel. Return to Argentina. Coach 2008, 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Humiliating elimination against Germany, 4-0. Diego losing control of his public life while cocaine remained his only faithful companion.

There are videos from those years, appearances where he couldn’t walk straight, interviews where he was drooling, television programs where he shouted for no reason. And the Argentinians, instead of helping, laughed, turning him into a meme until 2020. What almost no one talks about in the last six months is this.

In May 2020, Maradona moved to a rented house in a gated community in San Andrés, in the Tigre district. 3 qu4, a small backyard, paying 2000 a month. Diego, who in 1986 had earned more money than any athlete in the world, at 59 years old lived in a middle-class rented house, without his own property. He had no assets in his name.

Cola, his 40-year-old manager, had disappeared. Nobody knew where the money was. But there’s something else, something that only came to light in the 2025 trial. In those last six months, Diego wasn’t being cared for by private hospital doctors. He was being treated by a psychiatrist named Agostina Kachov and a general practitioner named Leopoldo Luk.

The two, along with five others, are the defendants in the current trial. According to the proceedings, in the last six months, Maradona took a daily mixture that no cardiologist in the world would have approved: quetiapine, olanzapine, levetiracema, lorazepam, and cocaine. A lethal combination. Any first-year doctor would have known that that man was going to die.

And the seven defendants knew. November 3, 2020. Maradona is admitted to a clinic in La Plata for a subdural hematoma. They perform brain surgery. He leaves after 8 days. His daughter, Adalma, asks that he He remains hospitalized. Anina’s daughter asks that he remain hospitalized. Copola, who reappears, also asks, but Dr.

Luke, his personal physician, decides to discharge him and takes him to a rented house in Tigre. And there, without 24-hour nursing care, without a medical team, without a defibrillator, for 22 days, Diego begins to die slowly. For the last 12 hours, on the night of November 24th, Diego went to sleep at 11 pm. He was pale, his feet were swollen, and he asked for aspirin.

Dayana Madri gave him aspirin, then left. His sister Gisela came to relieve her. At 4:20 am on the 25th, Mario Bodri arrived. He entered the house with his key and went up to the room. Maradona was sleeping, already having difficulty breathing. Bodri approached, looked at him, and, according to Gisela’s original testimony, before she recanted, Baldre didn’t call an ambulance, didn’t wake the nurse Ricardo Almiron, didn’t do a

nything, and opened the… She took out her black bag and left. 3:15 AM at the house, without calling anyone. At 7:35 AM, Boldre left. At 9 AM, Almiron, the other nurse, asked the caretaker to come in to see Diego. Maradona was already dead, probably since 5 AM, but the nurses didn’t call an ambulance. They waited another 3 hours until 12:16 PM, when they finally called Dr.

Luke. And Luke took another hour to arrive. When the ambulance arrived, there was nothing more to be done. Maradona had been dead for 7 hours and nobody had done absolutely anything. Why? That’s the question the trial is trying to answer. Diego’s daughters , Dalma and Dianina, maintain that the seven defendants knew he was going to die, that they let him die on purpose to receive the inheritance and image rights.

They maintain that Copola and the lawyers had signed an exclusivity agreement weeks before regarding Maradona’s image after his death, for 200 million. dollars. And that all the accused knew what was going to happen, but the daughters don’t mention Mario Bodrino’s trial. Even though Verónica Oeda broke off her relationship with him in 2023, she said in an interview on Argentine television that she realized too late that Mario had never loved her, that he had stayed by her side for 12 years for one reason only: to get closer to Diego.

To finish what his father, Hugo, had started in 1982. But there’s still a darker question. This connects the whole story in Tec. Who destroyed the Argentine genius? Was it the Bodrino Network? Was it the Camorra? Was it the seven doctors? Was it Coppola? Was it none of them? Here comes the twist.

Maradona’s answer in the 2015 Lanata recording is this: “Who destroyed Maradona?” Diego said. It was a promise. The promise I made to my mother, Dona Tota, when I was 9 years old. I promised I would get her out of Vila Belmiro. Fiorito. I promised she would never have to go hungry again because of me. And I did. I bought her a house, I bought her jewelry, I bought her everything she never had.

But there was one thing I couldn’t give back: the weight she lost for me when I was 6 years old. The 10 kg my mother lost. Those 10 kg destroyed me, because every time I ate, I thought of her not eating. Every time I slept in a five-star hotel bed, I thought of her sleeping on the floor of the village. Every time I won a game, I thought of her applauding from the empty kitchen.

And the guilt, the guilt that my mother had gone hungry for me, is what led me to cocaine. Cocaine made the guilt disappear for a few hours, then it came back. And I needed more and more and more. Even today, cocaine makes the guilt disappear. That phrase is key. Maradona didn’t sink because of weakness.

He sank because he carried the guilt of a mother who had lost 10 kg for him in… 1967. And that guilt that cocaine erased for 6 hours returned stronger each morning. Hugo Bodri, in 1982, knew exactly how to identify the emotional fissure through which to insert the white powder, the maternal guilt.

And through that fissure entered everything else: the addiction, the Camorra, Serrini, Luke, the Cosachov, Mario Bodri, the empty safe, the missing brown notebook. Everything entered through that fissure opened when Diego was 6 years old in a kitchen in Vila Fiorito. Dona Tota died in 1999, 21 years before Diego. And according to what he recounted in Lanata’s recording, those 21 years between his mother’s death and his own were the most painful of his life.

He no longer had anyone to dedicate the struggle to, he no longer had a mother to endure for, only he and the white powder and an empty apartment in Buenos Aires remained. And in the end, a rented house in Tigre, where someone entered at 4:20 in the morning to eliminate the last witness of 40 years of me. It started in March 2025.

More than 100 witnesses have already testified. The brown notebook never appeared. Mario Bodri wasn’t indicted. Hugo Boldri died 26 years ago. And the complete truth about Maradona’s final 12 hours will probably be taken to the grave with each of those involved. But there’s something Diego said in Lanata’s recording.

2000 goals don’t matter to me. I want to be remembered as a good son. There are millions of men like that right now. Men who destroy themselves little by little because feeling joy seems like betrayal to those who suffered. Some drink, others use drugs, others work 16 hours a day, but deep down they are all running away from the same image.

A mother eating silently in a corner while her children eat first. These men have hearts too big for a world that hasn’t taught any man to cry. Diego is one of them. Garrincha was another, Adriano, Ronaldinho. And tomorrow, in the next episode, we’re going to tell the story of a fifth. A man who won three Formula 1 world championships.

A man who saw a colleague die on the track. A man who, at the wheel of a Williams, crossed the drum curve and whose memory resonates in the heart of Brazil to this day. But the truth about Ayrton Senna’s death has never been told to you. If Maradona’s story made you think of someone, call them today. Not tomorrow, today.

Call your mother, your father, your brother, your son. Call them. Even if they respond badly, even if they say they don’t need anything, call yourself like a tiger. He believed for 60 years that he had to repay with money something his mother had given him with love. And that can’t be repaid, it can only be accepted. If you know someone who carries such guilt, tell them today to accept it, to rest, to eat without guilt.

Because a mother doesn’t lose something for her son to return. A mother loses something for her son to live. And to live, to live well, to live happily is the only debt a good son has to a mother who went hungry for him. And if this story touched you, if Subscribe to the channel, because the next one will hurt even more.