Immorality, bribery, graft and corruption, betrayal of trust and culpable violation of the Constitution do not bother Filipinos. Many of them are guilty of these charges, too. Or wish they were—and lived to enjoy it.
—RENE Q. BAS, “ENTHUSIASMS,” MANILA TIMES, DEC. 5, 2000
There was a better way. It showed itself in the autumn of 2000 in the person of General Panfilo “Ping” Lacson, chief of the Philippine National Police and the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force (PAOCTF). Like his boss Erap, Ping was under considerable duress. One of his antagonists was an ex-14K “Big Sister” named Mary “Rosebud” Ong, a strikingly beautiful woman who’d served as an underworld agent for the PAOCTF and the Hong Kong police. In November, 10 months after the docking of the Jumbo and the attendant BW Resources scandal, Rosebud exploded on the tube, accusing Lacson of working hand in glove with the 14K for his own benefit. She proclaimed that the police chief was a major international drug trafficker though his 14K allies in Macau, Hong Kong, and Manila, that he was a habitual kidnapper-for-ransom, a big-time money launderer, and a mass murderer. She was supported in these allegations by an ex-PNP colonel named Reynaldo Berroya, who had worked under Lacson as an anti-narcotics officer in the late 1990s.
I was back in Vancouver and had no way of knowing if any (or all) of the charges against Lacson were true. I did know that the Philippines was a perpetual madhouse of warring accusations, and that bellicose politicians and feuding cops often hired “demolition teams” to plant the most outrageous charges in the media. True or not, however, the charges made me ponder the possibilities. I conjectured that the embattled Lacson might perceive an opportunity for some positive international press by employing his knowledge of the 14K to find Steve and hand him over to me in Manila. I shared my thoughts with my wife, Leslie, and my publisher, Anne, who both assessed them as reckless. If even one of the charges against Lacson were true, they said, I could very well wind up as the 37th journalist murdered in the Philippines.
Promising I would go slow, I leaned on Leslie to talk to her company’s 24-year-old Chinese-Filipina secretary, Janise, who had recently returned from Manila. “In a roundabout way get her opinion on this Lacson business,” I requested.
Ninety seconds after her hour-long conversation with Janise, Leslie called me with the spectacular news that Lacson was Janise’s godfather, and that Janise’s dad was a Manila businessman named Jerome Tang, who owned a medical-supply company and a couple of Jolibee restaurants. Back in 1995—grateful for Lacson’s help in combating the hundreds of annual kidnappings plaguing the Chinese community—Jerome had hired a high-priced lawyer to defend the general on charges of mass murder. The case involved 11 members of the savage Kuratong Baleleng gang: after the gang’s arrest, Lacson had allegedly ordered his men to “salvage” the prisoners in a paddy wagon, although Lacson claimed there had been “a shoot-out.” The charges—dismissed, reinstated, raised to a higher court, and returned to a lower court—were still kicking around the byzantine Filipino justice system.
Over lunch with Janise and Leslie at the decorous Lazy Gourmet, I learned some more details about Janise’s controversial godfather. Charges of murder and malfeasance had been dogging the 52-year-old general ever since he had graduated the Philippine Military Academy in 1971 and joined Ferdinand Marcos’s feared Metrocom Intelligence and Security Group. Nevertheless, since Estrada had appointed him top cop, Lacson had ended the PNP’s tradition of kotung, the God-given right of Philippine police to supplement their starvation-level salaries by preying on the population. Cabdrivers and small businessmen throughout the land felt as if a lifelong plague had been suddenly lifted from their shoulders. The police chief had also set records for arrests—over 37,000 the previous year, 75 of whom were Triad members—and rescued literally hundreds of kidnap victims. “He’s a very tough policeman, but the Philippines isn’t Canada or the U.S.,” Janise said, alluding to the fact that Lacson’s sobriquet “Ping” derived from his association with gunfire whenever he chased criminals. “When a criminal is caught here, he goes to jail. In the Philippines, a judge is bribed and he’s back in business.” Indeed, Lacson’s reputation as a “tough policeman,” coupled with his magnetic attractiveness to women and an affair he’d had with a sultry actress named Tina Monasterio, were the twin hot themes of a blockbuster movie just released about his exploits: Ping Lacson—Supercop. At the moment, despite all that was said about his supposed criminality, Lacson was still enormously popular among the million ethnic Chinese, the working class, and the poor—that is, 80 percent of the population. The powerful Chinese community even wanted him to enter politics.
I liked the sound of Lacson, but a couple of weeks later I learned that the accusations against him were in part the reason many North American cops were so hesitant to share information about fugitive criminals with Lacson’s international liaison officer, Aris Gana. Indeed, Lacson and the black reputation of the PNP he headed were the reasons no action had been taken on Steve after he had returned to the Philippines and become connected to the NBI. That he was still there, hard at work in Manila’s fetid swamps, was the chatter of Richmond’s upscale Chinatown. Kim Tam was now out of the pen and cruising the casinos in Richmond, where there were some talky dragon heads who suddenly knew Steve’s alias: Joe Co.
Getting wind of the Paper Fan’s nom de guerre boosted my testosterone into the red zone. After a couple of months of debate with my wife and Anne, I decided to ignore everyone’s advice and begin pulling strings to arrange a meeting with Ping in Manila, which by then was in such turmoil that anything was possible—even throwing Steve “Joe Co” Wong in a steamer trunk and having him mailed home.
It was the beginning of 2001, and the unceasing revelations about the Estrada administration had pushed the Philippines to the edge of its second revolution in 15 years. Around the time of Mary Ong’s bombshell, a provincial governor named Luis “Chavit” Singson—feeling cheated out of an illegal gambling racket by Estrada, and with a claimed death threat from the president’s men hanging over his head—stepped forward and announced that he had delivered almost $8 million in bribes from illegal gambling syndicates to Estrada, plus another $2.6 million from taxes collected from tobacco farmers. Panfilo Lacson was completely aware of the payoffs, Singson charged.
The accumulating landslide of charges and mountains of evidence behind them were too grave to ignore, even in a nation where governments routinely looked the other way in the face of gross official corruption that, according to the World Bank, had cost the country $48 billion since 1980. Three days after Singson’s allegations, Vice President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the constitutional successor to Estrada with support among the elite and the Catholic Church, resigned from her post as secretary of social welfare, citing a loss of confidence in Erap’s leadership. In the House of Representatives, opposition legislators filed an impeachment motion against the president. Two weeks later, Macapagal-Arroyo formed a united opposition with Church factions and legislators, which was called the People’s Power Coalition, taking its name from the People Power revolution that had overthrown Marcos in 1986.
Estrada’s defense—accepted by the poor who had elected him—was that he had received only $4 million in intended bribes, and had actually deposited the money into the account of a presidential lottery for slum kids. “The poor have always been close to me, as they surely know, for I am from them,” he said in a radio interview from Malacañang, alluding to his birthplace in Tondo, the poorest slum in Manila.
The House of Representatives was having none of it. Its members voted to impeach Erap and have him tried on charges of graft, bribery, and betrayal of public trust for attempting to shield BW Resources from the SEC. The case was passed for trial to the Senate, where Estrada entered a not-guilty plea, claiming he was the victim of a conspiracy between the upper class and the Church, both of which factions had always held him—and the poor—in contempt.
What seemed clear was that the country was facing a hiatus in government it could ill afford. Over a third of Filipinos were living on less than 70 cents a day, the peso was crashing, foreign investment and tourism were drying up, NPA-led revolutions raged on half a dozen islands, Islamic terrorists struck at will on Mindanao, and street crime was so rampant that Lacson had called out the marines to patrol Metro Manila.
The televised proceedings opened on December 7, 2000, and the entire nation watched riveted as numerous witnesses with knowledge of the president’s under-the-table income testfied that Estrada had a secret account in the Equitable PCI Bank with a total of $66 million in deposits. The prosecutors demanded to have an envelope containing information on the Equitable account opened. In most nations, that would have been the next logical step in the trial. Not in the Philippines. On January 16, 2001, the 21 senators acting as judges decided in an 11-to-10 vote not to pry into Estrada’s private finances.
With that vote it became apparent to the House prosecutors that the Senate would never convict Estrada, no matter what the evidence. The next day, they stormed out in mid-session and announced they were quitting. Jaime Cardinal Sin called upon the citizens of Manila to gather at EDSA square, on the east side of the city, to protest the Senate vote. “Go to EDSA, it is a holy place,” Sin announced, referring to the treasured fact that hundreds of thousands had gathered there to overthrow Marcos in the first People Power revolution and that the site had since been made into a shrine, with a 50-foot gold statue of the Virgin out front.
Text messages were mass mailed by Church officials to the cell phones of the middle and upper classes. By the evening of the next day, January 18, some 500,000 of Manila’s “elite” had assembled at EDSA. One after another, cabinet ministers deserted the president and showed up at the shrine to stand beneath the Virgin and beside Macapagal-Arroyo, Jaime Cardinal Sin, Cory Aquino, and former president Fidel Ramos. Estrada remained holed up in Malacañang with army generals and a still-loyal Lacson, trying to keep them onside, but after a couple of days of hectic meetings and cell phone negotiation, the military told the commander in chief the jig was up; their top generals then left the palace and joined the demonstrators at the shrine. At that point Lacson informed his boss that while his overthrow might not be legal, the only alternative would be violent resistance—something he was not prepared to contemplate. He left for PNP headquarters at Camp Crame, near the EDSA Shrine, and after consulting with his men, phoned the president in tears and said he was withdrawing his support. Left alone in Malacañang, the former movie star declared he would never resign.
“Glory Gloria! Glory Gloria!” the half-million demonstrators chanted in unison, demanding that Macapagal-Arroyo be made president. In a theatrical display of solidarity with the sea of well-scrubbed faces, the chief justice of the Supreme Court showed up at EDSA and announced that, based on the precedent set by the last People Power revolution, the presidency was now vacant.
Foreign observers on the scene scratched their heads. How could a 500,000-person demonstration, in the capital of a country with 78 million people, be viewed as an authoritative vote of no-confidence in a leader who had received almost 11 million votes just two and a half years earlier? Estrada was probably utterly corrupt, but surely the overthrow of a sitting president by such means had to sow the seeds for further so-called People Power revolutions. “People Power has become an acceptable term for a troubling phenomenon,” editorialized Time.com, “one that used to be known as mob rule.”
But the emotions of the well-behaved mob carried the day. January 20 was marked as People Power II, and the chief justice swore in the four-foot-ten, 53-year-old Macapagal-Arroyo as the new president. A couple of hours later, still refusing to acknowledge his presidency was at an end, Estrada and his family, facing forced eviction, left the palace by the rear Pasig River Gate and went home to their mansion in a gated community called North Greenhills, its back wall nestled against Camp Crame.
With his boss dethroned and now ensconced on the other side of Camp Crame’s razor wire, Lacson offered his resignation to Macapagal-Arroyo. She accepted it, but countered with an offer to appoint him to the number two spot in the PNP, under a suddenly anti-Erap general (and old enemy of Lacson’s) named Leandro Mendoza. Lacson refused the offer, and, perhaps to keep him out of her hair, Arroyo offered him an ambassadorship in a European capital of his choosing. Ping refused again; then, weighing the sources of the new president’s support and opposition, announced he would be running for the Senate in the upcoming May 14 national elections as a candidate with a pro-Erap coalition, ominously called Puwersa Ng Masa—Power of the Masses.
By the end of March 2001, polls showed Lacson was among the most popular politicians in the country, particularly among the ethnic Chinese and poor Filipinos. Ignored, excluded, or exploited, the poor still believed in Estrada’s movie star myth, and were left boiling with feelings of disenfranchisement when their votes had been thrown to the winds and Estrada ejected. As Estadra’s man, Lacson seemed to have a good shot at the presidency in the 2004 election—if he won his Senate seat.
At precisely that moment, polls in hand, the newly appointed leaders of the PNP and the NBI reviewed their “intelligence reports” and then declared to the press they would be investigating Lacson for acts of mass murder, kidnapping for ransom, $350 million in drug dealing, ordering the illegal wiretapping of senators, working hand in hand with the Chinese Triads, and embezzling funds from his task force to invest in a Jolibee franchise—a not-so-subtle swipe at his now-prominent supporter, Jerome Tang.
“I read your paper, the documents, but if you come in May it’s going to be too late,” Ping Lacson told me over the phone from Manila on April 5. “So if you want to—uh—collect something, I think it should be earlier.”
“Are you still connected with some high-level honest people that can arrange it?” I asked. “I’ll just tell you very broadly, he’s with the NBI.”
“Oh!” Lacson replied, sounding as startled as I was when I had first got the news. “He’s with the NBI—at what level?”
“I’m not sure what level he’s at, but it’s going to be very difficult and very delicate.”
“Do you have a name?” he asked, because in the letter and documents I’d sent him I’d been careful to leave out or redact specific details. I’d promised Leslie and Anne I would not trust Lacson until I met him.
“Yes we do, but I don’t want to give you that over the phone,” I said. “I’ve been on this fellow’s case for eleven years, the police have been on him for eleven years, without success. Because obviously he’s connected to some very sensitive people. I can tell you he’s a 14K Triad official. And I’m going through you because I think if you can work this, it will do you a lot of good. But the object is to get him!”
“Bring him down,” he said.
“Yes! Because he’s not just a gangster. He’s a gangster with power. I’m not going to go beyond what I said, but when I come over there I’ll give you photographs of him, a full description, I have his regular name, I have an alias that he’s operating under, an Interpol Red Alert warrant for his arrest, a Canadian national warrant, and an international warrant. I’ll let them know in Hong Kong first,” I added since, on this trip, regardless of Paul Brown’s aversion to journalists, I was going to make sure the RCMP Liaison Office in Hong Kong knew I was on the ground and dealing with Lacson. “Are you still on good relations with some people in the NBI?” I asked again.
“Definitely,” he affirmed. “My former officers with the task force, they’re now back with the NBI. Their place was on detail with my task force, and now they’re there.”
“But would they protect one of their own?”
“I don’t think so,” he replied. “I chose these people, led them in the highest level of operations.”
“Okay, I will be in Manila on April 24,” I said, counting ahead on my calendar for a cheap flight. “I would say that it’s important that you don’t do anything until then, because this fellow will hear that somebody has contacted you looking for somebody in the NBI, and as soon as he hears that, several things could happen. One is he could take off; another is that he could have me killed when I show up; another is he could take care of somebody over there who he thought—”
“No, no, I won’t do anything,” Lacson assured me.
“Okay, I will come with all the documents,” I said. Then, figuring I was not going to gain any points with Ping by leaving out a little detail he might go ballistic over in person, I added, “But I must tell you, Panfilo, you’ll see that he has been very heavily involved with the PNP.”
“Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh,” Lacson said, and my heart sank and shriveled with each of his descending vowels. “Ahh, the PNP,” he sighed.
“From years ago, Ping. I know that from years ago. With senior inspectors at the PNP.”
“And now he’s with the NBI,” he said flatly.
“Yes,” I said. “And let’s face it, I’m putting my life in your hands, okay?”
“Yeah, I know, I know, I realize that.”
I waited, but he didn’t add, “Don’t worry.”
“Okay, now, the Canadian police will be aware I’m there,” I declared, implying that men in serge would be monitoring my every move. “But they can’t really do anything for me in the Philippines—” thinking, Shit, I phrased that exactly wrong! I’d meant to say Canadian cops couldn’t help me arrest Steve, but would get Lacson arrested if he harmed a hair on my curly head. He seemed to take it the right way though.
“We have some good contacts with the Canadian embassy here and the police attaché,” Ping said, “because when I was with the task force we used to network with these people and we’ve established some very good relationships with them.”
Comforting as this news was, it disturbed me. It didn’t exactly jibe with what I’d been told about the Canadian embassy’s opinion of the PNP. I ignored my misgivings, however, and gave Ping the benefit of the doubt. I figured no one would have said anything to his face. In 1994, when Garry Clement was on Steve’s ass and visiting Manila as the police attaché, Lacson, as chief of the president’s anti-drug task force, would have been part and parcel of the “good relations” which had then prevailed. Either he thought the amity had never ended or didn’t want to admit it had. “I can make the arrangements when you arrive,” he said.
“How’d it go?” Leslie asked when I got off the phone.
“It went and I’m going.”
Over the next few days I broke into my usual pre-hunt prep—arranging e-mail codes with Anne and Leslie, cell phone codes, letters of intro—all the while hanging on the Internet. The Philippines ombudsman had just indicted Estrada for plunder and seven other related charges of graft amounting to more than $80 million, which meant Estrada was looking at the death penalty; which meant, once arrested, he would not be granted bail. He maneuvered desperately to avoid being hauled into Camp Crame by launching an appeal on the grounds that he had presidential immunity. On April 10, the Supreme Court threw out his appeals, stating he was no longer president, and on April 16 an arrest warrant was handed down. The country held its breath, wondering if the warrant would really be carried out, and what the reaction of Estrada’s millions of supporters in the poor barrios would be. With the country still wondering, I boarded a Cathay Pacific flight for Hong Kong and Manila.
Stepping off the plane in Ninoy Aquino Airport on April 24, my third time in my search for Steve, I literally walked into Jerome Tang, a short man who stood in the middle of the ramp holding my name high on a sign as 300 passengers parted around him. So much for my fantasy of keeping a low profile.
Jerome was 60, but his hair and eyebrows were dyed so shinily black, his handsome features were so smooth, that at first glance he seemed too young to be the father of Janise. We shook hands and as we walked double-time through the airport corridor Jerome informed me that thousands of Erap loyalists were now encamped at the gates of North Greenhills. They were pledging their lives to keep Erap from being taken to jail.
“Will Lacson be getting involved?” I asked, worried that this Erap business would distract Ping from the reason I had traveled 6,000 miles.
“It is an issue for the people, his constituency,” Jerome said, then made it sound as if we were going to meet Batman. “The general has special powers. If he say he will do for you, he will do.”
Jerome seemed to have his own special powers, at least at the airport. He wore a security badge around his neck and had a smiling acquaintanceship with all the right officials. When I picked up my suitcase and turned my luggage cart towards the end of the long line of passengers waiting to be inspected by Bureau of Immigration agents, Jerome said, “Not necessary.” He pulled my cart out of line and ushered it and me past the immigration desk, right by a guard. He then asked for my passport and immigration card, went back to the desk and slipped them under an agent’s arm. The agent absently looked around, smiled at him and glanced at me, then took the card. As we exited into the blast furnace that was Manila in this hottest month of the year, I thought: This man has the pull to protect me. I’ll be okay.
Jerome’s chauffeur drove us north up Roxas Boulevard, aggressively plunging into the gridlocked traffic around the Philippine Cultural Center. Just beyond the jetty’s plaza I could see Stanley Ho’s shuttered Jumbo floating forlornly in the harbor, about a hundred yards from where it had been docked at its opening. I asked Jerome if he knew what Ho would be doing with the barge. “If no casino, nothing.” He shook his head and laughed wearily. “You know, Ho thinks government close it, but Cardinal Sin really close it. Because back then, Estrada was not giving gambling money to the Church.”
“Well, no, he was keeping it all to himself!”
“I mean legal money, not jueteng,” he replied, referring to the illegal numbers racket Erap had been scooping. “Now, though, with new government, Sin is getting gambling money from the government. I think Jumbo be opening again sometime.”
“You mean Cardinal Sin’s in favor of gambling now?” I asked, astonished.
“Maybe he look the other way, because the new government say, ‘Here’s some money to you from gambling.’”
I turned around and faced Jerome squarely in the back seat. “Do you mean to say the new government is giving him gambling money personally, or to the Church?”
“Same thing. He live in big villa in Mandaluyong City. So where does he get the money to live like that? From the Church.”
He told me he’d give me an article in Time that proved the cardinal was a hypocrite. It seemed “Glorious Gloria” had scandalously agreed to become the godmother to the son of a notorious jueteng gangster named Bong Pineda, who masterminded a $100-million-a-year illegal operation. It was an unholy union that Sin had approved. I later read Gloria’s lame explanation for becoming godmother to the criminal godfather’s son: “Cardinal Sin said, as a Christian, if I am asked to be a godmother, it is my Christian duty.”
Jerome looked ahead at the jeepneys and taxis pointing every which way on the road. “That the problem with this country. Everybody make up the rules as they go.”
Jerome took me to a hotel he’d booked called the Palm Plaza, which was only six blocks south of the Iseya but a world away in class and comfort, with a banquet hall, piano bar, marble floors, and glittering lighting in the huge white lobby. When I asked Jerome how much this joint was going to cost me, he told me not to worry, “It’s in the family.”
I couldn’t accept his money but let it go for now: we had to race right off to the dinner he’d arranged with Lacson, a man who’d probably made up a few rules in his life, but none, I hoped, that allowed him to commit the travesty that was making the very latest headlines.
I tried to take it with a few grains of salt, but the PNP and NBI had just accused Lacson of engineering the kidnapping, strangulation, and incineration of a political publicist named Salvador “Bubby” Dacer. The published police accounts did not lean in the direction of Lacson’s innocence. The gruesome killing had occurred on November 24, 2000, two days after a meeting between Dacer and the president at Malacañang in the midst of Erap’s mounting agony. According to Dacer’s daughter, Ampy, who was a witness to the meeting, Estrada had accused Dacer of leading “a demolition squad” to ruin his reputation. In addition, an adviser to Fidel Ramos had just produced a letter in which Dacer wrote that he feared he was being monitored by Estrada and Lacson because Estrada believed the publicist was “the point man” in the conspiracy to oust him. Dacer certainly had somebody to fear. At a busy Manila intersection on the city’s South Superhighway, Dacer and his driver, Emmanuel Corbito, were abducted from their car at gunpoint by eight men. Witnesses fingered two suspects, both junior cops. During interrogation the junior cops claimed that members of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force, headed by Lacson, strangled Dacer and Corbito with electric cords before setting fire to the corpses in a town called Cavite. By the time I’d left for the Philippines, eight members of the PAOCTF had been arrested as the culprits, based on confessions and sworn statements of four of them. The confessed killers claimed they’d taken their orders from “people higher up,” although none of the PAOCTF cops had specifically fingered Lacson or Estrada.
Jerome had an explanation for all of it. I could read it in the papers, he said. The letter to Ramos’s adviser was never confirmed as Dacer’s, and the police had taken it upon themselves to speak for Ampy. Indeed, Lacson’s campaign manager, Angelito Banayo—also at the Dacer-Estrada meeting—said there had never been an argument. Quite the opposite. Dacer had told Banayo, “Let’s work together to help your boss.” Banayo claimed it was Fidel Ramos who’d had the motive to get rid of Dacer. Ramos had hired Dacer to destabilize the Estrada administration because, in the 1998 election, Estrada had soundly trounced Ramos’s chosen successor, House Speaker Jose de Venecia—the point man in the House impeachment vote. Ramos admitted to a meeting with Dacer just before his abduction, and Banayo speculated that Ramos had taken his revenge for Dacer’s betrayal.
Of the two versions, the police interpretation sounded more plausible to the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Still, in the Philippines, you could never be sure of any version of a murder. I knew that the PNP would not be averse to torturing confessions out of the accused cops. “You think Lacson will actually be charged for this?” I asked Jerome. “I mean, any or all of this—kidnapping, murder, wiretapping, drug dealing—”
Jerome laughed and waved his hand, as if he were relaxed about the whole thing. “No, no, no—see, they just want to throw all the trouble to him, because the administration party don’t want him to be elected, so want to give him the trouble, destroy his reputation. Because he’s one of most popular politicians. Because if he elected senator, then in 2004 he will also become the president. It is all—how you say it—television play—”
“A soap opera?”
“Yes, yes—soap opera!! Look the police who make the most accusations! Look!”
The instigator of the accusations against Lacson was Reynaldo Berroya, Lacson’s co-accuser in the Mary Ong affair. Last week, Macapagal-Arroyo had reinstated Berroya in the PNP, promoting him to senior superintendent and appointing him intelligence chief. The history of Berroya and Lacson went back eight years, Jerome said, and, in fact, as he related it, I remembered reading the headlines when I was on my first hunt for Steve on Negros. In September 1993, Lacson, the anti-kidnap crusader, had arrested Berroya for snatching a wealthy Taiwanese businessman named Jack Chow. The evidence Lacson had gathered resulted in Berroya’s conviction three years later and the colonel was sentenced to life in prison. Berroya only served a year, however. On December 12, 1997, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s decision, finding on appeal that there was not enough evidence for a conviction, although the justices went out of their way to state that their decision was not an exoneration of the colonel. Berroya was reinstated to the PNP in 1999 and Lacson assigned him to the anti-narcotics unit, only to dismiss him from the force when he found Berroya had gone absent without leave.
“You see, all connected,” Jerome said, as we crossed the Manila line into Quezon City. “Berroya do so much—why make him intelligence chief now? Answer: because he the one hate Lacson, do the demolition work for Gloria.”
I thought the charge that “Berroya do so much” could be equally applied to Lacson, who’d been appointed PNP chief in the midst of the Kuratong Baleleng case, but decided to leave it alone.
“What about this Ong business?” I asked.
“Mary Ong—she is already accused with drug trafficking, money laundering, many things.”
“But never convicted?”
“No, because everybody is afraid of her, or else they owe her the favors. Beginning of that—she has many many lovers—but one was John Campos, senior superintendent PNP anti-narcotics under Lacson. Campos threw her away, so she decide to get back at PNP. She tell another boyfriend in the TV media, ‘I have secret information, I am agent for PNP.’ He calls Berroya, get two them together, they charge everybody—murder, kidnapping, drug trafficking. It is all lies. If Lacson do all this, wouldn’t he be rich man? If he’s rich man, why does he have to come to me pay for lawyer? He live in a normal house, one car, one watch. They want to stop him because, without demolition job, he the next president.”
At seven we pulled up in front of the Golden Pearl Seafood Restaurant, located in a supposedly middle-class area of Quezon City called the West Triangle—totally indistinguishable in terms of strewn trash, shack buildings, and noxious traffic from any of the other urban messes we’d just crawled through for two hours. We were met by two smiling valets who ushered us under the plastic awning and then through the freezing dining room to a wall-length accordion door. Jerome slid the louvers back to reveal a large rotating table, seated all round with middle-aged Chinese men and women. Opposite the door, back to the wall as I’d expected, sat the trim general, casually dressed in a blue-and-green plaid shirt, his thick raven hair styled to flop youthfully down to frame a good-looking face accented by light wire glasses. You could sort of see how, before the media had turned on him, they’d sold him as a sexy supercop.
Everyone stood up and greeted the Western journalist warmly—or hopefully, since Jerome told me he’d passed the word that I was “a friend,” and Lacson had very few left in the media. Lacson stayed seated, looking as if he was too exhausted to beamingly play the role of politician after two months of constant campaigning, much of which had been spent refuting the astonishing cataract of allegations.
“When did you arrive?” he asked, looking shyly at a point on the red tablecloth between lobster and mango slices.
I pulled my chair in beside his and glanced at my watch. “Just.”
“You are in a sleep-deprived state then,” he smiled.
“Actually I paid my respects at the Mountie Liaison Office in Hong Kong first,” I stated truthfully, again letting him know there were people (powerless as they were to help me) aware of my being here. “I recuperated there for a day.”
“Good, well, let’s eat and then we can talk about your subject afterwards.”
Because we were in the midst of this crucial senatorial election—in effect, a referendum on Estrada’s overthrow—the ensuing discussion was exclusively about politics. Lacson, however, sat curiously silent as my table-mates complained that in the six months since Singson’s allegations, the country had been in ceaseless and needless crisis. In their eyes, the president was merely a macho blue-collar guy who’d made it to the top and done what any Tondo boy would have done: have lots of women, father illegitimate children, drink, and party with underworld figures. The rich did it, too. They were more corrupt than Estrada at his worst—they just got away with it. Look at Ramos’s involvement in the Amari scandal—several hundred million dollars lost to the government. Look at Aquino’s handing out jobs to all her relatives. Look at Cardinal Sin, prelate of the poor in his giant villa. Look at Macapagal-Arroyo, tied in with jueteng gangsters like Bong Pineda. Look at her husband, Mike—a rich haciendero who was caught up in a bribery scandal now. “You think the poor do not see through this and that?” said Mark Tan, the owner of the restaurant. Everybody agreed the Ramos-Aquino-Sin-Gloria clique was behind the impeachment, because, with the exception of Estrada, the elite had uninterruptedly ruled the Philippines since Independence, and they couldn’t stand that someone not in their class had taken the reins from them.
“Granted, they despise Estrada,” I said, “but Erap still stole millions of dollars. I mean, you guys wouldn’t excuse that, right?”
That prompted everybody to speak at once, shouting over each other, breaking into Chinese for sidebars, bursting into laughter or argument, switching to Tagalog and then going back to English. This is essentially what they said:
The jueteng racket Estrada had been skimming was so much a part of Filipino life that every president since Independence had profited from it. The government could have legalized the lottery at any time, just the way it had casino gambling, but it was far more profitable for officials to leave jueteng in the hands of the syndicates, who then had to pay those officials protection money. Since the vast majority of Filipinos played jueteng for a few pesos a day it was considered a victimless crime, as much a part of the national character as cockfighting. It was an open secret that people ran for office to get in on the jueteng bonanza, and no one had paid the price until Estrada. He had been impeached only because he was the first to flaunt his affection for the poor and the Chinese, both of which were openly disparaged in the most blatantly bigoted terms by the ruling Filipino classes and the press. Indeed, they said, that was why when Estrada was exposed as a jueteng profiteer, most poor people laughed and said, in effect, “Good on ya!” Erap was merely a tough guy with a golden heart (everyone had seen his movies) who had stolen his fortune from gangsters, distributing at least some of it to the barrios. To the masa, his late-night boozing and shmoozing came off as roguish and appealing—a lifestyle the poor knew they would lead if they ever made it to the top.
“And General Lacson?” I asked, not addressing this to Ping but to his supporters. At that, though, they all suddenly fell silent.
“I have never taken a centavo from jueteng, I had a no-take policy for all my men,” Lacson said, sounding almost puritanical compared to those around him. “My salary was thirty thousand pesos a month, six hundred U.S. dollars. As director of PNP I am sure to get five million pesos each month from jueteng, plus other extras. We discover a schedule of payment based on rank. A regional director of the PNP—three million pesos a month. This is according to our intelligence reports. So the immorality of the jueteng, I don’t speak about this. Just to the police officers, to spare them corruption by jueteng lords.”
“When Ping elected he will expose what he know in the Senate—you will see,” Jerome said. “Privileged speech in Senate. Then everybody know who get what. That is why they afraid of him.”
“Ping from the poor barrio too,” Mark Tan informed me. “In Cavite City. Nine brothers and sisters. Pull himself up because he is smart. So the people know this and elect him senator.”
“I sent you our campaign slogan,” Jerome added. “‘What is right must be kept right; what is wrong must be set right.’”
None of it made the least bit of sense, of course. Lacson had been the top cop to a crooked guy who’d been into a lot more than jueteng. If he was a supercop, why didn’t he bust his boss back then? And why not condemn him now? Was it because he was loyal to the man who had promoted him to the summit, or because of his outrage at the illegality of the People Power II revolution? I could sympathize with both motivations, yet, given the magnitude of Estrada’s graft, Lacson was either a man with a monumentally misplaced sense of integrity, or a man with a lot to hide. However, it wasn’t my business to make him feel uncomfortable now. I just wanted him to get Steve for me.
“It’s amazing what they say about you in the press,” I commented. “Thirteen murders, three hundred million in drug dealing—”
“The press will say anything that will sell papers,” Lacson sighed.
“In the Philippines they either murder you or accuse you of murder,” said the fellow sitting beside Mark Tan.
“Tell him why reporters hate you so much,” Jerome leaned over and advised Ping.
“Oh it’s probably quite simple,” Lacson said. “When I became head of the PNP, I discovered a list. We were paying two million pesos a month in bribes to media on the list. I ordered that the list be torn up and the payments stopped.”
“Worst mistake you ever made,” I said, more than half believing his explanation, since the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism had done a survey of reporters during the 1998 presidential election and found that a third openly admitted to taking money from their sources: how many more took bribes and simply denied it could only be guessed. The sad fact was, the PCIJ report pointed out, many in the Philippine media essentially worked as prostitutes—taking money to publish glowing press releases as hard news and suppressing bad news that their patrons were unhappy with. Or worse. There were some who acted as paid character assassins; others who investigated public figures in order to blackmail them; still others who actively extorted protection money to keep an embarrassing story off the air or the front pages. The corrupt practice, officially considered a firing offense but unofficially tolerated in Filipino journalism, was called “ATM Journalism,” or “Envelopmental Journalism.” The particular brand of bribery Lacson had “discovered” in 1999 was called “Inteligensia,” defined by the PCIJ as “the regular payments that they [reporters] get from law enforcers.” It was the reason, in fact, that I had not yet met with another journalist in the Philippines—not even one in the PCIJ. I didn’t doubt the PCIJ’s integrity, but, given the mixed reputation of their colleagues, a loose lip could sink my ship.
After dinner the 10 guests in the room obligingly left Jerome, Lacson, and me in private to discuss business. I took out my thick file and got down to work. I talked for 20 minutes, starting with my first article on Steve, then my second, then my third. I handed these over to the general, plus Steve’s 10- and 15-year-old pictures and his detailed tattoo descriptions. These provided no short cut to journalistic heaven, however. Lacson said he didn’t recognize Steve—or else the photos were so old that Steve no longer looked as he had in front of the Brooklyn Bridge. I handed over the Interpol wanted poster and concluded with the latest information, his alias, which I wrote in the corner of the poster. I added that nothing had been done on Steve in the Philippines in the last year and a half because of the “controversies” surrounding Estrada and the PNP.
Lacson seemed to take this last bit neutrally, but I couldn’t really be sure if he was offended. In the three hours I’d sat beside him he had betrayed almost no emotions. He wasn’t icy—wooden would be a better term, an anomalous characteristic for a Filipino. I remembered reading in the press that, aside from his classmates from the military academy, he had almost no friends.
“I don’t know how you want to go about doing this,” I said, “but I’ll do whatever you say.”
“It’s too bad they didn’t work with Aris Gana when I was still director. You would have this man now.”
I held my tongue and a silence descended on the table. I didn’t break it because I could tell his cop mind was turning. He was staring not at Steve’s pictures or my articles but at the oilcloth. After a long minute he said: “This will involve a lot of planning. You want him captured and held.”
“Can you put me in touch with your men in the NBI?” I asked.
“All of that will have to be done in a roundabout way. Since we spoke on the phone, as you know, new developments.”
“The general needs to get the credit for this,” Jerome said. “Not NBI.”
“Of course, that’s the whole point,” I told Jerome. “But it’ll be some credit! My experience is that when a foreign country praises a local boy, his stock goes way up among the locals.” I turned back to Ping. “When can we begin?”
“How long will you be staying?”
“As long as I can afford—two, three weeks. Jerome’s kindly offered to pay my hotel, but I can’t let him.”
“I will try and have a meeting tomorrow afternoon. In the morning I’ll be busy on other developments.”
I surmised he meant busy on Estrada. “So when will I hear from you?” I asked.
“I am always in touch with Jerome. I should have some word for you back tomorrow night.”
“Great! And the embassy?”
“If I am lucky on the first, of course, then the embassy. They will be embarrassed they didn’t inform me of this.”
The guests were then invited back in and we all began taking pictures of each other, a noisy ritual that lasted half an hour. At the end of the photofest I told Lacson that I hoped Steve would catapult him into the Senate. We shook on it and I thought we were on our way out, but Jerome took Ping aside and huddled with him in a corner of the private dining room for 10 minutes. I could see Jerome pointing to the envelope containing all my material. Good man, Jerome! I said to myself. I guessed he now felt his own face was on the line with me, and was arguing for action.
“Keep cell phone on,” Jerome told me as we got into the back of his car. “The general will work for you, he promise, then he will call me.”
“Where will you be?”
“My office, Jolibee. Await developments.” Again Estrada, I figured. Jerome closed his eyes a moment. It was now past 11 and the guy had been up for 20 hours. “Maybe you go Estrada’s house. The general just say maybe arrest will be tomorrow. Very interesting for you to see situation.”
“You think it’ll be safe?” I asked. “I’d hate to have my head batoned by a cop before I get my man.”
“What you say, maybe your man the one with baton.”