Destroying evidence of fraud at Customs

When Customs chief Napoleon Morales torched a cargo of smuggled diseased pork from China two Fridays ago, he thought that would be the end of it. He was wrong. Local hog raisers and NGOs that normally witness the disposal of contraband howled that Morales had destroyed not illegal meat but legal evidence. For, the incinerated stuff was but the remainder of the confiscated shipment after men directly under Morales allegedly stole and resold the bulk. With it burnt, gone forever is the proof of the heist.

The above supposedly is part of a report to Malacañang about events that have been hitting the news lately. What happens next is unsure. Even the author of the report, retired police general and now Customs Police boss Nestorio Gualberto, is reluctant to acknowledge it for fear of reprisal. At Customs, one of the dirtiest government agencies, the guilty often get away and whistleblowers fall by the wayside. Insiders murmur that the burning of the contraband, or what’s left of it, was in fact "on orders from higher authorities."

"They destroyed vital evidence," cried Roger Santos, president of the Citizens Anti-Crime Assistance Group. "Now we have no way of knowing whether the ‘hot meat’ had been stolen." It was a crude way of squelching any more reports of the theft and public sale of pork contaminated with foot-and-mouth disease. An officer of the Agriculture Suppliers Association of the Philippines, which exposed the theft, questioned Morales’s authority to burn. The original plan was to bury the spoiled meat in a Pampanga dump, just that mayors had objected because it might spread disease. The Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), in charge of discarding the meat, had not given clearance for incineration.

Morales’s burning of the contraband was but the latest of his strange moves on the case. On Nov. 14 he formed a special committee to probe the Customs Police for trucking the meat back to Manila after the Pampanga mayors stopped the dumping. In his memo, Morales said the Customs cops "forcibly" brought back the four refrigerated 40-foot container vans. Yet from official reports on the incident, nobody ever accused the policemen of using force to return the contraband to the Customs compound. They in fact had helped to verify in the field that the vans contained only a tenth of the original confiscated items. Still, lawyers Roberto Francis Marcon, Rolando Tacub and Alexander Arcilla were to determine guilt. Arcilla is the head of Morales’s anti-smuggling task force, a superfluous unit through which the contraband from China had sneaked past in Aug.

The discovery of the theft was like an action-suspense movie. Only, the villains were true to life. The vans had arrived on Aug. 25 as "frozen mackerel," consigned to Asia Golden Ark Marketing with SM Estrada as broker. On inspection a week later, BAI quarantine veterinarians noted that a few crates of mackerel only served to cover the true contents: pork packed in unmarked boxes of 5 kilos each. Since each van contained roughly 25,000 kilos and each kilo was worth P60, the contraband was valued at P6 million. Reynaldo Quilang, head of inspectors, closed the vans and pasted each with official seals numbered 3505-3508. The vans were then moved to the Sigma Storage, a private warehouser at the Manila harbor. On Sept 15 the Customs formally confiscated the shipment since all frozen poultry and meat from China are banned. And on Oct. 25 Morales approved the proposal of Manila harbor district collector Horacio Suansing to bury the mackerel and pork. A detailed plan had been drafted by Facundo Bitanga, head of auctions and cargo disposal, which listed the contractor as McBro’s Trading and Garbage Collection Services in Sta. Rita, Pampanga.

With the dumping set for Nov. 7, Quilang requested Sigma to let his men in for final inspection as standard procedure. Sigma refused; Customs officials suddenly delayed the transport to Nov. 8 and then to Nov. 9. In the two days, Quilang accompanied by Customs men again tried to enter the warehouse to inspect, especially since he noticed that his official seals had been replaced with numbers 3527-3529 and 3591. Still Sigma refused. The Customs men, knowing that Sigma was influential, told Quilang to just try to inspect when the vans were opened for dumping.

The convoy proceeded to Pampanga, where it was joined by more quarantine personnel, policemen and reporters. On the road to Sta. Rita, the lead van made a turn for the adjoining town of Guagua. Followed by the rest, it drove into the compound of Queens Steel House, supposedly owned by a friend of the owner of McBro’s. The McBro’s agent said the dumpsite at Sta. Rita was flooded, so he decided to divert to the dried up fishpond of Queens in Guagua. But the police chief and mayor of Guagua had gotten word of the shipment and arrived to stop the dumping. Quilang told Bitanga’s men to assert their plan as approved by Morales. At the same time, he sent a team to Sta. Rita to verify the flooding story, which turned out to be a lie. There was no McBro’s dumpsite in Sta. Rita to begin with, and the mayor there also didn’t like the idea of being used as the Customs garbage bin.

Since it was getting dark, Quilang with the help of the accompanying Customs policemen opened the four vans simultaneously. With the Pampanga officials, policemen and reporters as witnesses, they inventoried the contents: less than a tenth of what they had originally sealed at the port of Manila two months before. The next day the Customs cops oversaw the return of the convoy to Manila with its un-dumped cargo.

Informed of the events, Customs deputy commissioner Celso Templo immediately sensed an inside job. More so since Sigma, which had custody of the confiscated meat when it apparently was stolen, was known to be close to Morales’s chief aides. Templo quickly wrote to the NBI to send over a five-man team to flush out the thieves.

Murmurs at the Customs head office are that Morales resented the NBI presence, but just the same requested for additional agents to sniff around. At any rate, the NBI sleuths immediately turned up some evidence. Among these: that some Customs men had felt left out of the deal and thus squealed to Gualberto’s cops, that the buyer of the stolen stuff was a certain "Bim Mama", and that the remainder was never intended to be buried in Pampanga but resold to makers of longanisa and tocino if not for the to-do.

And then came Morales’s order to investigate the cops, and to burn what was left inside the four vans.

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