Famous crimes, escapes, and kidnappings: the true crime tour through downtown that fascinates tourists and locals.

The Underworld Tour is an urban tour where two specialized journalists recount real-life cases from all eras at the scene of the crime. Mariano Vidal and Nahuel Gallotta , who work in the crime department at the newspaper Clarín , focus on stories of crimes, robberies, and historical cases that occurred in different neighborhoods. This True Crime tour was one of the activities—in addition to the literary panels—at the second edition of Semana Negra BA, the International Crime Festival in Buenos Aires, but it is held periodically .

This time, the chosen area is the south of Buenos Aires , in a spiral around San Telmo, starting at La Casa de la Cultura, on Avenida de Mayo 500, and ending at Plaza Dorrego. The program is a two-hour specialized talk for lovers of the genre. It's Saturday at 4 p.m., and a group of almost 20 people is gathered, ready to begin. They are tourists and locals. There are young couples. Friends in pairs or groups of three. Individuals. Mothers with teenage children.

Summer arrives amidst a dull spring with sticky, heavy humidity. The smells overwhelm the asphalt. No one is discouraged. They already want to start walking. Let the underworld tour begin. The promenade area is crisscrossed with another kind of crime: social crime. Heading to the first stop, Plaza de Mayo, the group led by Vidal passes between urine-soaked mattresses where homeless people sleep. There are kids begging for money, but no one sees them. Beautiful old buildings, now squatted, crown the sky that promises rain.

“Last year, we also did a tour for Semana Negra, in that case, it was through Recoleta. We take advantage of it; we always try to leave the venue for somewhere nearby and adapt some of the stories we usually tell with new ones, specifically for the Festival,” Vidal will say later, at the end of the tour. The duo's story began in 2023 , when they started talking about the many stories the city of Buenos Aires has to tell and created, he says, “the first true crime walking tour in Buenos Aires.”

The first stop is Plaza de Mayo . The story is about the family that robbed six Argentine museums , the first known and caught thieves specializing in historical artifacts. The gang consisted of Nazareno Baldo, a prisoner in the Ezeiza prison; and on the outside, his brother Jorge and son Ariel, who carried out the first museum robberies. Their trophies included, among other things, coins from the era of Juan Manuel de Rosas, presidential pens from various eras, and even Manuel Belgrano's watch. The master plan began in 2008, when the father was released and they went after the collection of the Numismatic Museum of the Banco Nación, a haul of 550 ancient coins valued at $700,000.

The story is beautiful. On Friday, February 15, 2008, Nazareno entered the bank building as if he were a customer, hid in a bathroom, and waited until after closing time. He waited until midnight, when he crawled through a ventilation tunnel to the top of the museum, opened a hole in the ceiling, and climbed down. There he filled his backpack, opened the window overlooking Bartolomé Mitre, and lowered himself down with a rope to the sidewalk. He hit his head as he fell. He got into a car and disappeared. This was captured by a security camera and was the key. Months later, they caught him. The photo from the day he was arrested shows him on crutches . “He served his sentence and is out. Now he's dedicated to stealing like Spiderman,” Vidal says, claiming that a reliable source told him this.

Now we have to go down Diagonal to Chacabuco toward the second stop . Enthusiastic members of the group ask to go to Balcarce and Chile, because they know there are good stories there. The coordinator smiles as he moves toward his destination. “A lot of people came today, and I love it when they participate, ask questions, and even spoil the ending of each story I'm going to tell,” he confides in an aside. The second destination is Chacabuco 580. The group is eager to guess what's coming next.

People ask questions; many already know what the young man is going to say. Vidal shows a photo and asks if they recognize him. "He's the former official on Raúl Alfonsín's economic team," a tall man, over 60, answers. "Tell me, tell me what happened," asks a girl eating ice cream while her girlfriend takes notes. On March 25, 1998, the Techint manager was murdered with two gunshots and blows to the head . His two oldest sons claimed they had been victims of a robbery, but forensic examinations proved it was them.

The trial began in July 2010, and the defense attorney was Sergio Schoklender. It was a case of parricide, but everyone—even the prosecution—was convinced that there were "extraordinary circumstances" that mitigated the life sentence. The victim had been a violent abuser of his family for decades. Vidal then explains that the Da Bouza brothers, Santiago and Manuel, were released from prison in 2014 and are low-profile economists .

It's five in the afternoon and the heat hasn't subsided yet. Neither has the interest of the group following the tour. " This walk is a way to explain or recount some aspects of society and the era. When we planned it, we wanted to cover more or less recent crimes as well, not just historical ones, which is why we include things people might remember seeing on the news. Sometimes we include cases we covered or provide information we obtain from sources such as investigators, prosecutors, police officers, witnesses, who tell us, as journalists, even off the record, little things," Vidal says in a chat with Clarín on the way to the third destination.

Along the way, as the group takes photos, chats, makes friends, and makes way for each other on the narrow sidewalks of southern Buenos Aires, there are people searching for food in garbage cans. A boy stores his clothes in a gas niche and closes the door, as if it were his closet. What crime does the underworld tour depict? The ones it describes are those that have occurred in the city of Buenos Aires throughout its history, and the one that is constantly visible is the social, current crime.

The stop now is at Chile and Balcarce . There, Vidal says, the city's first dismembered body was found. It was in 1845. The Zanjón de Belén ditch used to be there, and a man who went to fetch water ended up finding a leg, an arm, and a torso. The police went to their most reliable source at the time: the laundresses, who had just found the head. To identify the victim, they hung his remains on the door of the police station until someone recognized him. It was Antonio, a Spanish odd-job man who worked as a gardener for Rosas's family. The story ends like this: his neighbors, a couple, had murdered him to steal his savings. They arrested them. He was shot, and she was sentenced to five years in prison.

The fourth destination is Pasaje San Lorenzo at 300. There's a mural of Che Guevara, with an anachronistic slogan for the character: "For love, use a condom." The story now turns into a classic crime tale: tough cop versus tough thief. Vidal delves into the history of Evaristo Meneses, legendary head of the Federal Police's Robbery and Theft Unit in the mid-20th century , and his nemesis, Jorge Villarino, who escaped from prison so many times he was known as the King of the Escape. He grew up on that street, just meters from the Casa Mínima, which is still there, with its green door, and which interests no one in this group, who crave more underworld adventures and don't want to know about architecture.

The fifth destination is Giuffra Passage, and the bets begin again. "He's going to talk about the kidnapping of Macri's daughter," several people venture. Vidal pretends not to hear and begins to describe the economic context of 2001 , which made bank robberies a trend. But soon, he says, many criminals realized there were people keeping money in their homes, so "the express kidnapping" arose. Across the street is the Universidad del Cine (Film University), and although the coordinator wants to go over the fate of Pablo Echarri's father, several businessmen, and some celebrities, the gang shouts: "Florencia, Mauricio's sister."

They won. In April 2003, Franco's daughter was 19 years old and a student at the Federal University of Ciudad Juárez (FUC ). One Wednesday at noon, as she was leaving school, she was kidnapped by a pickup truck. She was held captive for six days at a villa in Moreno. The negotiations were carried out by her father , who haggled and managed to pay half of the million and a half dollars they demanded. The girl returned by taxi and said she had been treated better than at home. Without much effort, they caught the kidnapper, Martín Zidar, 30, who spent 11 years in prison and said he got the idea after seeing the girl in a celebrity article in Caras magazine.

It's already six in the evening, and the tour was supposed to last two hours. The sixth destination is at 200 Humberto Primo Street, and the public's enthusiasm remains intact . The proposal now is a journey back in time, to 1890, when the first women's prison opened , run by nuns for 100 years. Among other illustrious inmates were Victoria Ocampo and Norah Borges. In 1971, there was an escape , and the place closed to become the Penitentiary Museum.

Toward the end of the tour, the sun is beating down. It's already 6:20 when the group reaches Plaza Dorrego and the last story begins . Vidal says, "This is a tourist neighborhood, ideal for snatching." He explains the difference between pickpocketing and pickpocketing: touching someone without the victim noticing, on the one hand, and those who create a distraction to steal something. "Local thieves have been established here since the 1990s, as well as others who come from neighboring countries," he explains. The group begins to become aware of their backpacks and purses.

The interesting note is that in 2006, 24-year-old Barbara's wallet was robbed while she was with her twin sister on an unofficial vacation. "George Bush's daughters," the tour participants shout, as if celebrating a World Cup goal . It's six-thirty when the tour ends. Before dispersing, the group, who will be more careful with their cell phones, takes a group photo, where they pose like the Argentine national team, surrounding their captain, the amazingly untired Vidal. The sun begins to clear the heat. The night opens with possibilities.