Senate decks now clear/ Faces of Lacson, Corpus

The Senate has finally swabbed its decks, Sen. Serge Osmeña has shed off his circus paint as a clown, and now the much-awaited investigation of Sen. Panfilo Lacson can begin. The Senate will rise or fall depending on how it handles the Lacson probe probably by the Blue Ribbon committee chaired by the redoubtable Sen. Joker Arroyo. Is the Senate an Old Boys’ Club and, therefore, an untouchable fraternity of lordly sahibs out to protect each member from the heathen outside its portals? Or is the Senate what it is, the sanctum sanctorum of the republic as mandated by the Constitution, a gathering of great minds, armed to search for truth, nothing but the truth and defend this truth at any cost?

We shall soon know.

Actually, if the Blue Ribbon committee settles down to investigate Senator Lacson, this will be a takeoff of its probe of Luis Chavit Singson whose jueteng bombs eventually exploded the presidency of Joseph Estrada. Jueteng is just a lesser evil removed from drugs in the index exporgatorius list of forbidden use and traffic. Technically called metampethamine hydrochloride (a.k.a. shabu), these drugs have long dogged both Estrada and Lacson. What had long been a whispered scandal has now broken into the clear. In jueteng, the traffic was just in the millions or hundreds of millions of pesos. In drugs, the traffic is in the hundreds of millions of US dollars or – horrors! – even in the billions.

No wonder we couldn’t figure out where the fortune spent for the mansions came from. Not jueteng alone.

This whole drug thing came like a cyclone’s downspout just weeks ago when columnist Ramon Tulfo openly accused Lacson of being a cold-blooded killer, a crook and a criminal who engaged in a series of kidnaps for huge ransom payments, who used the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force (PAOCTF) and his position as PNP chief as a cover to amass ill-gotten wealth, who trafficked in drugs. In Tulfo’s words, Lacson was a "monster" who had to be stopped, a thief who stole a luxury watch from a dead man, who swiped the gorgeously beautiful wife of a detainee, and the latter was conveniently "run over" by a truck, then deep-sixed, never to touch his paramour anymore.

We shall not tarry in gruesome details.

Somehow you knew Tulfo was not alone. In a trice, Col. Victor Corpus came out in the open to dramatically divulge that Lacson together with his wife Alice and even Joseph and Loi Ejercito Estrada allegedly owned laundered accounts in the US, Canada and Hong Kong to the tune of – hold your breath! – $722 million or close to a billion. Mother of mercy! If even only one-tenth of this was true, one-tenth mind you, then your presidency and our police system had gone a long way to sell the Philippines upriver and downriver, three touches of Sodom and four touches of Gomorrah, six touches of Hades.

Lacson of course openly, categorically and even contemptuously denies all these charges.

They have been fabricated, he said, by Colonel Corpus, "the greatest threat to our national security." Corpus, he said, has never really severed his ties with the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army he once joined as a top guerrilla. Lacson broadly hints that behind all these charges could be President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who wants to eliminate him as a rival for the presidency in the 2004 presidential elections. The rumor goes – a rumor stoked to near bonfire proportions by Corpus – that drug money will buy the 2004 elections, billions to be poured, and the Philippines will be another Colombia, every elected official, and yes every judge and fiscal, every barangay captain, in the pocket of this drug Mafia over which allegedly looms the forbidding shadow of Panfilo Lacson.

So now, it’s a face-off between two formidably skilled, redoubtable and towering men in the realm of gladiatorial combat – Lacson and Corpus.

I saw Senator Lacson on Gene Orejana’s On-Line Monday. And I must say it was a brave man who dared appear on that talk show, knowing fully well, even just the phone-in questions and comments would put him on the fire like shish kebab – and they did. Gene may have handled Lacson with kid gloves – he didn’t ask many gut questions having to do with Bubby Dacer, Emmanuel Corbito and Edgar Bentain and yes, Kuratong Baleleng. But what he missed the phone-in flight of verbal balisongs supplied.

But cunning as his performance was, Lacson couldn’t squirm out of two things.

He couldn’t fend off the charge he did wrong and disgraced his position as PNP chief by accepting a cell phone as a gift from one Kim Wong, and whose bills Wong paid, except that Lacson claimed he reimbursed his Chinese-Filipino friend. Lacson said he saw nothing wrong with this. Really? Sir, as police chief you must be as clean as a hound’s tooth and above suspicion like Caesar’s wife. As far as whip around income is concerned, a few columnists including myself are small fry, but we never accept cell phones as gifts, or anything expensive, or anything that could compromise our independence. Now that you are a senator, by golly, Ping, where do you draw the line accepting gifts?

Senator Lacson also pooh-poohed official reports that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, backed by the State Department, confirmed he had dollar deposits in America amounting to about $50 million. Sir, that is not hogwash at all. The FBI and State would never have allowed their names to be used by the Philippine government – in this case, the NBI and Justice Secretary Nani Perez – if the report was hogwash. Swill. A pig’s leavings. I know how secret or confidential cross-country diplomacy works.

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Now let me get to other waters.

Just how much has television enabled us to peer into the character, comportment and personality of the Messrs. Lacson and Corpus? These are my observations. Lacson has an air-blown face with hair brushed sideward which gives him a somewhat boyish, of course youngish look. Until he talks. Then his spectacles come into play, glinting almost ominously like a bespectacled Kenneth Starr. Then you see Lacson’s eyes. They rarely smile. They do not have the three-mile look of emaciated children in the Sahel. They have a room-length look as of a police officer accustomed to deal at arm’s length with prisoners or suspects, the eyes unblinking and imperious, with a lot of menace in them, maybe even a certain ruthlessness. Maybe it comes with the job.

As to Corpus, it’s just amazing he looks the way he looks.

He doesn’t look like a spook at all, which he is as head of ISAFP. I had seen him a long time ago as a young PMA lieutenant and again as an NPA surrenderee. Even when flushed out of the NPA, Corpus smiled quite often, a smile that exuded confidence if not confidence – a certainty he would pull through. Beside him, Jose Maria Sison and the others looked drawn, fully aware they were now captives, the gems of the communist revolution now twitching forlornly at the hands of their military captors, maybe not beaten, but somehow cowed.

Corpus walked briskly, and there was about him a mysterious aura. How could this once young, promising and brilliant lieutenant have led a raid on the PMA armory to share the dreams of Mao Zedong?

Now, in frequent appearances before media, Corpus looked avuncular, nothing sly or slinky on his face, as ever smiling, a very unlikely spook, age beginning to gather on his features like the early falling leaves of autumn. Nothing sinister. Or was Corpus putting on a front, knowing his was a battle of media projection with Ping Lacson? And apparently winning the battle because surveys show at least 70 percent believe him, believe his charges against Lacson. Believe he is the bida, Ping the contra-bida.

But eventually this skirmishing will land in the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee and – very possibly – in our courts of justice.

Here, the battle of personalities will recoil. The evidence on both sides will take front and center of the stage. In a way, I consider thin just as important as the Senate impeachment trial of Joseph Estrada, if not more so. I have a feeling Erap Estrada was just the prancing horse of a multilayered government scandal that had eaten at the vitals of Philippine society.

I have a further feeling that even with Estrada detained and arraigned, the ground beneath shivers with the weight and presence of evil men still to be flushed out in the open, who worked the dark while Erap worked the chandeliered purlieus of Malacañang, entranced the poor, but handled some puppet strings at the end of which criminals on black horses rode in the shadows and the bayous beyond.

Not all of them obeyed Estrada. They had their own ambitions.