On the afternoon of July 18, 2013, a street sweeper had finished lunch and was returning to work when he witnessed a car crash near the corner of Libertad Avenue and Roxas Boulevard in Pasay City, Manila. He reported to Officer Bautista that he saw a red Toyota Innova collide with a gray Mitsubishi Montero Sport. Both vehicles were traveling at high speeds when the Innova suddenly went against the flow of traffic. A store owner, a gasoline attendant, and a traffic attendant also witnessed the collision and corroborated the street sweeper’s testimony.
Both vehicles suffered severe damages, and the drivers were rushed to the nearby San Juan de Dios Hospital. The driver of the Montero was a Caucasian American female, Elizabeth L. Greenwood.
She was pronounced dead on arrival.
EVERYTHING THAT HAD COME before—badgering Frank and Steve, reliving the hoax with John, wading through Believers logic, listening to Jonathan Roth’s story across a jail partition—all of it led to this terminal moment. But the moment felt interminable. Time passes slowly when you’re waiting on your own death certificate.
It seemed as if forces beyond my control had been conspiring to place me here. Only two weeks before, I received an email out of the thin blue ether from a college friend who was working for a magazine in Manila inviting me to the Philippines for an all-expenses-paid trip as a “blogger.” I didn’t believe it. I’d had my eye set on this South Pacific archipelago for ages, since first reading about those fabled black market morgues and death kits, but I’d had no idea how I would cobble together the plane fare to cross the globe and cultivate the contacts to assist in my literal entrée into the underworld of death fraud. Plus, after becoming so intimate with the nastier side of pseudocide, especially the shattered lives left in death fakers’ wakes, I wasn’t exactly gunning for an exodus any longer. But the chance to tout the glories of this country and to tack on just two little extra days in the capital to see how one were to fake one’s death in this epicenter of pseudocide, if one were so inclined? Subsidized and underwritten? I’d always wanted somebody to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
I found the Philippines to be heavenly. It was the first time in my so-called career that I was treated like more than a human hemorrhoid. My hosts rolled out the red carpet. And thereby created a monster.
On my weeklong tour, I lazed on white-sand beaches, which bore a striking resemblance to the sunny, anonymous setting of my après-pseudocide destination. I received transcendent massages and consumed animals new to me, many with faces still intact. I met the tarsier, a tiny primate native to the island of Bohol with eyes the size of grapefruits, which can commit suicide by holding its breath. I was introduced to a new form of roving entertainment wherein elderly Filipinas sing karaoke to the captive audience of a tour bus in transit to the next delight. I feigned sleep while “Memory” from the Cats soundtrack was sung off-key and at earsplitting volume. Within twenty-four hours of deplaning, I met the president of the country. I encountered a bountiful buffet (my personal nirvana) at every turn. The first day, I deferentially cleared my own dishes at the resort. By the last day, I found myself wishing the cabana boy would return to massage aloe into my sun-scorched shoulders yet again, and was disappointed when the baked goods in my welcome basket included only one swan-shaped coconut confection. I fell in love with the Philippines. The Philippines is God’s country. I wrote about it thusly. I prostituted myself as a writer, and it was worth it. I’ve done a lot more for a lot less.
But as I sat waiting on the document that would pronounce me dead in a fatal car crash, I wondered if even this would be so free and easy. How would it feel if my new friends (and accomplices) Snooky and Bong were to be the last people I saw before I got busted for fraud, handcuffed, and detained in a Southeast Asian women’s correctional facility? I constructed a convincing explanation to feed the cops when they discovered my authentic death certificate on my very alive person. The promise of death (on paper, at least) is what I’d been praying for. The entire deranged journey, which began with Googling “fake your own death,” had brought me to Manila, and now I was scared, stuck with the classic comeuppance of getting what I’d wished for.
I MEET MIKE DOMINGO the night before in the cavernous lobby of the Holiday Inn Makati, the heart of the globalization-slick business center of Manila. He is a fifty-one-year-old Pinkerton-trained investigator who has specialized in fraud—from phony insurance claims to counterfeiting operations—for twenty-six years. He has helped Steve Rambam on a number of Filipino death fraud cases. There is an amphibious quality to Mike. Tiny moles speckle the sunken hollows of his cheeks, and the whites of his eyes are cloudy, a bright blue outlining his dark irises. He speaks slowly, deliberately, and in a deep, soft tone that makes you lean in to hear what he’s saying. He looks menacing until he smiles.
“Tomorrow morning you will meet Snooky and Bong. They will pick you up and take you wherever you want to go,” Mike whispers, while I crane all my gangly hulk into his personal space.
Snooky and Bong? Okay. Tomorrow I am to get in a car with Snooky and Bong, and they will tour me around the death-faking hot spots of the capital city. It sounds like the premise of a straight-to-DVD movie: Hostel meets Taken, with a touch of Kindergarten Cop. Or the stuff of Nancy Grace’s dreams.
But I am relieved. I am on a tight timetable—less than thirty-six hours—in the mecca of pseudocide. I think back to Hector Mendoza, who passed off the dead body of the neighborhood drunk as his own. Snooky and Bong sound like saviors to me.
More than serving as a helpful conduit to my local fixers with the charming names, Mike has worked a great many death fraud cases in his day and can demystify the macabre rumors. Both Richard Marquez and Steven Rambam cited the Philippines as one of the more theatrical stages for full-monty death fraud. Could this really be, even today? Even with homeland security always finding new ways to stamp out phony documents and, of course, the buying and selling of human remains? The Philippine economy has boomed in recent years, so I had wondered if this sector of the informal market was still thriving.
I am dying—pun absolutely intended—to ask Mike, along with the more exigent questions of “Where are the bodies?” “Any blondes in stock?” and “How much?”
Undoubtedly, inquiring about purchasing Mike’s deceased countrymen could be construed as culturally insensitive. Asking him from the jump would be like a foreigner entering America and at customs requesting directions to the Calabasas mansion of Kim Kardashian. She might be a dismal fact, but she’s not the patriotic face we wish to advance. Not wanting to offend my host in his own country, or even in this ostentatious hotel lobby, I proceed gingerly, sipping nervously at my overpriced bottle of water, and ask him about some of the fishy life insurance cases he has investigated.
“A family filed a claim for a female, a Filipina American, who was insured in the United States,” Mike says, looking out the plate-glass hotel window to the gray drizzle swallowing up the half-finished skyline outside.
“They claimed that the female was out strolling along the promenade of Manila Bay when she fell through the breakwater structure and dropped in. The fishermen around scooped out the body and brought it to the police, and gave their statements. The insurance company wanted to verify the authenticity of the documents the family submitted. The first thing an investigator will do is verify the authenticity of the death certificate.” Just like Rambam said: death fraud is carried out mainly with documents. Mike continues: “So the investigator visits the funeral parlor and asks for records. In this case, the body was cremated. I went to the crematorium,” he says, still gazing at the thick tropical fog outside.
Through his investigation and comparing photos of the deceased, Mike learned that the body presented to the police, the funeral parlor, and the crematorium was not the woman in question. “It turned out later that what this woman did was buy an unclaimed body at a funeral parlor,” he tells me. “Back then”—fifteen years ago—“you could have acquired a cadaver for only twenty thousand to thirty thousand pesos.” That’s roughly $430 to $640. “She found a fresh body to match her claim, dressed it up in her clothes, and threw it off the promenade into the bay,” he says, chortling at the absurdity of the story.
This woman purchased and costumed a dead body and carted it around Manila. My mannered deference suddenly feels quaint.
“So what happened? Did she go to jail?” I ask, absorbing the image of a lady chucking a body in her likeness off the side of the road.
“Very few of the insurance claims we handle go into prosecution. The objective is to deny their claims. When we investigate cases, we charge up to a thousand dollars per day. The companies don’t want to spend any more money on this person,” he explains.
Mike echoes the shocking consensus I had been hearing all along, from fieldwork specialists to the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud: in the vast majority of insurance frauds that come under investigation, the only punishment is the company denying the claim. Most insurers will not seek retribution or press charges. If you are bold enough to manipulate your mortality, there is really no legal disincentive to trying your luck at collecting a chunk of change for your untimely demise. This seems really surprising, given how much American businesses like to make examples of no-goodniks. No jail time? Not even a fine? I’m glad to hear this, considering what tomorrow’s itinerary entails.
“Just send me an email with all of the places you want to hit and people you want to interview,” Mike instructs. “Then I will forward it to Snooky and Bong, and they will support you, whatever you want to do.”
I run up to my comfortingly unremarkable hotel room and fire off a wish list:
—Morgues where people can purchase/have purchased bodies
—Shady crematoriums
—Funeral parlors where fraudulent funerals/wakes have occurred
—People who can procure fraudulent documents, e.g., fake death certificates, passports, witness statements, etc.
Mike responds right away: “Sounds good. Snooky and Bong will pick you up in front of the hotel at ten in the morning.” I am off to see the wizards.
Imagining the individuals attached to the names Snooky and Bong is not without specific cultural resonance. The former evokes the Jersey Shore siren, and the latter conjures the bulbous glass filtration system indigenous to dorm rooms the world over. So when two perfectly normal-looking middle-aged men approach me in front of the Glorietta Mall adjacent to the Holiday Inn the next morning, I am actually taken aback by how unassuming they seem. Bong is slight, with pockmarked skin and a swooping black dye job. He is wearing a short-sleeved white button-down shirt and black slacks, and looks exactly like the bank manager he once was. Snooky is slightly younger, a cop’s cop: he has a shaved head and wears an open button-down shirt over a T-shirt and jeans. He walks with the swagger of a Texas sheriff and smiles incessantly.
Bong shakes his head wearily.
“We saw your list last night, and we said, ‘Oh my God!’ ” he says, laughing in a way that makes me nervous.
“Do you have your own contacts?” Snooky asks me. My own contacts? Wasn’t the whole point that these two are my contacts?
“Uh, no. I think Mike said that you guys would set me up.”
“Mike told us that you had your own contacts and that we would just drive you around,” Bong says. “Fuuuuuuccckkk,” I think. How, and whence, this communication breakdown? I just went from twenty-first-century Joan Didion to incompetent blogger reject.
At that moment, Mike, the duplicitous amphibian, rounds the corner. Mike, enabler of death fraud delusions. Mike, you got some ’splainin’ to do.
Snooky and Bong perk up when they see their superior. Mike walks over and punches them each in the stomach.
“Hey, boss!” they groan.
“Good morning,” he whispers menacingly, soft and deep. “I have a breakfast meeting. We are setting up an entrapment of a woman.” Good God. Am I the entrapped woman? Mike slinks off, and Snooky, Bong, and I face one another with consternation.
“It would take a few weeks to set up everything you want to do,” Bong says. “But I came up with a plan B: Do you want your own death certificate?”
While I want to experience death fraud firsthand, I never thought I’d get a chance to see my own name in cold, hard type. Never before had such a question been lobbed in my direction. And when the universe arranges itself for such queries to be posed, one can answer only in the affirmative.
“Duh, Bong, yes!”
“Okay, I’ll call my guy, and we will see what we can do.”
In the meantime, we return to the lobby of the Holiday Inn, which is trying to distract us from the fact that it is a midbudget hotel by splashing lurid geometric patterns across every available surface to cover up the chintzy hardware. I appreciate this strategy of diversion because I employ the same tactic with my wardrobe of Forever 21 cocktail dresses. Now that I’m past the age of thirty-one, the frocks might scan as more poignant than playful, but usually I can pass off the polyblend monstrosities. Unless the setting is formal, that is. You can divert attention with spangles and peplum for only so long until you reveal your lack of resources, and then everyone is embarrassed.
Anyway, Snooky, Bong, and I find a quiet corner in the lounge, surrounded by Chinese businessmen with laptops, the chipper staff hovering nearby.
Bong has investigated over fifty cases of death fraud in his fifteen-year career, and as Mike said last night, the first place he starts is with the death certificate. The theatrics of lobbing a body off a bridge are superfluous. And sourcing bodies, though delightfully lugubrious, is often unnecessary. The Philippines is fertile ground for death fraud because of the widespread corruption of developing countries. In fact, the “corruption” is so commonplace that the word isn’t an accurate term. It’s just another way of doing business.
Take, for example, the guy who is helping to secure my death certificate. A friend of Bong’s, he goes under the code name Smith and works for the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), the Philippine equivalent of the FBI. This arm of the law goes after people who commit fraud, and yet the person helping me to commit fraud is the person in charge of stamping it out. One thinks of the Ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail. With Smith working both ends, he will never be in short supply of fraud to investigate, and he will always be doubly employed.
Before Bong gets on the phone to organize the certificate, he asks, “Hey, do you want to graduate from medical school today too?” In addition to supplying death certificates (which is a “very rare” request), the counterfeiter mostly makes diplomas and transcripts required for many good jobs. (This is a ubiquitous practice the world over. In 2012 a Mexican university president was found to have a fake degree. A retired University of Rhode Island adjunct professor convicted of embezzling state research funds in 2014 had landed his job with a phony diploma.) Both Snooky and Bong use fake IDs from Smith’s forger when they go undercover, and the counterfeiter’s work is so good that Bong blackens the upper left corner of his false ID so he doesn’t confuse it with the authentic one. “Always use the same first name!” Snooky says. “It’s instinct to respond to your first name.” Just as John Jones, née John Darwin, advised me in England.
Most people in the Philippines with fake licenses don’t get them to assume a different identity or for malevolent purposes, but just to save time. Fraudulent driver’s licenses and passports are a prosaic part of life. The few tedious hours you might pass at your local DMV in the United States are cake compared with the endless coiling line at the Manila counterpart: “If you arrive at eight o’clock when they open the window, you might be two-hundred-fifty-eighth in line,” Bong says. “Then they close at three in the afternoon. So you go back the following morning. You will be in line at six. Then you will be in the first one hundred. Then it will take all day, under the hot sun or drizzling rain.” If you want to get a fake ID card or death certificate, they are quite easy to obtain and won’t arouse suspicion.
So who are the people who come to the Philippines to take advantage of the amenable fraud climate? I ask Bong to walk me through a typical case.
“Most people who commit death fraud in the Philippines are Filipino but citizens of the United States,” he says. “If they are not Filipino by birth, they will have some connection to the country, like they were stationed here in the army. They come back here and meet their untimely death. One such person is Eduardo Medina. He had lived in Detroit for years, but came back to visit his country and went swimming at the beach in the northernmost part of the country. This beach is known for rough waves. That’s why they picked that area: it’s the perfect cover-up. According to his companion, he was so drunk that he was swept away in the tides. So there’s no cadaver. After a few days, a body will usually wash up. But in this case, there’s none. I don’t know why he would choose to swim at that beach. He is from central Luzon. Why would he travel four hundred kilometers to go swimming? Then we found out that he has another family in the Philippines that his wife and children back in Detroit don’t know about.”
This case sounds familiar, like Wint or the Canadian scuba instructor.
“In the new family, his wife is young,” Bong says. Shocker. “I sense collusion between the first wife and the missing husband.”
“Really? Why would the first wife help him fake his death?” I ask.
“We found out he wasn’t doing well in America. His wife is a doctor, and he had a jewelry business that was failing. So they probably thought that they could collect eventually, even though they’d have to wait five years, without a cadaver.”
“So she didn’t know about the other family?”
“No, she probably just wanted to get rid of the husband and collect money while she’s at it.”
“Why not just get divorced?” I ask. I think about Lisa Boosin’s wish for her father. This seems like a really crazy and complicated way to leave your family.
“Probably because he’s afraid of his wife!” Snooky guffaws, and Bong joins in laughing. This casual misogyny, this “Take my wife!” Borscht Belt repartee, is a big part of Snooky’s and Bong’s banter. I am an ardent feminist. But their gag lines are so predictable, and the middle-aged-guy outlook so Central Casting, that their jokes feel more cute than offensive. Snooky’s designated ringtone for his wife is the theme song from the TV show Combat!, because she is the sergeant. I laugh right along with them. The two-timing jewelry maker wants to leave the wife! But he’s afraid of her! So he fakes his death! Of course!
But does it work the other way? Do women try to ditch their fat, balding, charmless husbands for younger models? Do they become Cavalli-swathed cougars with their newly minted insurance windfall?
“Out of the fifty investigations you’ve done, how many have been men and how many have been women?” I ask.
“There was only one female,” Bong says.
“So why more men than women?” This question has been nagging at me all along, especially after meeting John Darwin. He shirked his paternal and financial obligations because he felt entitled to something better. Does it have something to do with masculinity in the twenty-first century? With men’s adeptness at compartmentalizing or rationalizing their misdeeds? Their ability to forget about their familial responsibilities?
“They want to live with another girl! Ha!” Snooky says, cracking up, and Bong bangs the table. According to guys who have investigated loads of these cases, “living with another girl” (along with a handsome insurance payout) is the primary motive. So much for my pseudosociological theorizing. Snooky continues: “Usually male criminal minds have more guts to run to another country. A single lady would find trouble, attract the wrong attention. We’ve got a lot of army bases here, and retirees from the service. It’s normal to see an old white guy in the provinces with a family. But for a female American white girl and a local male guy? I haven’t seen that—unfortunately! Hahahahaha!”
So the Philippines is a good place to die if you fit a certain profile. I apparently don’t cut it.
Back to Medina, the “drowned” swimmer from Luzon. How did Bong investigate?
“The police report looked legit, and it said he was with two male companions. Medina was drunk, but the other two weren’t. How long would it take for those two guys to notice he was gone? So definitely the other two are co-conspirators. It turns out one of the guys is Medina’s godson.”
“So did he cooperate with you? Or did he try to cover up for his godfather?”
“When I arrived to interview him, I introduced myself. ‘Hi, I’m Mr. Bong from Manila. I’m here to investigate the death of Eduardo Medina. I believe you are his godson.’ You can see from the surprise on his face, ‘How did you know?!’ They are not prepared. They’re only focused on the local problem.”
No one expects Mr. Bong’s inquisition. This reminds me of something Mike said last night about how there’s actually a lot of money in death fraud claims for the investigator himself, because once accessories get tipped off that someone like Bong is nosing around, they will bribe him to write a clean report. My guys, however, would never do such a thing. I think.
Bong continues: “The godson is a bus driver, and I interviewed him in front of the terminal. I asked, ‘Why did you and your godfather go swimming so far north?’ He said, ‘His wife is from there.’ But I knew his wife wasn’t from there. Something suspicious is boiling. I asked him, ‘What’s the name of your godfather’s wife?’ ‘Elsie,’ he said. Again, I know this isn’t her name. ‘What does she do?’ ‘She sells cell phone accessories.’ Then I turn around, and across the street is a cell phone accessories store called Elsie’s Cell Phones. He made it up on the fly! Ha!”
We are all cackling at the ingenuity. I’m waiting for the dramatic coda—which, before delving into the world of death fraud, I would have assumed involved people going to jail, maybe even including the godson as an accessory (to a crime, not a cell phone).
“As an investigator, I had a gut feeling that something was wrong,” Bong says. Gut feelings seem to be a guiding principle in death fraud investigations. Steve Rambam said that most insurance fraud investigations begin in the office, when a claims adjustor intuits something is not right.
Bong continues, “So I filed my report to the insurance company, and they decide. My boss called me up and said, ‘Job well done, but the company doesn’t want to pursue the case.’ So they will get paid in five years, even if a body doesn’t appear.”
It seems crazy: it appears that Medina committed death fraud without even using a body or procuring a fraudulent death certificate like the one I’m waiting on. If he can just sit tight for the next few years, he will collect hundreds of thousands of dollars. This scenario definitely sounds preferable to (and more profitable) than simply disappearing. His case underscores how easy it is for fraudsters to collect a payout because of the tight spot the company is in: it can’t prove that Medina is dead without a body, nor can it prove that he is alive, short of smoking him out. And crazier still, these types of faked death cases rarely make the news in the Philippines. Unlike in the United States and the United Kingdom, where death fakers such as Raymond Roth or John Darwin become tabloid fodder, local Filipino guys who go missing under mysterious circumstances do not attract the same media attention.
“So the Philippines is a great place to die!” I conclude.
“It is!” Snooky says. Bong nods, and bangs his fist on the table. “But it really is. It’s English speaking. We are used to foreigners because we’ve been colonized so many times.”
Bong’s flip phone skitters across the tablecloth as it buzzes. It’s the fixer who is arranging my death certificate. He steps away from the table for a minute. In the interim, Snooky regales me with some colorful tales of working private security with Bong, their other job together. They have been bodyguards for David Beckham, Bill and Melinda Gates, and, most recently, the opposition leader in Malaysia during a six-month campaign—a superdangerous job, because they had to deflect numerous attempts on the candidate’s life. And, trickier still, because you must be licensed to carry guns, knives, and even ammunition in the Muslim country. Their only mode of defense was a ballpoint pen. Snooky gives me a quick demo on how to take out an adversary with a Bic: “Make a slashing X in front of you, to create kind of like a shield! Then—guh!” He makes a stabbing motion, a little too close to my person. “Go for the eyes!” Bong returns to the table and adds a caveat to Snooky’s lesson: “You should also know how to run fast!”
The forger, it turns out, is not impressed with our expedited request, Bong explains.
“ ‘What do you think I am, Superman?!’ he said. You have skipped the line! Very important person, VIP! Hahahaha! He wants to know: How would you like to die?”
“What are my options?”
“A car accident is good. The traffic here is awful.” Well, with my driving, people would believe it. Contrary to the Volkswagen ad, on the road of life there are not passengers and drivers. Rather, there are drivers and those who should be driven. I am terrified of driving—and, more specifically, of dying in a gruesome car accident—because I was in a gnarly one as a teenager. Today, going over fifty miles per hour on a highway gives me heart-constricting anxiety, even when I’m not behind the wheel.
For the first time in all our joking about killing me and creating my own death on paper, I feel a little queasy. Of course, the way I most fear myself dying is the way I am now tempting fate to fake! I’m not so sure I like this anymore.
Locking down my own death certificate looks like it will be surprisingly easy. But what about those dead bodies? Snooky and Bong place some calls to their cop friends, since, sadly, I do not boast the kind of contacts Mike claimed I did. Now we’re playing the waiting game, and time is ticking down. I’m scheduled to leave the country in less than eighteen hours.
“In the olden days, people didn’t even buy a cadaver from the morgue,” Bong says. “They would put a live person inside the coffin and collect contributions for a fake wake. Sometimes they would tell mourners, ‘You can only have a little peek because he died of a contagious disease, so the casket is closed!’ Ha!”
“In Manila, you are allowed to have gambling if you have a wake,” Snooky says. Gambling, while ordinarily illegal in the devoutly Catholic country, finds a convenient loophole in the case of a death. If a family hosts a numbers game or mah-jongg at a wake—but only at a wake—police will turn a blind eye. “So what they do now,” Snooky explains, “is loan a dead body. If a family member dies, they will loan the body all around the community, and everyone gets a percentage.”
“Where else have you seen a wake that lasts two weeks?” Bong asks breathlessly.
“I’m pretty sure the police are also getting paid,” Snooky says. “A cut of the winnings, usually fifteen percent to twenty percent, goes to the family to provide for burial expenses.”
In this scenario, the sin of gambling acts as charity. And organizers go to great lengths to earn a degree of verisimilitude so as not to arouse suspicion from local law enforcement.
“They even rent crying girls!” Bong says. Just as you can with Irish keeners, you can pay local slum dwellers a few pesos to get into character and weep over the coffin.
Since running a weeks-long gambling game can be lucrative, but is rare when you have to wait for someone to actually die, local entrepreneurs find a more creative way to raise money: they purchase unclaimed bodies at an unofficial morgue and host fake wakes. In the Philippines, supplying dearly departed family members for gambling games is the primary purpose of black market morgues—not death fraud for insurance purposes, not to leave behind your family, not to reinvent yourself.
This revelation is the most shocking thus far: while I was initially afraid of broaching the topic of illegal morgues and bodies for sale, it turns out that exchanging money for dead human flesh is a relatively common practice in the Philippines, even something of a cottage industry. I wonder why the Department of Tourism isn’t peddling this unique and authentic experience to foreign visitors. The country’s relationship with death is complex and contradictory. The law of the land is based on Catholic dogma, and gambling doesn’t jibe. But when it comes to creating the appearance of death, manipulating mortality and pulling out all the stops with a show funeral just to gamble, which is the bigger sin? It seems strange that pantomiming a funeral would be kosher, but a card game would not. I suppose it comes down to poverty: if you have a chance to make a few bucks, you can probably rationalize throwing dice over a dead body.
But it’s not just poverty that accounts for the existence of such a market. Lack of adequate governmental resources for proper body disposal is another reason so much death fraud occurs not just in the Philippines but also in other developing nations generally.
The United States, for example, boasts a stunningly comprehensive system for retrieving, storing, and locating the relatives of unclaimed bodies. In the United States, if the stink from a bloated corpse in an hourly motel so offends a neighbor that she calls the cops, the coroner collects the remains and will store them on ice for three to four months. The Public Administrator’s Office attempts to locate next of kin, combing through any personal effects and financial records and reaching out to former employers and neighbors. These administrators act essentially as detectives, tracking down any family who can serve to identify the body. If no one can be located to claim the body after four months, the body will be cremated. Caitlin Doughty, the writer who worked in crematories in Los Angeles, explains: “Sometimes the coroner keeps the jawbone, because once someone is cremated, there’s no identifying them.” This happens more frequently than you would think. In Los Angeles alone, as a result of the city’s large homeless population, the coroner cremates around 1,500 unclaimed bodies each year. The city holds on to the cremains for at least another two years, and often longer. Each December, a cohort of cremains that has passed its expiration for being claimed gets deposited into a mass grave behind the Boyle Heights crematory. Workers in Hazmat suits and masks empty metal boxes and dump ashes into a hole in the ground. The air becomes a thick white cloud of human remains for several hours, until the dust settles. In 2014 the county buried 1,489 unclaimed people it had been storing since 2011. Clerics and community leaders attend the ceremony to see these mysterious mortals off to the next world.
Such an organized infrastructure in the United States makes it difficult to cut through bureaucratic red tape, and the palms of desk workers are not greased easily. But Doughty says that, like their Philippine counterparts, coroners’ offices are still overextended and eager to unload inventory: “If the body has been there for a while, and you show up, like, ‘I’m his third cousin, I want to see him well taken care of!’ they would probably just release it. The idea is that you would take it away and pay for it. The typical fee is three hundred to four hundred dollars for the coroner’s office, and that includes the autopsy. If you want a basic cremation in LA County, it’s about seven hundred to eight hundred dollars. You’re looking at about a thousand dollars total to get the body out of there.” Buying bodies for insurance purposes, or bogus wakes, is not the principal corruption Doughty encountered in the funeral business. “There really aren’t black market morgues, but there are definitely more shady funeral parlors,” she explains. “The organ trade is on the nursing home and hospital side of things, before the bodies get to the funeral parlor.” Those funeral parlors tend to remove skin, tendons, and bones from corpses without family permission and sell them to hospitals for surgeries for thousands of dollars. Different economies, cultures, and health care systems yield different death crimes, it seems.
Bong texts Smith to get an ETA on my death certificate.
“We’re still killing her!” Smith texts back.
In the meantime, Bong makes a few phone calls. He learns that there has been a recent crackdown on black market morgues and even on the regulated, police-affiliated morgues. Just that morning, two boys, ages three and four, were found dead inside a Mercedes with heavily tinted windows in Taguig City in Metro Manila. The boys had been missing for four months. They were brought to a private morgue first. Seeing an opportunity to squeeze some money out of grieving parents, the morgue charged 70,000 pesos (about $1,500) to release the remains to the family, citing a “storage fee.” This isn’t the first time that Manila morgues have been criticized for such unseemly practices. One morgue in the Quezon City district was found illegally harboring the bodies of eighteen to twenty children and selling them to the local medical schools.
The case of the two suffocated boys made national news headlines and left people duly enraged. Bong describes the shoddy quality of the local morgues when the government in Quezon City checked them out in the last round of crackdowns: “Sometimes the cadavers are just stacked in old bathtubs and drums.” And these bodies go cheaply because the morgue is happy to get rid of them.
When I returned to New York, Steve Rambam further contextualized the shady mortuary business: “The government morgues are attached to the police agencies, like the NBI. So if someone gets shot, forensics will examine the body, then it goes to the morgue. If the body is a criminal, no one wants to claim it, especially in the provinces. So it will be left behind. What is a little morgue out in the middle of nowhere going to do with them? Chop them up and bury them in shallow ground? They need a special cooling system. That’s why I’m telling you it won’t cost much, because they want to get rid of them.”
So who are the enterprising brains behind these institutions? Usually it’s a family business that’s been handed down for generations, people with contacts in law enforcement. They will give local police a cut. Proprietors get not only protection from the police for bribes but also a steady stream of capital when police bring in bodies from crime scenes. And then, as with the current crackdown, police know exactly where to make their cursory busts. Again, the snake eats its tail.
According to Bong’s contact, three of the most infamous private morgues in Manila have been shuttered temporarily in the last few days due to the kids-trapped-in-the-car incident. “But in the provinces, you can still get a body, no problem,” Snooky reassures me. The next day, Bong will be appearing on a morning news program as a security expert to give advice on what to do if a kid is locked inside a vehicle. What tips will he dispense? I ask. “Make sure they have plenty of food so they don’t die, ha!” he responds.
Bong’s television contact, incidentally, is his eldest son, who works for the news program based in Manila. Given the dangerous nature of Snooky’s and Bong’s work—bodyguarding, investigating fraud—both men lead quiet home lives, in stark contrast with their high-octane professions.
While we’re waiting for the death certificate (Bong answers his cell phone and shouts in a mix of Tagalog and English, in which I can make out “Greenwood! Greenwood!” Apparently the forger had a question about my surname, which is important to get right), I gain some insight into their personal lives. Snooky is an adrenaline junkie. He has gone skydiving more than 260 times to date and rides motocross on the weekends. This is how he and Bong met twenty years ago, when Snooky joined a motorcycle club that Bong led. They have been partners ever since, although the nature of their relationship is often called into question. At the office, their big boss refers to them as “the two scoundrels,” and their peers call them “the sissy partners.” But the judges they train regularly in self-defense—in case someone on the wrong end of a verdict seeks vengeance—refer to the pair as “the Clean-Bean Connection,” due to Snooky’s Mr. Clean–like shaved head and Bong’s likeness to British actor Rowan Atkinson’s character Mr. Bean.
To what do they attribute the longevity of their relationship? “We don’t fight about money, and we don’t fight about women!” Snooky says. He pulls out his cell phone and shows me pictures of three adorable girls: one infant daughter and a set of nine-year-old twin girls whom he is grooming in his image. Both are ranked nationally in the Philippine martial art kali, and he has been training them to shoot guns since they were four years old. Now one is into artillery, and the other is into archery and knife throwing. “The Little Nikitas,” Bong calls them. He, too, is a father, though his four children are grown up and out of the house. Bong started out working as a bank manager, then worked at the NBI investigating financial crimes, and then went into private security after his retirement.
Snooky and Bong are not their Christian names, though the nicknames’ origins are just as wholesome. Bong is named after a Philippine cartoon from the 1960s that shared his real first name, Perlito, and Snooky had a lot of hiccups as a kid. “The Tagalog word for hiccups is sinok, so that turned into Snooky,” he explains. “It’s a girl’s name, actually. It was good during high school and college because it sounded harmless—”
“The irony!” Bong interjects.
“The irony!” Snooky agrees.
Mr. Clean and Mr. Bean do seem harmless to me, in spite of their cartoonish machismo and the concealed guns they carry. On this day in particular, Snooky is packing four guns, and Bong, three. Unlike in Malaysia, guns are quite legal here. Maybe the Philippines and all its aggressive friendliness has worked its magic on me, but I have felt very safe the entire time I’ve been in the country. Prior to flying in, everyone I knew—especially my best friend from college, who is Filipina American—warned me to be careful. “I know my people, Liz,” she said with resignation. And that was without my having mentioned that the primary goal of this trip (beyond my advertorial assignment) was seeking dead bodies for purchase. Now I’m sitting across from two heavily armed guys who could kill me with a ballpoint pen, waiting to get in a car to drive across Metro Manila to pick up my own death certificate. Given what I’ve learned about corruption and how life is lived here, putting trust in law enforcement—or in these two guys who run interference between the police and the criminals—maybe isn’t the wisest idea. But what can I do now, go barricade myself in my hotel room? At the same time, I wonder how Snooky and Bong perceive me, an American weirdo who really, really wants to know the finer points of pseudocide. Why should they take my word for it that I’m a “writer”? I often have trouble giving my job title with a straight face myself.
I ask them if what I’m doing—inquiring into illegal morgues, fake documents, and unclaimed bodies—is dangerous. They dispel my fears quickly. Nosing into death fraud is a breeze. It is reporting on the government that will get you killed.
“It’s a dynasty here,” Snooky says, referring to the government’s iron-fisted control of the media. This became deadly clear in the Maguindanao massacre in 2009, where at least thirty-two journalists were slain in the small town of Amaptuan because the incumbent mayoral candidate dispatched his security team to kill everyone in the opposition party’s convoy. Fifty-seven people were killed and buried in a mass grave. No one was ever convicted. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the massacre “the single deadliest event for the press since 1992,” when the organization began keeping records of reporters killed in the field. Prior to the massacre, the committee had labeled the Philippines the second most dangerous country for reporters, lagging behind only Iraq. Snooky and Bong also teach a self-defense class for journalists. Some Clean-Bean alumni were reporting the day of the massacre, but made it out alive because they heeded Snooky’s and Bong’s advice to avoid big groups and split off. In spite of such horrors, they both insist that what we’re doing today is safe. So long as we don’t get involved with local politics, we are in the clear.
The anxieties I harbored prior to landing in the Philippines are turning out to be unfounded. I thought I was willfully putting myself into some kind of imminent danger, sniffing around purchasing corpses and ripping off American insurance companies. But it turns out that faking your own death, at least logistically speaking, is not as perilous as it might seem. Before touching down in the Philippines, I’d imagined that organizing the endeavor—sourcing my body, plying the right people, securing the necessary signatures—would make me something of a low-budget Jason Bourne. But my subterfuge is turning out to be as dangerous as Drew Barrymore going undercover as a high school student in Never Been Kissed. I am not trolling the docks, talking to men in long trench coats, or lying on my back on a dirty mattress in a stuffy flophouse with a listless ceiling fan stirring the muggy air while a Dickensian child hustler uses his wits to bring me a body. No, my death fraud is all going down as I sit in the air-conditioned lobby of a multinational chain hotel.
This distinctly unglamorous experience mirrors the revelation about the rampant use of false documents in the Philippines. People aren’t seeking fake IDs so they can be somebody else. They need them for the purely pragmatic and understandable reason of avoiding throwing away several days’ time and wages wading through a labyrinthine bureaucratic process. It’s hardly swashbuckling, but it’s much more relatable. Could it really be this easy? If you know the right people, you can get a trustworthy fixer to hook you up with whatever you need. And how do you find the right people? Pose as a journalist!
But I still have one last question, one I’ve been trying to answer since the beginning: “If your goal is just to get away from your life—not to collect insurance money—is it better to disappear or to fake your death?”
“The main ingredient is the family you leave behind, unless you are a single person,” Snooky says. “Because if a wife or kid is looking for you, chances are they will find you.”
“If you were investigating this type of missing persons case, where a person with no known enemies just vanished one day—how would you do it?” I ask.
“The first thing I would do is check immigration. Did you leave the country? If so, which country? You follow the paper trail, and the investigation starts.”
“How easy is it to travel on a fake passport here?” I ask. Prior to working in private security, Snooky was at the US Embassy. Passports were his specialty.
“If the fake passport comes from a foreign country, then it’s okay. A US passport would work. Unless you’re wanted or on the blacklist, I think you’d be okay. They don’t have that technology at the airports; they don’t scan passports. Manila isn’t the only international airport, though. You’ve got Cebu, Mindanao . . .”
I know what he’s getting at. I flew out of Cebu a few days ago during my prissy press junket. The security was as meticulous as that at a minor league baseball game.
For those who feel a little uneasy trying to pass off an unclaimed provincial Filipino cadaver as your likeness, disappearing might be the way to go. As with Ahearn, Rambam, and everyone else said, it comes down to motivations. Why do you want to leave, and who is looking for you?
Bong’s cell phone skitters across the table. He reads the text: “Your friend is dead.”
It’s time.
We step outside into a wall of hot, gray steam. We walk to the underground parking garage, where Bong has parked his new Mercedes SLK. I climb into the backseat and settle in for our journey to NBI headquarters, where we will pick up Smith and my you-know-what. Since I died in a car accident, I urge Bong to please drive carefully. The two guys in front both crack up, but I really mean it. It’s four o’clock, and Manila rush hour is commencing. Even along the back road shortcuts that Bong takes, every intersection is a bottleneck. We pass fruit stands with women selling dusty bananas, lines of autorickshaws with the drivers napping in their cabs, beggars weaving through the gridlock asking for change. One such beggar approaches the passenger-side window, but Snooky taps his knuckles twice on the glass.
“That means you are part of the syndicate, so they go away,” he explains.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“The beggars are a part of the syndicate, and the syndicate runs the begging. They house them and feed them at night, and they go out begging during the day. They get a little bit of money, and protection. With room and board paid for, the beggars make more than the basic salary earner!”
Even the begging is organized, and even the begging is corrupt.
We pass the hulking concrete Manila Film Center, modeled after the ancient Parthenon and commissioned by then First Lady Imelda Marcos, the profligate, shoe-centric wife of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, for the first Manila International Film Festival in 1982. Urban legend says the place is haunted because of an accident that happened just prior to the structure’s completion. A dozen workers plummeted to their deaths, but, not wanting to delay the film festival, the Steel Butterfly, as she was known, ordered that they pour concrete over the bodies and continue construction.
Soon we pull up in front of another dismal concrete monolith: NBI headquarters. Everything in the Pasay municipality looks like it was built during the Cold War. The neighborhood resembles the plaza and discothèque illustrations from my out-of-date junior high school Spanish textbook. A stocky man in a baseball hat with a chipped front tooth slides into the backseat next to me. This is Smith, who, despite his double-agent status, looks just as unassuming as Bong and Snooky. He is holding a long brown envelope.
“Give it to her!” Snooky yells to the backseat. Smith understands English but prefers to speak Tagalog.
He hands me the package. I undo the clasp and pull out a two-page document. The first page looks like a diploma, with red ribbons bound by gold foil seal and calligraphic flourishes. But my eyes are drawn immediately to the lower right corner, which reads:
NSO CERTIFIED
TRUE COPY OF DEATH CERTIFICATE
ISSUED TO ELIZABETH LOGAN GREENWOOD
“I’m dead!”
“Should we start crying?” asks Snooky.
“We need to hire the crying girls now! We can make some money from your wake, hahahaha!” Bong says.
I flip to the second page, a yellow sheet with the details of my life, and my death.
Elizabeth Logan Greenwood died on July 2 at San Juan de Dios General Hospital in Pasay City. Cause of death: car accident. According to the document before me, I am married, Catholic, and a businesswoman. I managed to tie the knot, convert religions, find a viable career, and die, all within a few hours.
Below my new life story is a grid of boxes with signatures and dates, from the chief of police, the mortician, the doctor, the civil registrar. I’m no investigator, but they look pretty legit to me.
The accompanying police report, on official Philippine National Police letterhead, describes the accident. While the Spanish and Tagalog names of the places where my accident went down are unfamiliar, a few phrases stick out as plain as a recurring nightmare:
Both vehicles suffered severe damages, the driver of the Innova was rushed to the nearby San Juan De Dios Hospital as well as Ms. Greenwood which later proclaimed (DOA) Dead on Arrival.
The relatives of Ms. Greenwood will be notified as soon as the representative of the US Embassy Manila finished their own inquiry on the matter.
All items and belongings of Ms. Greenwood will be forwarded to the US Embassy Manila for safe keeping purposes.
I think back to the questions Rambam and I had concocted for those considering pseudocide. If I’d known then what I know now, I definitely would have inserted a box in that decision tree about one’s ability to look the eternal footman in his eye and snicker. Whether or not one is especially superstitious, seeing the end of one’s life typed out on a police blotter gives one pause.
We are now weaving in and out of traffic, with Smith and me sharing the backseat.
“I have to be very careful driving now!” Bong says. “If we get pulled over, I will say I am rushing you to the hospital. Ha!”
“Hey, do you like seafood?” Snooky yells back to me.
We are on our way to a seafood restaurant for a very late lunch or a very early dinner. I suddenly realize I’m starving. Or am I dying of hunger? I am dying for seafood. Ha!
We pull onto a narrow pier, and the briny funk of the fish market wafts into the car, even with the windows rolled up. The sun is beginning its descent over Manila Bay, casting an orange light over the rows of restaurants. We are the first diners at Papa Don’s. We sit at a round table for eight, though we are only four. We get a round of San Miguel beers, and Snooky orders what seems like one of every item on the menu: grilled lobster with lemon butter sauce; deep-fried squid, shrimp, and crab; seafood soup; tuna belly; pork belly; and steamed rice. When the food arrives, I make the requisite joke: now I’ve died and gone to heaven.
Bong sidles over and explains the finer points of my death certificate. The first page is from the Department of Foreign Affairs, because I am an American. While the certificate itself bears today’s date—July 17—the accident actually took place on July 2. Why the time lapse?
“It takes a few weeks from the time of death to process the paperwork,” Bong explains. “This is very authentic.”
According to the paper, my cousin requested the certificate, and it also states that we live together. “Maybe he’s also my husband?” I offer.
“You even have the funeral permit here!” Bong is very impressed with the forger’s work, maybe even a little proud.
Now that I have my own death certificate, which yesterday wasn’t even an item on my wish list, I have a pressing question.
“Is it illegal to have this?” I ask.
“According to who? Ha!” Bong responds, and all three of them crack up.
I have no idea what this means. All I know is that I have to get on a plane tomorrow and fly to Tokyo and then to New York. If my bag gets searched, as is wont to happen because I arouse suspicion at every turn, I want to know what I should say.
I won’t find out today, though.
Instead, I chat with Smith about his extracurricular job, while Bong translates. It turns out that he takes only a small cut, and sometimes nothing at all. But why would a forger work with someone from the NBI, even given the level of corruption in Manila?
“I want someone in law enforcement watching my back,” Smith says. Bong interjects: “It works both ways, because sometimes we need our fake IDs for investigations, or documents like today.”
All of the papers are authentic, obtained by a mole inside the National Statistics Office who siphons off the documents slowly. Diplomas are the most requested item. He can do a passport with biometrics, but that takes more time and money. None of the documents he produces have come back to bite him yet. My death certificate would usually cost 5,000 pesos, or about $100. Except they are sweet enough to give it to me on the house.
I ask Smith how old he is. He’s fifty-seven, and I can’t believe it because he looks so young.
“Even my face is fake,” he says, to more uproarious laughter.
We eat, and most of the food I am arranging and rearranging on my plate has googly fish eyes staring up at me. I know this place, though charming in its down-home authenticity, will not agree with my delicate gringo stomach. (It doesn’t. I can’t venture too far afield from the commode for two weeks after this.) I had planned on paying for the meal. After the generosity that Snooky, Bong, and company have shown me, it would have been my pleasure. But they don’t let me pay. “We charged it to Mike’s account!” Snooky says. The Department of Tourism might not approve of this illicit window into the Philippines, but what goodwill ambassadors these three guys are. My love for this country is cemented yet again.
We walk out of the restaurant, and the pier is now packed. A young father and mother walk into Papa Don’s with their infant baby. Outside a boy is skinning fish into a bucket. Two men are laughing. The sky over the bay is streaked with purple and orange, and the smog from rush-hour traffic creates a colorful parachute over our heads. There would be so much to miss about this life.
I will say good-bye to Snooky and Bong. I will pack my bag, wrapping my death certificate carefully in plastic and placing it nonchalantly between a few glossy Department of Tourism promo magazines (“It’s More Fun in the Philippines!”) in my backpack. I will wake up in a few hours and take a taxi down a deserted highway to the airport. I will go to the ticket counter and customs, and get on the plane. I will travel with a declaration of my death in my backpack. I will go through security in Manila, Tokyo, and New York. On paper, I am already dead. But a part of me has never felt more alive.
