Widow of live dealer technology pioneer Adam Anhang arrested in Spain

One of the enduring mysteries of the online gambling industry – the 2005 murder in Puerto Rico of live dealer technology pioneer and real estate investor Adam Anhang (32) – featured in a BBC story this week which revealed that Anhang’s estranged wife and widow Áurea Vázquez Rijos is to face trial in a Puerto Rico court this week, charged with conspiring to murder her wealthy husband.

The former Puerto Rican beauty queen’s motivation for the hit is alleged to have been her fear that a divorce would deprive her of a share in Anhang’s multi-million dollar fortune under a pre-nuptial contract.

Prosecutors in the 13-year-old case will seek to prove that Rijos hired the assassin who attacked Anhang on a San Juan street whilst he was walking with his then estranged wife, lured there on the pretext of a discussion on their divorce after a mere six months of marriage.

The assassin reportedly stabbed Anhang twenty times before (according to witnesses) more mildly assaulting Rijos to avoid suspicion falling on her (see previous reports).

The murder was at first thought to be a robbery that went out of control, and an employee of Anhang’s – a dishwasher at his restaurant called Jonathan Román Rivera – was initially put on trial two years after the murder. He was convicted, but the conviction was overturned when an eye-witness to the murder cleared him.

In 2008, a US federal grand jury indicted Rijos on two murder-for-hire related counts after the man suspected of being the assassin, Alex “El Loco” Pabón Colón confessed to the killing, claiming that Rijos had agreed to pay him $3 million for the hit.

By then Rijos had fled Puerto Rico and settled in Italy, where she met a taxi driver in Florence and gave birth to twin girls, securing a presence in the country, which has difficult extradition laws. The two split up when he read in local press reports that Rijos was wanted in Puerto Rico.

US attempts at extradition were unsuccessful, but Anhang’s family hired private detectives to track and follow Rijos’s whereabouts as she moved around Europe, reportedly using “false names and several ID cards” and visiting Gibraltar, Spain, France and England.

Four years later the FBI and Spanish authorities set up a sting operation, inviting Rijos to travel from Italy to Madrid to work as a guide to a fictitious tour group. She took the bait, and was arrested at Madrid airport.

Rijos resisted extradition to Puerto Rico, and the issue was complicated by her becoming pregnant and giving birth to a child whilst in a Spanish jail. Spanish police sources told the BBC that the father of the child was a small-time Italian crook, serving time in Spain for a drugs offence. The two were married whilst in jail, and Rijos claimed that as the mother of a Spanish child she should not be extradited.

Ultimately her fight against extradition failed after US prosecutors signed a sworn affidavit to Spanish authorities that they will not ask for the death sentence in the case.

In 2015 Rijos was flown to Puerto Rico in an FBI aircraft to at last face her accusers. Her infant was taken into local Puerto Rico care, but it was to take three years of trial postponements before investigations were completed and this week’s court appearance arranged.

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