the times | Saturday April 9 2022 79
ing weekend and finishing with the loss
in Johannesburg that brought the tour
to a close. Four years later he was with
the combined side in Australia and
again figured in all three Tests, al-
though the Lions lost that series 2-1.
If Smith’s abilities were a revelation
to many in 1997, they were no great sur-
prise to those who had watched his
emergence in Scotland, first with Dun-
dee High, later with Watsonians. When
Watsonians lifted the Melrose Sevens
title in 1996, Smith was the star of the
team, displaying a combination of
speed, energy and handling skills of
which an international-standard back
would have been proud.
He was chosen for Scotland’s tour to
New Zealand in 1996, but was kept out
of the Test team by Dave Hilton — a
player who, it would emerge some years
later, was not actually eligible to play for
Scotland. Hilton was still at loosehead
when Scotland opened their 1997 Five
Nations with a loss to Wales, but Smith
took over for the next match, against
England at Twickenham. He was Scot-
land’s first choice in the position for the
next eight years. The highlight of that
period was when he helped Scotland to
win the last Five Nations title in 1999.
His final international was his 61st cap
for Scotland; fittingly, it was also against
England on the same ground where his
Test career had begun.
Sir Ian McGeechan, who coached
Smith for Scotland and the Lions, de-
scribed him as “Scotland’s greatest prop
forward of the professional era, if not of
all time. Pound for pound there was no
one tougher, but he was also far ahead
of his time in how skilful he was.”
In 1996 Smith was one of about 100
players contracted by the Scottish
Rugby Union (SRU) when they tried to
implement a professional structure
based around their traditional district
sides. He was allocated to Caledonia,
previously known as North and Mid-
lands, who duly won the inter-district
title for the first time in 54 years. How-
ever, the Scottish game was in a precari-Smith in action against the Eastern Province during the 1997 Lions tour of South
Africa. He was a surprise selection but helped his side to victory in the Test series
of stories tarnishing the image of the
Socialists, Roldán was a gift to the right-
wing opposition Popular Party, led by
José María Aznar, who would defeat
González in the 1996 election.
Roldán, meanwhile, was hiding in a
Paris attic and making inflammatory
comments to the press via his minder,
Paesa, threatening to “spill the beans”
on accomplices. What he did not know
was that Paesa had done a deal with
González, who was desperate to end the
pantomime that was inflicting daily
damage to his government. Paesa was
allegedly paid the equivalent of €1.8 mil-
lion to bring the fugitive police chief
home, and a game of cat and mouse
ended in 1995 at Bangkok airport, where
Roldán was handed over to the Madrid
chief of police and flown back to Spain.
By then Paesa had vanished, and so
had the stolen money that Roldán had
stashed in a Swiss bank. Prose-
cutors pursued it for years
but the trail went cold.
Roldán was given a 27-
year sentence, later
increased to 31, for
embezzlement,
bribery, fraud and
forgery against the
treasury.
He served less
than half of it, mostly
in solitary confine-
ment. After his release in
2005 he got married for a
third time, to Natalia Glazkova, a
Russian 12 years his junior whom he
claimed to have met online. She is
reported to have predeceased him by a
few weeks. The couple led a simple life in
his native Zaragoza, but often stayed in
Russia.
From his first marriage, to María
Ángeles Cimorra, Roldán had two
children: Luis Javier, an economist, and
Ignacio, who died in a traffic accident in- He also had two children with his
second wife, the Chilean-Galician
doctor Blanca Rodriguez Porto.
Roldán always alleged that Paesa —
whose death notice appeared in a
Spanish newspaper in 1998, claiming
that he had died in Thailand — took all
the money. Yet Paesa, after years of
rumours, was eventually tracked down
in Paris by the magazine Interviú and
said that his “death” had been a
misunderstanding. He later claimed he
received “not a penny” from the
scandal and that he tried to persuade
Roldán to give the millions back.
For a time after Roldán left prison he
lived in his parents’ small flat in
Zaragoza, decorated with photographs
of himself with King Juan Carlos, signed
“affectionately” by the monarch.
Interviewed in 2013 by El País, he said:
“I am using up the last grape harvests of
life. For ten years, the only company I
had was nothing, now I feel very accom-
panied and loved by my wife and family.
I await the end with serenity.”
Luis Roldán, Spanish politician and police
chief, was born on August 16, 1943. He
died of complications from cancer on
March 24, 2022, aged 78ous financial position and the SRU
amalgamated their four teams to create
two “super districts” in 1998. Like many
others, Smith decided to pursue his
rugby career elsewhere and he signed
for the French club Brive the following
year.
He spent two seasons with Brive. In
2001 he moved back to Britain, signing
for Northampton Saints. Over the next
eight years he made 193 appearances
for the East Midlands side. His final
game for the club, at the age of 38, was
in their European Challenge Cup final
victory over Bourgoin in 2009.
Smith’s personality was as far re-
moved from the bruising and bellicose
caricature of the rugby forward as it was
possible to imagine. He was unassum-ing and quiet, almost to the point of
being inaudible at times, yet exuded
inner strength and determination.
That he could carve out such a
successful rugby career was all the
more remarkable as Smith was found to
have epilepsy at the age of 18. Initially
attacks occurred in his sleep, but later
during waking hours — including once
on the morning of a Calcutta Cup game.
He still played in the match. At one
point he had to surrender his driving
licence for a year, although he never
tried to hide the condition and carried
out much work for epilepsy charities.
Thomas James Smith was born in
London in October 1971 to Geoff, a
computer engineer with IBM, and Alli-
son Bell, who had a varied career in
advertising and education. His father
died when he was six years old and his
Scottish-born mother moved the
family back north.
He was sent to board at Rannoch
School, on the shore of Loch Rannoch in
the Perthshire Highlands; it was set up
by three former masters at Gordonstoun
and had a spartan regime at the time, al-
though he credited it with toughening
him up for the rigours of rugby. At 15
Smith was chosen for the first XV and
became captain.
His great-grandfather, Jack Bell, had
avoided the game in favour of football
and was a well-known player in Scot-
land in the 1890s.
In 1999 Smith married Zoe Schle-
singer, who survives him with their
three children: Angus, 21, Amelie, 19,
and Teddy, 11.
After his playing career was over
Smith worked as forwards coach for
Edinburgh and then Lyons. He re-
mained in France after that engage-
ment ended in 2015 and it was while
travelling home from watching Scot-
land play France in Nice in a World Cup
warm-up game in 2019 that he began to
feel unwell. He was found to have stage
four cancer of the colon soon after-
wards.
Smith bore his illness with typical
steadfastness, defying an early progno-
sis that he had only a few months to live.
He was inducted into the Scottish
Rugby Hall of Fame last year and was at
Murrayfield to watch Scotland beat
England on the opening day of this
year’s Six Nations, where, two months
before his death, he had the pleasure of
seeing his old team retain the Calcutta
Cup with a 20-17 win.Tom Smith, rugby player and coach, was
born on October 31, 1971. He died of
cancer on April 6, 2022, aged 50Luis Roldán
Corrupt Spanish politician and police chief
who went on the run after embezzling millions
Luis Roldán seemed to personify much
of that which had gone awry with
Spain’s fragile democracy since the
death of General Franco in 1975.
Though of little comfort to a weary
public, his dramatic downfall, which
came after more than a decade of
unbroken socialist rule, provided them
at least with the sort of entertainment
that all the money he had stolen from
state coffers could never buy.
Despite being the chief of police he
thought nothing of embezzling the
equivalent of an estimated €14 million,
fleeing to evade justice and leaving a
false trail for his former colleagues to
follow: Roldán was supposedly spotted
in Venezuela, Angola and South Africa,
when all the time he was hiding in Paris.
One magazine published photos of him
at a sex party in unflattering Y-fronts
with lines of cocaine on a coffee table.
His eventual capture was the work
of a man arguably more devious
than himself. Francisco Paesa,
allegedly a gun-runner and
spy affiliated to the
Spanish security services,
helped Roldán to flee
Spain but changed sides
for a fee (and later, in
another twist, appeared
to have faked his own
death).
Born in Zaragoza in 1943,
the son of a taxi driver, Roldán
had the knack of being in the right
place at the right time. He joined the
Socialist Party in his thirties and rose
rapidly from deputy mayor of Zaragoza
to government delegate to Aragon. In
1986 he was given the job of heading
Spain’s Civil Guard — the first civilian to
lead it — because his boss turned it
down, fearing the risk of assassination
by ETA during a period when the
Basque terrorist group was highly active.
In 1993 Roldán’s successes against
ETA were about to earn him promotion
to the role of interior minister when a
front-page exclusive was published in
the newspaper Diario 16: “Luis Roldán’s
wealth has increased by 400 million
pesetas since he became director of the
Civil Guard,” the headline read. He
denied the story but within months,
after stepping down from office and
being suspended from his party, he
became a fugitive.
It later emerged that his “engineering
bachelor’s degree and masters in eco-
nomics” were both fabricated and he
had long had a taste for kickbacks. As
director-general of the Civil Guard he
plundered state funds reserved for
fighting terrorism and took illegal com-
missions from contracts he awarded to
construction companies for new police
stations and army bases.
He even stole from the Civil Guard’s
orphan association (one of the few
crimes he later vehemently denied).
Investigative journalists uncovered a
dozen flats and villas; outside Spain he
owned a luxurious flat in Paris facing
the Eiffel Tower and a villa in Saint
Barthélemy, West Indies.
As Roldán became a symbol of cor-
ruption in the echelons of power, the
scandal was the final straw for the
premiership of Felipe González, who
had been elected in 1982. After a seriesHe suffered an epileptic
seizure before a Calcutta
Cup game. He still played
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Marriages and engagements
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