After the verdict, no one wanted to touch her story, not my literary agent at the time, not my former editors or publisher—no one. Gaggling reporters proved more interested in Imelda Marcos’s several thousand pairs of shoes than in the criminal conspiracy with which she’d been charged.
I never met Ferdinand Marcos. What I knew of him I was told by Power’s propaganda machine, the media, that conditions the way we see things—most of us. I do not contend that Marcos was a virtuous man. I do not deny that he was a tyrant and a crook. I do not know. I do not claim that his wife, Imelda, was but an innocent wife. I do not know. Let me be clear: The mission of this story is not to pass judgment on the Marcoses. I left that to a New York jury. The mission of this story is simple: to tell what I experienced in the defense of Imelda Marcos. That is a true story.
The story will provide its own facts, many of which have never found their way to a public page. It is a story that reveals an unapologetic, unabashed police state, one that was in full, shameless bloom, in which some of the criminals lounged in the White House, and their crimes extended across the globe to the Philippines. This is a story that has never been told because Power would not permit its telling.
For two decades Ferdinand Marcos had ruled the Philippines as its virtual dictator. He was not without opposition. In 1983 Benigno Aquino, the popular opposition leader, had been assassinated. Marcos, denying involvement and expressing appropriate shock, promised to bring those responsible to justice. He appointed a commission to investigate. But asking Power to investigate itself is like asking the Mafia to cough up facts to send its membership to prison.
This case will introduce us to a truth that lingers in the hazy, duplicitous rule book of international law: that our basic ideals—truth telling, loyalty, compassion, even our adherence to the criminal law—can be cast aside as rubbish in the wind, as irrelevant and even foolish, when Power’s interests are at stake. This case will force us to ask uncomfortable questions: Who were the criminals here—the Marcoses or the various functionaries in our own government, beginning with our then-president?
In 1984, when debating Walter Mondale for the presidency, Ronald Reagan said, “I know there are things there in the Philippines that do not look good to us from the standpoint of democratic rights. But … I think that we’re better off … trying to retain our friendship and help them right the wrongs we see rather than throwing them to the wolves and then facing a Communist power in the Pacific.” Reagan understood geography—the close proximity of Communist China and North Vietnam to the Philippines. American bases in the Philippines were at stake. That exigency opened the door for a new set of rules involving the Marcoses, even their kidnapping and prosecution.
Day by day the Marcos abscess on the Philippine body politic had continued to fester. Ferdinand’s downfall seemed imminent. At the urging of the United States that Marcos solidify his power, he called for a snap election, and who might one predict would be his opponent? Why, to be sure, Corazon Aquino, the widow of Marcos’s assassinated challenger, Benigno Aquino.
Marcos claimed he won the election by at least a million votes, but massive crowds took to the streets and charged the houses of government in a movement called the People Power Revolution. The United States, concluding a change of power was inevitable, urged Marcos to vacate the premises.
The Marcoses and the Reagans were more than diplomatic compatriots who sipped tea and dipped tarts. They’d become close friends, and Reagan made promises to Marcos. If Marcos would relinquish power to Corazon Aquino, the United States would airlift Marcos and his family to the safety of their home in the northern reaches of the Philippines. To seal the deal Reagan sent Senator Paul Laxalt to Manila. Marcos wanted assurance that he and his family would be “spared vindictiveness and revenge.” Such assurances fell from Laxalt’s lips like bubbles from a seltzer bottle.
On February 20, 1986, relying on these promises from their longtime friend Ronald Reagan, the Marcoses gathered up their most vital possessions and boarded the plane supplied by the United States. But instead of landing at home in Ilocos Norte, the Marcoses found themselves in Honolulu, U.S.A., kidnapped and captives of the United States government.
Why the double-cross? Of course, we never heard the dialogue between the new takeover regime of Corazon Aquino, President Reagan, and his loyal attendants: If one had been privy to the conversation one could have heard the Aquinos shouting from Manila across the 8,400-some miles to Washington. “So, Mr. U.S. of A., you want your military bases over here? Let us tell you the price: We want the Marcoses out of here. We do not want them ever again on Philippine soil, not even in a Philippine prison. Dump them into one of your own prisons.” But how could our government prosecute the Marcoses in the United States for alleged crimes committed in the Philippines?
Now enters a hungry-eyed politician by the name of Rudy Giuliani. He’d gotten himself appointed to the U.S. attorney’s job for the Southern District of New York. Giuliani had been suffering surging urgings for the mayor’s job of that great city. We cannot assume there’d been no get-togethers between Giuliani and the powers that be in Washington, D.C. In support of the Grand Old Party, Rudy got right to work and called a grand jury to indict, in New York, U.S.A, America’s newest Filipino guests living in Hawaii for alleged crimes committed in the Philippines. That sets any functional legal mind to spinning. A Harvard law professor could have a marvelous time untangling all of the possible ins-and-outs of that twisted jurisdictional scenario.
We remember the old axiom, “A grand jury will indict a ham sandwich.” And presto! Giuliani’s grand jury returned indictments against both Ferdinand and Imelda for RICO crimes (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) stemming from the purchase of four skyscrapers in Manhattan. They were charged with defrauding three lending banks of more than $165 million in the purchase and financing of that real estate. The indictment claimed the Marcoses had amassed $103 million of those monies through embezzlement, theft, bribes, and kickbacks, and some of that dirty money was used to buy those buildings in New York.
Giuliani wasted no time putting into play the prosecutor’s standard demonizing tactics, designed to convince the innocent public—the pool from which the jury would be chosen—that the Marcoses were the most abominable crooks ever residing on the planet. The prosecutors called their case against the Marcoses a “dead-bang” case of conspiracy and fraud.25
The FBI lost no opportunity to pile on. James Fox of the FBI’s New York office proclaimed, “This case amounted to the Marcoses and their co-defendants using their position of trust to turn the Philippines’ treasury into their own treasury.”26 If in defending the Marcoses I’d announced to the media that my clients were as innocent as lilies in the lily pond, but that the U.S. attorney was prosecuting them to get himself elected mayor of New York, I’d have been sanctioned by judges and hauled up in front of the bar association with my license to practice law at risk. But in New York City Giuliani was the mouth of Power. And Power plays by its own rules.
Few would assert that Ferdinand was an exemplary fellow. His opponents, his biographers, and, indeed, some reputable reporters contend that Marcos stole billions from the Philippines, and that during his twenty-one years at the helm of this troubled vessel he served not as its captain but as its private owner. His enemies, yes, and his claimed impartial biographers as well, have charged that he instigated and ordered the wholesale murder of his opponents, that he excelled in every form of theft, bribery, embezzlement, blackmail, and graft known to the creative criminal mind, and that he was an expert in all varieties of political corruption, including some that Marcos himself invented. Many volumes have been written that detail Marcos’s greed and foul play, but most ignore that Marcos built more schools, hospitals, and infrastructure than all of his predecessors combined. And he had always been a loyal enough friend of the United States.
Our country had provided Marcos hundreds of millions of dollars in aid that had been crucial in buttressing his rule over the years. With the exception of Jimmy Carter, from the beginning of his twenty-one-year tenure Marcos had been “our guy.” Four of our presidents waltzed across the international dance floor with him. Some of our darkest national disgraces have been our support of various tyrants. But the United States betrayed the Marcoses and created its own criminal conspiracy when it kidnapped them and brought them to the United States under false promises. If you or I commit the crime of kidnapping it could easily result in a sentence of life imprisonment.
Still, hand it to Ferdinand. He hadn’t yet pulled his last dirty trick. On September 28, 1989, nearly a year after he and Imelda were indicted, and before Giuliani could get him to trial, he up and died. But Imelda, his widow, was alive and available for prosecution, and Mrs. Aquino, then the president of the Philippines, was heard to say in one of the many Philippine dialects, “I want that wicked widow in prison, and I am going to get what I want or the U.S. can kiss their bases good-bye.”
To defend themselves the Marcoses had hired lawyers from both coasts, lawyers I’m told were paid fees totaling $8 million. With Ferdinand dead, and with a long, complicated trial looming, these lawyers recommended that Imelda plead guilty, not to mention that Marcos’s death left her without access to the Marcos monies. In short, she had no funds to pay additional attorneys’ fees. Beyond that, her lawyers were advising her that if convicted she could get up to thirty years in an American prison. But they gave her the good news: They’d worked long and hard for her and had been successful in bargaining with the prosecutor for a prison term of a “few years.” They had even investigated the various federal prisons in the United States, they said, part of the plea deal they made for her was that she’d be sent to the best federal pen in the country.
But the lady wasn’t cooperative. She wasn’t even grateful. “Why would I plead guilty when I’m not?” she asked. Imelda then launched a search for a champion. She asked her trusted friend, Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress, for help. Ms. Duke knew Ben Cassidy, a young lawyer in Honolulu (whom I had never met), and he recommended that she hire me, “that country lawyer from Wyoming.” So one day in late January of 1990, little more than six weeks before Imelda’s trial was to begin, I received a call from Cassidy. Would I come to Honolulu to meet Mrs. Marcos? She needed someone to fight for her.
“You should go talk to her,” my wife, Imaging, said. “If you were dead and somebody was prosecuting me, I’d want a lawyer like you to look into it.” My wife has a proven insight into both the unknown and the unknowable, and I listen to her.
Mrs. Marcos met me at the Honolulu airport with her international smile and a fresh flower lei that she slipped over my head, after which she led me to a waiting limousine. “Mrs. Aquino won’t let me return Ferdinand’s body to his homeland,” she said, “and he cannot defend himself from the lies and false charges of those evil people. I want you to defend him.”
Defend her dead husband?
Yes.
She directed the driver to a cemetery that extended up a long hill covered with small grave markers. I followed her along a path to a prefabricated metal toolshed, the kind sold by Sears. Inside rested the coffin of Ferdinand Marcos.
She spoke to the closed casket as if the contents could hear her. “Mr. Spence is here,” she said. “He will defend you.” Then she said something in their native tongue, something that sounded loving and private. On the way down the hill she turned to me and in a quiet but determined voice she said again, “I want you to defend Ferdinand.”
We were then driven to the seaside residence of Doris Duke and ushered into a large auditorium-sized living room with a twenty- or thirty-foot ceiling exposing a configuration of beams that added to its structural and decorative magnificence. Ms. Duke soon made her appearance, along with a large Newfoundland dog. In early old age she was thin, frail, and deliberate in her speech. She was obviously alert. As for me, I knew little of Ferdinand Marcos, and what I’d heard wasn’t especially inspirational. I knew nothing of Imelda, not even about her two thousand pairs of shoes, and I knew nothing of the case I was being courted to defend. I didn’t run in the same circles as Ms. Duke or the former first lady of the Philippines. I was used to the mountains of Wyoming with neighbors I knew, not the towering landscape of Manhattan filled with hard-eyed people all looking straight ahead who passed one another on the streets as if the world were populated with treacherous strangers.
Ms. Duke’s butler served us those bite-sized white sandwiches without crusts but with a thin slice of cucumber inside, maybe a smear of mayonnaise. The butler had just set the tray down on the coffee table when the Newfoundland dog decimated the tray’s total contents in one lap of its monstrous tongue. The butler froze. Ms. Duke smiled, patted the dog, and motioned the butler to bring in another tray of sandwiches.
I found myself drawn to this widow, Imelda Marcos, a woman trapped in a foreign land who’d been betrayed by the power base of the United States, including Ronald Reagan, a woman in exile who wasn’t even permitted to return the body of her beloved husband to his homeland. She wore a queenlike grace and presence I’d rarely encountered. She asked for no sympathy. She seemed brave beyond understanding. Here was a woman driven not by fear for herself, but who only asked that the legacy of her dead husband be defended. Ms. Duke agreed to help Mrs. Marcos with my fee.
The next morning I awakened to the cold, hard realization that I’d agreed to represent the former first lady of the Philippines in an upcoming trial only a couple of weeks away, and I didn’t have the first idea what the case was about, except that a politician I’d never heard of by the name of Rudy Giuliani was determined to put this likable woman in prison, where she’d probably die. He’d promised a conviction.
Imelda was not going to be judged by a jury of her peers, one composed of Philippine people, some of whom loved her, and most of whom would have an insight into the history and mores of their country. In New York she’d be judged by jurors who knew little or nothing about her or her country. I felt no urge to defend her dead husband, but I did want to defend a woman who wanted to defend her dead husband. I’d known more than a few who, for good reason or not, had wanted live husbands dead.
In the meantime the Aquino government had begun handpicking Giuliani’s witnesses against Mrs. Marcos. And I was about to confront the top dogs in the FBI, and the CIA, not to mention Rudy Giuliani and two presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, all of whom had entered into their own conspiracy to get that evil, money-hogging witch of a woman, Imelda Marcos. Their uniform message to all who would listen—and, of course, America’s media listened—was that this greedy, grasping thief had betrayed the Philippine people’s trust, and that she and her husband had hauled off untold billions from that piteously impoverished country. Whether or not any or all of those allegations were true was not at issue in the case, the only issue being whether Imelda Marcos herself was guilty of any crime. In short, had she, in concert with her husband, knowingly absconded with monies stolen from the Philippines or elsewhere and hidden the monies in those four New York skyscrapers?
I knew that in the Philippines the rich were rich beyond understanding and the poor were hungry and hanging on to the ragged edge of hopelessness. Corruption was a way of life. I’d seen the lost and homeless in our own country pushing stolen grocery carts down the street that contained their total possessions, the most valuable of which was often a dirty blanket. But when every proclaimed independent news source joined in portraying Imelda Marcos, the widow, as a depraved international criminal, a ravenous rapist of the poor, one might find oneself beginning to believe their stories. Either such stories were cruel political fictions or Imelda herself was a walking, breathing lie. I had to trust somebody’s assessment of her, and I ended up trusting my own.
Giuliani assigned the case for trial to one Charles LaBella, an imperious, humorless, middle-aged fellow, a career prosecutor, who, by reputation, was the best in the Southern District of New York. On the first day of the trial we found ourselves in a federal courtroom as large as the auditorium in some of the cathedrals I’ve visited, one with high ceilings and a lot of marble, carpeting, and gold leaf. I walked over to introduce myself to LaBella. He refused to take my hand. He looked at Imelda like a man beholding something filthy and untouchable. I knew Imelda must be afraid, but she’d become an expert at clothing fear with a pleasant smile. I thought she needed to hear me say it: “Well,” I said to her, as was my commitment in every case, “we’re in this together. Before they get you they’ll have to kill me with an ax.”
American trials are widely advertised as fair to both parties. However, the challenge of some trial lawyers is to discover ways to destroy fairness and at the same time not violate the rules that protect it. Under federal court rules the prosecutor, LaBella, was required to designate his exhibits in advance of trial to eliminate any surprise. The same rule applied to us on the defendant’s side of the case. No secrets at trial was the simple rule. But LaBella had it figured out. Before I entered the case, he’d designated some three hundred thousand exhibits. I could read a thousand documents a day for a year and still not have read them all, much less understand how this whole untidy trainload of paper fit together to make a case for the prosecution. Before we’d entered the case, the judge had ruled against requiring LaBella to be more specific. One of Imelda’s former attorneys, John Bartko of San Francisco, seemed to know something about the documents because he’d stored them on his computer. I had to rehire him.
We’d caravanned to New York City, Imaging and I and my secretary, Rosemary McIntosh. There we were joined by Bartko and Ben Cassidy, who’d gotten me into this unholy war in the first place. Imaging and I rented a small suite in the Dag Hammarskjold Building in Manhattan. Imelda was also staying there with her entourage, which included her personal doctor, one of her sisters, who was a nun, a tall silent man who served as her bodyguard, and sometimes her son and daughter.
“I remember you, Mr. Spence,” Judge John Keenan said when I sought admission to his court for the trial. He was peering down at me from his bench with a judicial smile appropriate for a happy lynching. “We taught at Harvard Law School together one summer. I’m glad to have you in my court.” He was referring to Harvard’s program of inviting lawyers and judges Harvard professors thought had something of value to offer their students. “I’ll admit you in this case, Mr. Spence,” Judge Keenan said, “but don’t come asking me for a continuance. Will you be ready for trial?”
“Of course,” I said with my best big Wyoming smile. In truth, I didn’t know how I was going to get ready for such a trial in the couple of weeks remaining. And probably I’d have been no better off if I’d been given a year to prepare. Too much to absorb—not only the evidence I’d actually have to face, but an accurate history of the Marcoses, the way of Philippine politics, at least an introduction to the Philippine culture, and a knowledge of who the scores of witnesses from the Philippines were who’d be testifying against us. What was their story, their interests? How could I cross-examine and impeach them? I’d never been to the Philippines. To me the country was just a smattering of small dots on the globe over by China somewhere.
I could at least prepare an opening statement that was focused on Imelda, and the Power at hand that was attempting to destroy her. I spent many hours with the lady. Suddenly it was March 21, 1990, and there I was in Judge Keenan’s courtroom at Foley Square facing our first day of trial.
Imelda, Judge Keenan, and I were all born in 1929. But it wasn’t like a class reunion. Judge Keenan himself began picking the jury. Most federal judges question the prospective jurors, while in most state courts the lawyers do that work. From the moment he began questioning the prospective jurors, Judge Keenan left little doubt that the jurors chosen would be his jury in his case. And his case was a first—the first in U.S. history in which the wife of a former foreign head of state was prosecuted in this country. As the judge worked the prospective jurors in his chambers, we lawyers sat mute. If we had a question to ask a juror, it was first addressed to the judge, and he alone decided if he would ask it.
Many of the prospective jurors had heard something about the case—most often about Imelda’s thousands of shoes. And Keenan would ask, “Will you hold this against her?” “No,” each juror would dutifully answer. But in the depths of their secret hearts some jurors must have felt they’d be accomplishing great good by ridding society of this contemptible woman who had all those shoes while many of her countrymen went barefoot. After more than a week of the judge’s one-man show in jury selection, and after we’d exhausted all the challenges the law would allow, we ended up with a jury—the judge’s jury, to be sure. LaBella seemed happy. He still wouldn’t speak to me, not a word, not even a yes-or-no nod of the head. It was as if I did not exist, and if I did it was too appalling an experience for him to endure. But I was beginning to appreciate that gift.
I believed Judge Keenan’s nature was, by default, to be fair. But remember: He was a federal judge, and federal prosecutors were trying to convict a freshly branded enemy of the United States. Would he be insensitive to the needs of his country? It had already become clear that he didn’t cater to the likes of me who sauntered into his courtroom in a cowboy hat, threw the same on counsel table, and by my simple presence took up far too much room in his courtroom.
To ensure Imelda’s conviction, the Aquino administration sent its private spokesperson to further infect the media with more noxious stories against her. The Aquino spokesperson appeared in court every day. He said his mission was to “let people know what Mrs. Marcos was really like.” The Aquino people also hired one of New York’s savviest public relations people, John Scanlon, who’d previously worked for Ivana Trump, Donald Trump’s former wife. During our trial the media’s releases against Mrs. Marcos got so thick and mucky I complained to the reporters attending the trial that “propaganda from the Philippine government in your news reports has made it impossible for my client to receive a fair trial.” That was, of course, foolishness on my part. My complaints only encouraged the reporters to pile on more. Still, every morning when Mrs. Marcos and I arrived at the courthouse we were greeted by large crowds of Filipino well-wishers. They adored her. Some spoke loving words to her in their native tongue. And she responded to them with the gentleness of a caring, nurturing mother.
On April 3, 1990, two weeks after jury selection had begun, the feds finally began their case. Debra Livingston got the nod from LaBella to make the government’s opening address to the jury in a packed courtroom. She was short-haired, blond, slender, reasonably young, and as businesslike as an IBM computer in good working order. She’d graduated from Harvard with honors and was an editor on the Law Review, a powerful set of academic accomplishments. She reflected the humor of her lead, LaBella, which was as hilarious as a migraine at midnight. She wouldn’t speak to me either.
“This is a case about theft, fraud, and deceit on an incredible scale. It is a case about stolen money and money grabbed by fraud, over $240 million that the defendant stole and then secretly brought to New York to buy four buildings in Manhattan.”
Livingston’s words were wounding, but Imelda sat quietly with a small sad smile on her face and with her hands folded on the lap of her black mourning dress. The vestiges of her early beauty were still worth noting. In her second breath Ms. Livingston accused Mrs. Marcos of obstruction of justice, that catchall crime that could convict a hen of hiding the fruits of her crime by sitting on her eggs.
Ms. Livingston exhorted, “She plundered the Philippines” and “exported the fruits of her fraud to this country. She misused our banks to cover their wealth and to operate a criminal enterprise. And don’t be misled. She was a powerful personage in the Philippine government—a cabinet minister and mayor of Manila. She and her husband were ‘partners in crime.’ They earned a salary of about $20,000 a year but received millions and millions from bribes and kickbacks. She treated the Philippine National Bank in New York as her private piggy bank.”
In the first four minutes of her hour-and-a-half opening Ms. Livingston called Mrs. Marcos “a thief” twice and “a fraud” ten times; she said she was guilty of “deceit” twice; that she “harbored stolen property” three times; that she “laundered money” twice; that she “grabbed money” and was “engaged in a criminal enterprise.” She used the word “secret” fifty-seven times, as close as I could keep track—secret bank accounts, secret purchases, and the secret of all secrets, too secret to reveal even to the jurors. Ms. Livingston wanted the woman convicted of every count in the indictment. Every one. Each count carried a maximum of twenty years. Anger leaked out from around her flat-sounding words like venom dripping from the fangs of a stepped-on rattler.
I began my opening statement by telling the jury that what happened in the Philippines was like my hand. I showed my palm. “The United States attorney calls this side of my hand kickbacks and bribes. But there are two sides to the hand.” I showed the jury the top of my hand. “It’s my great responsibility to show you the other side of the hand. When this evidence is all in you’ll discover that the ‘web of fraud,’ as Ms. Livingston calls it, was created by Ms. Livingston herself, and by those who have interests in the outcome of this case, governments who wish to see Mrs. Marcos convicted for secret reasons not being revealed in this courtroom.
“This is a woman who lived with her beloved husband for thirty-five years, saw him in sickness and in health and was there when he took his last breath. Her position is simple: ‘I am going to defend my husband. His lips have been sealed by death. He can’t defend himself. You can do what you wish with me, but you cannot do this to a man who has spent his entire life as a servant of the Philippine people and who laid his entire fortune and life down on their behalf.’ Mrs. Marcos was born in Manila, the daughter of a good lawyer who was poor. When she was eight her mother died, leaving her father with eleven motherless children and the family in dire straits. They moved to Leyte, to the country, and life was hard. The area was poor. By 1941 the Japanese bombed Manila and they bombed Leyte—about the same day they bombed Pearl Harbor.
“Imelda was twelve years old. Her father was a tall man, six feet two, and lighter in complexion than most in the Philippines. He could be taken for an American and had to hide from the Japanese.
“She witnessed the Japanese brutally kill her countrymen. She saw beheaded Americans. Members of her own family were beheaded, the heads stacked up in trucks, truckloads of heads. There’s a story that will help you understand her passion for jewelry. When she was a little child her family had only one asset—a necklace of jewels. It was the family’s entire fortune. One necklace was all they had to live on during the war.
“As the youngest in the family she carried that necklace—the family entrusted it to her—and everywhere she went she had it hidden under her clothes. Once in a while they’d take a bead off of the necklace and trade it for something to eat. When the war was over nearly all of the beads were gone, but the family had survived.
“She was wounded in the war, and she was there when MacArthur returned, a girl, barefooted and singing. She sang a song called ‘God Bless the Philippines.’ It was ‘God Bless America’ except the words were changed to ‘God Bless the Philippines.’ MacArthur heard her singing, and he took her to the American troops and she sang to them as a child.
“Along the way she met a man by the name of Irving Berlin who was entertaining the troops, and he heard her sing ‘God Bless the Philippines.’ He stopped this girl and said, ‘It isn’t, “God Bless the Philippines,” it’s “God Bless America.”’ It was then that Irving Berlin decided to write a song that became a national favorite called ‘Heaven Watch the Philippines.’
“Imelda went to college, but she never had enough money to buy a book, and never owned one. She worked in the cafeteria. At twenty-two she finished college and moved to Manila with five pesos in her pocket—less than a dollar. She lived with relatives. She worked in a music store. She was able to play the piano, and she sang and sold sheets of music in the music store by playing them for the customers and singing, and she worked during the war as a volunteer at the American hospital taking care of American soldiers.
“One day she met the minority floor leader in the House of Representatives in Manila. His name was Ferdinand Marcos. He fell in love with her, and eleven days later they were married. He bought her a seven-karat diamond ring worth a big chunk of change. Fifteen thousand people were invited, and most came to the wedding. She and Ferdinand took a world tour for an entire year as their honeymoon.” I said to the jury, “I tell you this for one reason. You never heard in the prosecution’s presentation of the case a simple but crucial fact—prior to the time that Mr. Marcos became the president of the Philippines, he was one of the most wealthy men in the country.”
I told the jury that there came a time when Imelda got sick. Ferdinand took her to the Presbyterian Hospital, to Johns Hopkins and Walter Reed—the great hospitals in this country. What was wrong with her? She couldn’t bear the pressure of being a public person, not this simple girl who had grown up in the country. She was suffering a nervous breakdown.
“By this time, Ferdinand was the head of the Senate with a sparkling political career ahead of him. He was brilliant, a great orator, an economist, a lawyer, a man who had visions for his country, and he wanted to become the president. But Imelda, this shy person, couldn’t endure the hard gaze of the public eye. Then one day the doctor said to her husband, ‘You know, Mr. Marcos, if you want to cure your wife I’ll tell you what you have to do. Give up politics, give up the public life. That will cure her.’”
I took two steps closer to the jury and quietly said, “Here is what Ferdinand replied to the doctor: ‘If that will cure my wife, I’ll give up the presidency and I’ll give up politics.’ Imelda heard her husband, and she said, ‘No. If I mean that much to this man, then I will become his first lady,’ and she began forcing herself into her new role. She was often emotionally disarrayed and exhausted. But over time she was able, by sheer determination, to overcome. More and more she took part in his campaign. She traveled from province to province in the Philippines doing what she did best—singing. She and Ferdinand campaigned all over their country, and in 1965, Marcos won the election.
“From that time on he put Imelda in charge of important projects. She would go to businesses and ask for their support for good works. She built hospitals, she built the heart center, she built the kidney center, she built the school for boys, she built the school for girls, she built the school for orphans, and she built the Asian Center in the Philippines. She was the one in charge of putting out the markers that tracked the Bataan Death March along which our American boys suffered and died during the war.
“And the Philippines got the Nobel Prize for the refugee center which she helped build in twenty-nine days to take care of twenty thousand refugees, boat people who fled from Vietnam—the Nobel Prize for Peace—this evil woman. She built cultural centers, she built the Philippine International Convention Center, she built the folk art center, she built the national trade center, she built the Plaza Hotel, which is not Donald Trump’s Plaza Hotel, I assure you.”
I looked over at Ms. Livingston. She seemed on the edge of sleep. But Judge Keenan jumped up as if to alert her. He leaned over the bench and stared down at her. It was as if he were shouting to Ms. Livingston, “Couldn’t you at least offer up an objection? If you object I will stop him.” I pressed on. “At the National Arts Center, the first lady arranged to bring in gifted children from the provinces to Manila, where they were housed and fed and permitted to grow and create.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you will see that Mr. Marcos treated his wife as a queen. On behalf of the Philippine people she eventually met the great leaders across the world. She opened Russia to the Philippines. Ferdinand sent her ahead of him to China, and she helped open China to the Philippines. He sent her to meet with Khadafy. You’ll see this woman was beloved by the people. They called her Mamma.
“In the meantime, Marcos was kicking up serious problems at home. For the Philippines to become a self-sustaining country the people needed to own land. He took lands that were owned by a few families and cut them up into seven-acre plots, which were turned into small rice-producing farms. Before that time the Philippine people couldn’t support themselves with rice.”
Judge Keenan finally exploded, and without an objection from Ms. Livingston he hollered, “The court sustains the objection under Rule 401 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. There’s nothing relevant about that.”
Mr. Spence: “What I mean to point out to Your Honor and to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury is that—”
Judge Keenan interrupted, jumping up again, and peering over the bench at me as if I were the bad boy in the class who’d just been caught cheating. “Don’t point anything out to me, just make your opening to the jury, sir!”
That little repartee between the judge and me was his clear message to Ms. Livingston that he was inviting her to object. He’d do the rest. After that she did, and he did.
I pressed on. When I talked about the shoes I saw several jurors smile. I told them the Philippines had hundreds of mom-and-pop shoe manufacturers who’d send Imelda shoes hoping the first lady would be seen wearing them. Most didn’t fit, but when the Marcoses appeared in this country the first thing we saw was newsmen zooming in on the shoes she was wearing.
“And so it was Mr. Marcos’s great desire that his beloved wife become a symbol for his people, this poor girl who drank out of foxholes during the war—”
MS. LIVINGSTON: “Objection, Your Honor.”
JUDGE KEENAN (Loud and belligerent with a slam of his hammer): “Sustained!”
I pressed on:
“Ferdinand Marcos was born in 1917 of middle-class parents in the harsh north country, an area called Ilocos Norte. He was a man who excelled in everything—a boxer, a wrestler, a debater, and a lawyer. He is charged as one of the racketeers in this case—”
JUDGE KEENAN (Without the faintest sound of sympathy in his voice): “Mr. Marcos, sadly, is not here; he is not on trial. His character is not before the jury, and will not be before the jury. Proceed and make a proper opening.” At that moment the judge convicted me as a lawyer who was conducting himself improperly before the jury. How could such a lawyer be believed? I began anew:
“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said quietly. Then I continued:
“Mr. Marcos ran for the House, and he said, ‘If you will elect me congressman now—’”
MS. LIVINGSTON: “Objection, Your Honor.”
JUDGE KEENAN: “Sustained!” (Shouting) “We are not going to go back to Philippine election campaigns. We are going to try the case that is in this indictment before this jury and before this court!”
I began anew:
“Mr. Marcos’s wealth, prior to the time that he became the president, was known by the heads of state everywhere, including our own President Reagan, who told the American people publicly—”
MS. LIVINGSTON: “Objection, Your Honor.”
JUDGE KEENAN (With naked disdain and impatience): “Whatever President Reagan might have told the American people is not before this jury and will not be before this jury concerning Mr. Marcos.” (One might remember in passing that the judge had been appointed by Reagan in 1983 to the federal bench.)
I began anew:
“What was the origin of Marcos’s wealth? After the war, Manila was leveled to the ground. Not a building was left standing. This man, Marcos, believing in the Bahayon spirit, which means a spirit of togetherness, began to invest his monies in Philippine industries at the very time when they were in their infancy, and by 1985, he was extremely wealthy.”
Over Ms. Livingston’s objection the judge permitted me to put a large world map on the board to illustrate the location of three small islands off the coast of the Philippines and only five miles from Vietnam. “One of those islands belongs to the Philippines, one to China, and one to Vietnam, and so you could have actually stood on Philippine soil and watched the Vietnam War.”
JUDGE KEENAN: “Let’s get to the facts of this case.”
MR. SPENCE: “Please, I ask the court’s indulgence.”
JUDGE KEENAN (Hollering again): “No, you will not have my indulgence, you will open properly. You have had a lot of indulgence, you have been going for quite a while. Let’s get to the issues of this case, sir, please!”
The jury seemed shocked. If I had been Mrs. Marcos I could have seen the guards at the penitentiary opening those steel doors. I felt her helplessness and fear—my own feelings in tandem.
“There was a concern in the Philippines that the country was going to be taken over by the Communists. Such is our concern today, because the United States had its most important bases in the Philippines; its entire presence in the Asian area had been established on those bases.”
I told the jury that not only did Marcos discuss the threat of a Communist takeover with his old friend President Reagan, he and George H. W. Bush, the former head of the CIA and Reagan’s vice president, worried about it together. Bush said, “We know your need to move monies out of the country to establish a Communist takeover fund, so why not invest in American properties? The whole world, including the Japanese, is investing in American properties.”
I told the jury, “So Marcos began to purchase New York real estate, eventually the four New York buildings that are the centerpiece of the prosecutor’s case here.”
In 1972, a typhoon devastated the Philippines. All utilities, including water, were destroyed. Crops were lost, factories smashed, and the Communists were set to take control. “Marcos declared martial law. It would take the army to get the lights on again and the farms and factories moving again. Marcos ruled by decree. We know something about martial law in this country. Abe Lincoln declared martial law. Today, six of our states in this country have provisions for martial law.”
MS. LIVINGSTON: “Objection, Your Honor.”
JUDGE KEENAN: “Sustained!”
“The prosecution’s charges here begin when Marcos declared martial law in 1972. We’ve never experienced armed Communists about to take over our government, attempting to blow up our Congress, to kill our president, and stab our first lady. These threats exploded when, but a few miles off Philippine shores, Vietnam fell, and close by Communist China was staring in.
“Marcos couldn’t protect Philippine monies against a Communist takeover by simply depositing them in a New York bank. Marcos took extreme measures to hide the funds, a matter undisputed here, because you don’t have a security fund unless it’s hidden. And we’ll discover why the government was able to put this case together so quickly—what Marcos did was an open secret between Marcos and our CIA.”
In 1974 the Laurel-Langley trade agreement between the United States and the Philippines was terminated. This agreement had served the interests of foreign businesses that could acquire 100 percent ownership in all areas of the Philippine economy. New requirements for foreign investment were put in place that caused multinational corporations to flee the Philippines in droves, and by 1983 the country found itself moneyless. Things were desperate.
“But suddenly money began to come into the Philippines. One witness will testify that the first week $25 million came into the country. It wasn’t a loan. The next week in came $50 million more. One of the witnesses will testify that as much as $300 million, and another as much as $400 million, came back into the country to meet the crisis. That money was from the Marcos sock, from monies that had been planted outside the Philippines for just such an emergency.
“So when you hear evidence of Marcos putting monies in secret funds, it’s true. He was not only the country’s political leader, he was its economic source and the guru that kept the Philippines alive all of those years. The question you’ll decide is whether he was engaged in a racket against his own people.”
I told the jury that the ownership of the four New York buildings was a pending case in the Philippines. “Mrs. Marcos has never claimed the ownership of the New York property,” I said.
“After the Aquino government took over, that government held an auction in New York of property they seized from the Marcoses. They seized her bedsheets and her pillows. They seized the picture of her with the pope and sold it for $450. They seized the president’s private humidor in which he kept his cigars. They seized and sold her precious family memorabilia. They even seized her paper flowers.
“So as to the rest of the story—some of it is difficult to understand because we are a different culture, a different people with different customs. Certainly she is not being provided with a jury of her peers, any more than I suppose—”
MS. LIVINGSTON: “Objection.”
JUDGE KEENAN: “Objection sustained!” (Now speaking to the jurors) “You are a jury of her peers! Under the laws of the United States and the Constitution of the United States you are properly sworn to judge this case and to decide and pass upon the guilt or innocence of Mrs. Marcos. That’s why we took all those days to pick the jury and did it as carefully as we did.”
The judge was eating me for lunch.
MR. SPENCE: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I don’t mean to suggest you are not a proper jury. I don’t mean that at all. But it’s like Mrs. Reagan being tried by a Philippine jury.
“When you go back to the jury room you must decide: Were they crooks, as Ms. Livingston said? Did they intend to cheat their people? If Mr. Marcos was engaged in a racket, so was the CIA. If this was illegal racketeering, then every president of this country who knew about it—”
MS. LIVINGSTON: “Objection, Your Honor.”
JUDGE KEENAN: “That’s argument. That’s not proof of what you are going to prove. Sustained! Desist from that, sir!” He was red-faced and still hollering. It was always worse after lunch, and as I was to discover, it got still worse toward evening.
“Now, I want to talk to you a bit about Mrs. Marcos’s knowledge of what was going on. Mrs. Marcos never wrote a check in her life. She never saw a bill or paid one. Ms. Livingston overstepped quite a bit in her statement to you. President Marcos made the decisions.”
I tried to tell the jury how the Marcoses were kidnapped and brought to this country under the false promises of our government, but the judge threw another fit and sustained Ms. Livingston’s objections. But suddenly he reversed himself when I told him President Reagan had made promises to Marcos.
JUDGE KEENAN: “This is something you are going to prove?”
MR. SPENCE: “Yes.”
JUDGE KEENAN (Seeming surprised): “All right, go ahead.”
I told the jury how Marcos had been promised that if he peacefully stepped down he and his family would be safely airlifted to Ilocos Norte, his homeland. “This coup took place on the twenty-fifth of February, 1986, but the United States knew as early as the eighteenth of February that the coup was going to occur, and the CIA provided support for that coup against this country’s old, loyal friend, Ferdinand Marcos. He was a sick man and on dialysis. He’d survived two kidney transplants. That night the Marcoses were taken to Clark Air Force Base. Then about one in the morning they were awakened and told, for their own safety, they had to get out. They boarded an airplane believing that they were going to go to Ilocos Norte. They landed in Guam, a United States possession, and ended up in Hawaii.”
I spoke quietly, sadly to the jury:
“I dreamed I could give an opening statement that everybody would be proud of, and I haven’t been proud of the way this one has come off, the worst in my career, and I’m sorry, but I have done what I could do, and the best that I could.”
I told the jury about the so-called Philippine Commission on Good Government that had the power to take the property of a Philippine citizen without a court hearing, and how that commission had made deals with witness after witness for their testimony against Mrs. Marcos in exchange for that government’s agreement not to confiscate their holdings. And after those witnesses left this country they couldn’t be prosecuted for perjury here for their lies, because no extradition treaty existed between the Philippines and the United States. Ms. Livingston objected, and Judge Keenan sustained her objection with full-blooming fury. I thought I had the right to tell the jury the facts they’d hear that would undermine the credibility of the government’s imported witnesses from the Philippines. The judge disagreed.
By the time I was ready to conclude my opening statement I’d been held up by the court as a capital charlatan, one of those phony defense lawyers who habitually violated the rules. From a juror’s standpoint, that had to be true, because Judge Keenan, a judge who often smiled at them and who was obviously bent on seeing that the jury got only proper evidence, had almost always come down on the side of the prosecution—clearly the right and just side of the case, especially if the juror was a loyal American. I ended my opening telling the jury out of deep respect that the case would be left in the hands of the greatest institution of justice remaining in this country and in the world—an American jury.
* * *
The next morning Bartko and I drove to the courthouse, and although we occupied the same car, we were worlds apart. I hadn’t slept. I felt as if I were digging out from under the wreckage of a hurricane. In the event of a conviction and to protect Mrs. Marcos’s rights on appeal I was required to move for a mistrial. Bartko was afraid of further enraging the judge, but despite his strong dissent, I made my motion in the judge’s chambers, saying in part, “Your Honor’s response to my statements as disbelief, disapproval, or incredulity impassioned the jury against Mrs. Marcos.” I argued that considering his conduct as a whole he had ruined her right to a fair trial.
The judge bristled like a porcupine with a stick in its ribs. “Overruled! I have never heard an opening statement that departed from the rules further than your opening statement yesterday.” He said more off the record with words that failed to reveal his acceptance of me as a member of the human species.
We faced even more serious problems in the media. One paper reported that “Spence clashed with the judge, suffered damaging surprises at the hands of a skilled prosecution team”—again affirming that this intruder from the West had no business in a real court of law—“and stumbled so badly once during his opening statements that he appeared to insult, of all people, the jury [referring to my comment that Mrs. Marcos was not being tried by a jury of her peers]. Spence is finding out just how far away he is from Jackson and the sanctuary of Wyoming cottonwoods.… Nor did his homespun, country style hold up well inside, in a courtroom with more pinstripe than buckskin.”27 And the reporters seemed consumed by a throbbing thrill over Imelda’s shoes, my cowboy hat, and alleged buckskin jacket. (I never wore it in court.) Besides, as everybody knew, the Marcoses were crooks. So what was left to try?
* * *
LaBella called his first witness to a packed courtroom. The prosecutors pitched hundreds of documents to the jury, one document at a time, and before the trial was over they’d interrogated ninety-five witnesses. Jurors fought off sleep. Judge Keenan sagged in tedium. One paper reported, “The judge slowly slid down in his chair until only the crown of his balding head remained in view, like the sun slipping below the horizon.” Sometimes he got up and stretched like my old dog who’d lain too long on the living room floor with no squirrels to chase. Mrs. Marcos sat quietly with a small, pained smile on her face. I sat beside her trying to appear as quietly disinterested as she.
On cross-examination I often asked no questions, or at most I might ask, “You never had any contact with Mrs. Marcos, did you?” and the answer was almost uniformly “No.” I tried not to attack these helplessly trapped Filipinos who, under pain of losing their property in the Philippines, were ordered to testify against Mrs. Marcos in America.
“You are not here because you want to be here, isn’t that true?” I might ask.
“Yes, sir.”
“You came here at the expense of the Philippine government?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You own a business in the Philippines?”
“Yes.”
“Are you worried that if you don’t testify to suit the Aquino government you might lose your property?”
LaBella: “Objection!”
“Sustained.”
One witness, Andres Genito, a businessman who’d been granted immunity from prosecution, described how Marcos collected kickbacks from a Japanese government program that paid reparations to the Philippines for World War II damages. But under my cross-examination he joined the other witnesses.
“You’re not suggesting by your testimony that Mrs. Marcos did anything wrong, are you?” I asked.
Long silence. I pressed him. “Yes or no.”
“No,” Genito finally admitted.
By the end of the day I was often too tired to exercise or go out for dinner. Mrs. Marcos would sometimes come down from her upstairs apartment with something to eat. She was always accompanied by a tall, silent bodyguard who stood in the shadows of the entry hall and who carried down the dinner that she had prepared for me, and that I chewed at as we reviewed the day.
“What do you feel about what happened today?” I’d ask. I trusted her instincts. She’d spent a lifetime in political battles, and her assessments of people were valuable to me.
“We’re doing fine,” she said. “The jury, all but the man on the front row on the far left, likes you. He’s a young buck in the pasture and wants to own it all. He will come around. But that judge, he doesn’t like you too much. He likes himself a lot.”
One Monday morning I asked Imelda how her weekend had been. She said, “I had a nice time. I took a ferry ride past the Statue of Liberty.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I wanted to look up at the lady. I was thinking what I would do if I were convicted.”
“What would you do?”
“Why, I’d run for president of the Philippines from an American prison,” she said, as if her answer should have surprised no one.
Imaging, who was with me much of the trial, had grown to love Imelda and appreciated her attraction to beautiful architecture, furnishings, and art. And they had something else in common: They knew how to stand behind their men and to nurture them through dangerous wars. And I missed my longtime partner Ed Moriarity, who was holding down the fort in Jackson in our other cases.
I found out after the trial that Ms. Livingston was daily provided briefings from a panel of experts who sat in the courtroom and assessed the progress of the feds’ case. I also found out after the trial that the prosecutors expected me to call a celebrity witness. They decided to beat me to the punch. They called George Hamilton, the handsome, always marvelously tanned actor, who was a friend of Mrs. Marcos and had received a large loan from Mrs. Gliceria Tantoco, also a friend of Mrs. Marcos. LaBella had charged Hamilton as an “unindicted co-conspirator.” LaBella’s offered excuse for this abuse of a decent, innocent man was LaBella’s naked claim that Hamilton was a conduit by which the Marcoses funneled money out of the Philippines. I thought Hamilton was being called to embarrass Mrs. Marcos by suggesting she had some sort of intimate relationship with him that would contradict her heretofore unquestioned devotion to Ferdinand.
LaBella proved the loan by Mrs. Tantoco to Hamilton (which he had paid back in full) and at last found himself with nothing more to prove by his witness. On my cross-examination Hamilton said he’d never borrowed money from Mrs. Marcos. Then I threw the door wide open. “You felt close to Mrs. Marcos?” I asked him.
“Yes. I met her in Manila when I was promoting a movie entitled Love at First Bite. My brother was ill. He suffered from the same disease as Mr. Marcos—a liver and kidney malfunction.”
“Why did that bring you close to Mrs. Marcos?”
“I believe she saved my mother’s life. When my brother died, my mother wanted to commit suicide.” Hamilton’s head was bowed, and he was staring into his fidgeting hands. Then his voice broke. “Mrs. Marcos brought my mother to the Philippines. I think the only reason my mother is alive today is because of Mrs. Marcos.” He began to choke. The judge ordered that I go to another subject. A pall of silence invaded the courtroom. But LaBella and Livingston acted as if nothing untoward had taken place.
If any testimony touched Mrs. Marcos, it was usually soon dispelled. An example—my short cross-examination of an aging domestic servant:
“You knew Mrs. Marcos quite well?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“How did you feel about her?”
“She was always kind to me. I loved her.”
The prosecutors knew their case to this jury was falling apart, and LaBella began dropping stacks of exhibits in front of his witnesses. Standard court procedure required him to first bring the exhibits to my table and show them to me, but LaBella followed no such rule.
LABELLA (Without showing me the exhibits he’d put in front of the witness): “We offer into evidence Exhibits 593 through 642.”
MR. SPENCE: “I haven’t seen the exhibits, Your Honor.”
JUDGE KEENAN: “Don’t you dare misrepresent to the jury that you haven’t seen those exhibits. They were presented to you last night,” and the judge forthwith allowed the prosecutor’s exhibits into evidence.
LaBella dumped another couple of dozen exhibits in front of his witness and offered them. Since LaBella hadn’t shown me which exhibits he had just put in front of the witness, I had no idea whether those he’d shown me the night before were contained in the pile.
MR. SPENCE: “Your Honor, I simply haven’t seen these exhibits—”
JUDGE KEENAN: “I’ve had enough of this. I told you to desist in your misrepresentations to the jury. One more time and I will take action, and you know what action I am referring to!”
He continued denouncing me as the jury looked on.
I was shocked. I have never been held in contempt by any court in my entire career. I saw his attack as uncalled for and as his further attempt to discredit me permanently with the jury.
“I have a motion to make,” I said.
“The jury will be excused!” the judge said, still at the top of his lungs. The jury was led out by the bailiff. “I suppose you want to move for a mistrial?” the judge said, his anger in full flame.
“I’m not sure what motion I want to make,” I said, “but since you suggest it, yes, that will be just fine. I move for a mistrial. This jury cannot possibly give Mrs. Marcos a fair trial in view of what you’ve done here. You’ve painted me as a fake who will misrepresent the facts to the jury. You know I couldn’t possibly know what documents the prosecutor was offering in evidence when he hasn’t shown the documents to me that he’s offering. I’ve been in a lot of courts in my day, but I’ve never had a judge accuse me of misrepresentation. I was not misrepresenting. I was telling the truth.”
“So what do you want me to do about it?” Keenan asked.
“That’s up to you. You caused it. You figure it out,” I said. I felt beaten and incompetent.
Judge Keenan called the jurors back and proceeded to tell them what a fine lawyer I was, how I was only representing my client to the fullest, and that the jury should not consider in any way what he had said about me. He went on for a considerable time trying to erase what was obviously his error, which he never once admitted. He was, of course, the judge.
“That should do it, Mr. Spence,” the judge finally said. “Proceed.” But the judge’s explosion created the opening Bartko had been waiting for.
On Wednesday evening, May 31, 1990, the day the judge emasculated me in the presence of the jury, Bartko called a meeting. At the meeting were Imelda and I, Imelda’s doctor, her son Bongbong, her sister the nun, Bartko, and Cassidy. You better get rid of Spence, was Bartko’s advice to Imelda: “Spence’s trouble with the judge is poisoning the jury, and you’re going to be convicted.”
Her doctor took her blood pressure. It was high. I said, “I think you should take mine, too, Doctor,” and he did. Mine was even higher. Imelda listened carefully to their arguments and asked each of those present for their advice. Her son joined with Bartko and Cassidy, as did her sister. After she’d listened thoughtfully to each she made her decision: “Mr. Spence will stay on as my lawyer. He never wanted me to plead guilty.” She was saying another thing—this man, Spence, cares about me, which proved once more that caring is contagious. Loyalty is also contagious. She told the press, “It is comforting to have someone like Mr. Spence fighting for me.” Bartko had prepared a letter of resignation for me to sign. My fingers refused to hold the pen.
The next morning Mrs. Marcos suddenly fell facedown on the counsel table where she was sitting. She was throwing up blood that covered much of the tabletop. She was soon lifted to a stretcher, administered oxygen, and hauled to the hospital by ambulance. Later a reporter from the New York Times sauntered up to me. “Where did you get the blood capsule, Spence?”—a question that underlined the blind cynicism of the attending media.
The following morning the court clerk approached me: “Please don’t tell the judge, but tell Mrs. Marcos that I lit a candle for her at church.” And the tough old marshals who guarded the courtroom against every species of crook and criminal, and who must have grown calluses around their hearts as thick as bull leather, sent flowers to her in the hospital.
Along the way I’d felt solace from a wonderfully kind-faced black juror, a woman who sat near the middle of the jury box in the first row. When the judicial pot got boiling and I was about to be dumped in like a squirming squid, I sometimes looked over at her. I could read sympathy on her sad face. We never exchanged a word, not then nor since, but I thought she knew what was happening and understood. I needed help, and, of course, Imaging called Eddie Moriarity, my faithful partner, and told him to come. He got on a plane and was there the next morning. His job was to guard my backside while I finished the case.
I knew that LaBella, like all prosecutors, was hoping we’d call Mrs. Marcos to testify. But why would I turn this precious woman over to them to relentlessly attack and abuse, not for an hour or two but for days? I thought I’d proved our case on the cross-examination of the government’s trainload of witnesses—that if there was any unlawfulness, none was ever connected to Mrs. Marcos. Moreover, I thought that if we had gotten through to those tough old marshals, we’d probably also earned the jurors’ support. I rested our case without calling a single witness in defense.
Suddenly the Los Angeles Times seemed to awaken. That paper reported, “Not one of 95 prosecution witnesses testified unequivocally that former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos engaged in the coercion, bribery and kickback schemes that marked her late husband’s graft-tainted regime.”
The judge called a recess. He’d be gone for several days, he said. We learned he’d taken a trip to Washington, D.C. I hoped it had nothing to do with the case. On his return his attitude had miraculously and marvelously changed. He’d become more circumspect, even slightly thoughtful. He stopped his hollering and his pacing up on the bench. Either he’d walked into the blazing light of truth, or he was suffering the onset of a serious judicial heart ailment (from which most federal judges are immune), namely, compassion for the accused.
But with the jury out of the courtroom he suddenly erupted again. This time he was pointing at the prosecutors. He said he wasn’t convinced they’d proven their case. “What am I doing here at 40 Foley Square trying a case involving the theft of monies from Philippine banks?” I’d been arguing that from the beginning. Why was he just seeing it now? What had happened during his brief trip to Washington? Perhaps nothing.
LaBella rested the government’s case. We of the defense made our standard motion to dismiss the case based on the failure of the government to make its required proof. I let Bartko make the argument, and I thought he did a good job. But the judge did as judges most often do—he let the jury decide.
* * *
It was June 25, 1990, and LaBella was still steaming when he began his final argument. Was the man born angry? He argued for five hours, often at the peak of his passion. “Imelda Marcos was not in a glass tomb. She was in the thick of things.” I saw jurors pull back in their seats as if to dodge his onslaught. Then he’d fall off into eye-closing tedium that dragged us through endless exhibits and testimony that promised to cast the most caffeine-hyped listener into webs of involuntary slumber.
Did Imelda know about these ill-gotten monies? LaBella asked. “Of course! Of course!” LaBella hammered those two words with his fists against the podium like a drummer gone wild. “Of course, of course,” she knew. She had to know. She’d been the mayor of Manila. She lived with a billionaire. She was the closest human being in the world to Ferdinand Marcos, and of course she knew everything he was doing, consulted with him, and advised him. “Of course.”
It had become an “Of course” case.
Still, I thought I must be missing something. How could LaBella be so angry if the lady were innocent? Maybe Bartko was right. Maybe I was no longer fit to represent Imelda—all those witnesses and exhibits I didn’t fully understand, and there crouched LaBella snarling and tooth-baring like a mad mastiff over the body of a case that to me seemed barren of bones. When LaBella finally sat down I could feel fear welling up along my rib cage. In the jungle it would have been the moment to fight or flee. I’m not a good runner.
In the morning it would be my time, and my only time, to address the jurors. I argued all night in feverlike dreams with visions of Imelda running for president from behind the cold steel bars of an American prison. What if I failed her? Maybe I should have listened to Bartko. Eddie Moriarity gave me his reassuring Irish smile. One had to trust. And the one one had to trust was oneself.
I approached the jury box. The jurors were fixed on me. I began:
“Remember the little lady in the TV advertisement who opens up the hamburger and asks, ‘Where’s the beef?’ I’m going to quote what Mr. LaBella said yesterday about the purchase of those four buildings. ‘These were no doubt funded by stolen money.’ What witness testified to that? What document shows that? Where’s the beef? And do we want to get a simple lock on this case? LOK stands for lack of knowledge—knowledge that they’ve tried over and over to dump on Mrs. Marcos.
“The Secret Service and the FBI knew where she was at every moment. There isn’t a shred of evidence she ever hid anything. To four presidents of this United States of America, these were decent, honest people. The four presidents of the United States of America knew what they were doing—”
MR. LABELLA: “Objection, Your Honor.”
JUDGE KEENAN: “Sustained.”
MR. SPENCE: “If the United States of America through the FBI and the Secret Service knew what she was doing—”
MR. LABELLA: “Objection, Your Honor.”
JUDGE KEENAN: “Sustained.”
MR. SPENCE: “If the United States government believed these people were all right, then why couldn’t she believe her husband?
“I am reading from the transcript of Mr. Gadup’s testimony: ‘You told us that Mr. Marcos told you from time to time not to tell Mrs. Marcos about certain matters. Do you remember that?’
“HIS ANSWER: ‘Yes.’
“‘You followed President Marcos’s instructions in that regard, did you not?’
“HIS ANSWER: ‘Yes.’
“Now, those are facts, ladies and gentlemen. Those aren’t Mr. LaBella’s ‘she-must-have-knowns.’
“Even Genito—remember Mr. Genito? [I read from his testimony.] ‘So you’re not suggesting to anybody she did anything wrong, are you?’ This is my cross-examination of Genito.
“HIS ANSWER: ‘No.’
“‘Did you ever in your life go to Mrs. Marcos and ask her to do anything improper?’
“HIS ANSWER: ‘No.’”
I walked over to Mrs. Marcos and put my hands on her shoulders. “I will say this much: If she were charged with being a champion spender we don’t need a trial. But spending lots of money isn’t a crime. I mean, if that were a crime the Queen of England wouldn’t be safe and the wives of the sultans wouldn’t be safe, nor the late Grace Kelly, nor the Empress of Japan. She was a world-class shopper, but she was and is a world-class decent human being as well.
“The great danger in this case is the ‘big S.’ It’s called suspicion. Suspicion isn’t proof.”
My argument consumed most of the day. “And so, ladies and gentlemen, who wins this case? If you set her free the government wins. Do you know why the government wins? Because the system worked. Because justice has been done. And do you know who the government really is? The government is we. We are the government. And so everybody wins.”
I ended by saying to the jury that I wanted to tell them a story.
LABELLA: “Objection, Your Honor.”
JUDGE KEENAN: “The objection is overruled. You know you’ve heard the story, and I’ve heard the story. Tell the story, Mr. Spence.”
MR. SPENCE: “It must be a very good story if you both have heard it before.”
JUDGE KEENAN: “That’s for the jury to decide.”
This was the judge’s last chance to undermine me, telling the jury that my final words to them were a shopworn story with no sincerity attached.
I turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the story of a wise old man and a smart-aleck boy. The smart-aleck boy wanted to show up the old man as a fool. The boy had captured a small bird in the forest. His plan was to go to the old man with the little bird cupped inside his hands so that only the small tail of the bird protruded. Then he’d say with a sneer, ‘Old man, what do I have in my hand?’
“And the wise old man would say, ‘You have a bird, my son.’
“Then the boy would say with confronting disdain, ‘Old man, is the bird alive or is it dead?’
“And if the old man said the bird was dead, the boy would open up his hand and the bird would fly away free into the forest.
“But if the old man said the bird was alive, then the boy would begin to crush the bird in his cupped hands, and to crush it and crush it until the little bird was dead, and then he’d open his hands and say, ‘See, old man, the bird is dead!’
“So the smart-aleck boy, as planned, came to the old man with the bird hidden in his cupped hands, and he said, ‘Old man, what do I have in my hands?’
“The old man said, ‘You have a bird, my son.’
“Then the boy said, ‘Is the bird alive or is it dead?’
“And the wise old man softly said, ‘The bird is in your hands, my son.’
“And ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Imelda Marcos is in yours.”
I walked back and sat down slowly next to Mrs. Marcos. Her hand was trembling.
* * *
It was LaBella’s right to deliver the last argument, and he delivered what the press termed “a scathing rebuttal” that left Mrs. Marcos in tears and one juror wiping her own eyes. He stacked packs of freshly minted Philippine pesos on the rail of the jury box. “Can’t you see the money? Wouldn’t we know where this money came from? Wouldn’t we know that Ferdinand Marcos was enriching himself by stealing millions from his country’s treasury? And they”—pointing at me—“say she knew nothing!”
LaBella finally closed by predicting his victory. “When you look at all the evidence you will be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Imelda Marcos is guilty as charged.”
In his instructions to the jury, Judge Keenan told them that she could be found guilty even if she “closed her eyes” to whether stolen money was used for investments in the United States.
If she “closed her eyes”? Suspicion?
After the jury was sent off to deliberate, one of her many supporters asked her what she would do while awaiting the verdict.
“I’ll just pray,” she said. “Life is fragile. I’ll handle it with my prayers.”
The jury was out five days, during which Mrs. Marcos spent much of her time at the nearby St. Andrew’s Church. I suffered every nightmare that a creative mind could concoct. I reargued the case a hundred times. Mrs. Marcos should have hired a real lawyer. The country lawyer should go back where he came from and talk to those simple, honest people, not to sophisticated New York jurors.
Despite my screaming doubts, the rational part of me continued to seep up. That part said we’d won the case, the judge’s last stab notwithstanding. I told Mrs. Marcos there’d never be twelve good citizens who’d find her guilty. This was a case of caring versus anger, love versus hate. Mrs. Marcos stood for the former, LaBella and his crew the latter. I believe that love trumps hate. On Monday, July 2, 1990, the jurors marched into the courtroom with their verdict.
The foreperson held the verdict tightly to his chest as if he dare not let it go. I looked into the faces of each of the twelve. They wouldn’t look at me. My God, had I misjudged these people? Jurors who find against you usually look away as if to say, “We’ve rejected not only your case, but you as a human being.” I looked at the dear black woman with the soft eyes. She would not look at me.
The foreperson released the verdict to the clerk, who handed it to the judge. He read it to himself, and without a hint of expression handed it back to the clerk.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” the judge began, “harken to your verdict.”
The clerk began to read. “We, the jury, duly impaneled and sworn, do find the defendant Imelda Marcos not guilty on count one.
“Not guilty on count two.
“Not guilty on count three.”
Oh, Lord, I thought, did they compromise and find her guilty on the one remaining count?
“Not guilty on count four.”
The courtroom was packed with Marcos friends and loyalists who erupted in cheers and tears as this three-month nightmare finally ended. Mrs. Marcos stood softly weeping.
It was Imelda’s sixty-first birthday.
* * *
Mrs. Marcos invited me and the jury to a celebration, but I was desperate to get home and attend to affairs that had suffered in my absence those many months. Most of the jurors joined her. The kindly black woman was there. I wish I could have told her how much I appreciated her during the trial. Later Mrs. Marcos shared with me a conversation she had with the woman.
“Do you know why I knew you were innocent?” she asked Mrs. Marcos.
“Why?”
“Because,” she said, “Mr. Spence cared so much for you.”
The media still delighted in referring to Mrs. Marcos as “the Steel Butterfly.” But Imaging, who’d grown to love Mrs. Marcos, summed her up more accurately: “Imelda was extravagant in many ways—in spending money, in her love of beauty, in her generosity and her caring for people.” Imelda said she was allergic to ugliness. In ways, I thought, she and Imaging were sisters under the skin.
After the verdict Imelda left immediately for St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where she crawled on her knees down the full length of the center aisle to the altar. She bowed her head to the floor and gave her thanks to the Lord.
I dropped by Judge Keenan’s chambers to pay my respects. One can make room for a judge who conducts himself in ways that hurt you and your case so long as you recognize he is, in fact, a decent person who, like all of us, is the victim of his own personality. Too many judges come to the conclusion that they have been gifted from above with some sort of supernatural wisdom. Judge Keenan had a keen sense of justice, but I thought it was skewed in favor of the government. I thought perhaps he couldn’t help himself, considering that he was dealing with the likes of me.
In any event, I wished to pay my respects and stopped by his chambers to say good-bye and to wish him well. He couldn’t have been more cordial. I immediately understood why lawyers liked him. I found myself liking him. Along the way he said, “I want to congratulate you, Mr. Spence. You are the best criminal defense attorney who has appeared before me. I want you to know something: This is only the third time in my tenure that a jury has returned a verdict of acquittal in my court.” His statement didn’t surprise me. Many federal courts enjoy conviction rates of well above 90 percent.
I thanked him for the compliment, but I thought he was being overly generous. And I thought that if I ever tried another case before him he’d be as tough and unrelenting and impatient with me as before. At the same time, one must wonder if his explosive reactions to me didn’t have something to do with me and the way I behave. I’ll admit: We never see ourselves as well as others see us.
* * *
In 1991 Imelda Marcos was permitted to return to the Philippines. She faced a reported nine hundred civil and criminal cases that had crowded the Philippine courts for years. She won all but one or two of the cases, and those she lost were overturned by the court of appeals.
She served in the Philippine Congress from 1995 through 1998, representing her birthplace, the Leyte province in the central islands. She returned to politics in April of 2010 at the age of eighty and was reelected to Congress, where she still serves.
“In politics, you don’t only use your heart or head,” she said. “You also use the soul of a mother, the selfless giving of a mother.” As for our case, she said, “I won on my birthday. I was alone, widowed, helpless, penniless, and country-less. But even the Bible says there is a special place in hell for those who oppress widows and orphans.” Then with gentle eyes she offered that small, kindly smile I’d seen so often. Somehow I felt she’d forgiven her tormentors long ago.
This case stands for something more than just another story about how Power, one step at a time, has led us to the brink of a police state. Here we have seen how Power, through its voice, the corporate media, captured the minds of an entire nation. The hatred of the Marcoses by those who’d never met them, never knew them, and many who’d never heard of them descended on the nation like the plague. An irreversible loathing of the Marcos name was as solidly implanted in the minds of intelligent, discerning citizens as any religion in the minds of the faithful. No truth existed except that the Marcoses were agents of the devil, and that Mrs. Marcos was infected with her husband’s villainy.
What is the danger of a force so prevailing that the composite mind of a nation can be captured? Ask those who have experienced life in a police state. Ask those who once saluted Hitler as his goose-stepping troops marched by.