More to come vs Ping — Rosebud

Describing herself as a "thorn" in the side of Sen. Panfilo Lacson and a "speck of dust" he cannot rub off his eye, former police undercover agent Mary "Rosebud" Ong said yesterday she wasn’t through yet with the senator.

Ong said she had more damning evidence on the alleged criminal activities of Lacson, even as three Senate committees debate whether or not to continue its joint hearings after its two-week recess that starts today.

Ong made the revelation in an interview with The STAR as she tried to refute the charges against her by Lacson and her former boss, Chief Superintendent Reynaldo Acop, former commander of the Philippine National Police (PNP) Narcotics Group.

While she refused to reveal details, Ong said her revelations so far dealt only with drug trafficking, and some senators are interested in hearing the evidence she has on Lacson’s alleged money-laundering activities.

"We will get him (Lacson) on this but we have a gag order so I can’t reveal anything about it," she told The STAR, apparently referring to the money-laundering probe the US government is supposedly conducting on Lacson.

Both Lacson and Acop dismissed Ong as an "incredible" double-agent for a Hong Kong-based international drug syndicate or triad with a string of drug-related and estafa charges against her.

"Ganoon sila, mayayabang (That’s how they are, braggarts)," she told The STAR. "But I’m glad they’re talking because the more they talk, the faster they’ll fall. They’re confirming everything I have said," Ong said.

She noted that during the Senate hearing on Wednesday, Lacson presented a report supposedly written by a Philippine military intelligence official which quoted US officials who supposedly dismissed Ong as a "witness without credibility."

In the late-night talk show on ABS-CBN television Wednesday, Acop also cited the same report and stressed her involvement with the Hong Kong triad and her financial troubles.

"(But) that’s not the real report," said a laughing Ong, citing other instances when Lacson and Acop used documents which her protector, military intelligence chief Col. Victor Corpus, supposedly "floated" to plug leaks in their organization.

When Acop testified before the Senate, he raised issues that were contained in a diskette which, she said, subsequently disappeared but she also claims that that affidavit was another decoy.

"They should be careful because Colonel Corpus is also an experienced intelligence officer," she said of Corpus, who was also once suspected of being a government deep penetration agent in the communist movement.

Ong said she was not surprised by the "demolition job" Lacson and Acop are supposedly conducting and claimed the two are building a criminal case against her to discredit her testimony.

She said the case would likely involve her former boss Ron Abbot, the anti-narcotics chief of the Hong Kong Royal Police who is reportedly a compadre of Lacson and jailed former President Joseph Estrada.

"Ron Abbot may testify for Lacson to discredit me," she claimed.

She said that aside from the demolition job Lacson and Acop are waging against her, they are also preparing to charge that she had smuggled 40 kilograms of shabu into the country.

‘He wants his own triad’

But she denied the charges and dismissed Acop, who hired her as an undercover agent after she served Abbot in the same capacity, as "a man who can no longer distinguish right from wrong."

"He has lost his judgment, his conscience. He wants to control his own triad, his own Mafia," she said. "Siguro may kalawang na ang utak (Maybe his brain is already rusty)."

"But I’m still glad he’s accusing me of those things because the more he talks, the deeper he’ll fall," she said, referring to Acop’s accusations that drug charges were filed against her in 1998 and that she maintained an illegal gambling operation.

Ong explained that the case Acop was referring to had to do with debts that incurred when Acop allegedly failed to pay her her dues and were not drug-related.

She also explained that the illegal gambling operation Acop was trying to link her to was actually a neighborhood numbers game ("ending") based on the final scores of basketball games.

"I had to run a book on ‘ending’ because they (Acop and his men) left me impoverished. That’s the illegal gambling he’s linking me to," she said.

Ong was reacting to the issues Acop raised when he was summoned to the Senate to answer her charges that he was directly involved in the drug trade, re-sold seized narcotics, kidnapped Chinese drug lords and summarily executed them after they paid ransom.

Acop had denied the charges and tried to turn the table on Ong. He admitted that some of Ong’s revelations were true but denied that he and his men were involved in the drug trade.