Mutual annihilation

For several years Joseph Estrada and Panfilo Lacson seemed inseparable.

When Fidel Ramos became president, he inherited two headaches that needed urgent action: the crippling blackouts, which he promptly addressed, and a rash of kidnappings for ransom, which he assigned to a chief crime-buster, his vice president, Joseph Estrada.

Erap not only accepted the challenge but relished the role, and he was a big success. The kidnappings and, later, bank robberies stopped.

Much of that success he owed to the elite police team that Ramos created and which Estrada headed, whose brand of law enforcement would never get the approval of the Commission on Human Rights. The bodies of the bad guys, with several innocent civilians thrown in, piled up. The public, tired of lawlessness and the snail’s pace of Philippine justice, cheered.

Erap’s Presidential Anti-Crime Commission (PACC) initially had as its top enforcer Reynaldo Berroya. But he was later eclipsed — and then sent to prison for kidnapping — by one of his recruits, Panfilo Lacson.

As narrated yesterday by Lacson, Berroya was not the one who introduced him to Estrada. The first encounter, Lacson told the Senate, was when he arrested Erap in San Juan in 1973 for beating up actor Rudy Fernandez in one of those fits of violence that Erap now tries to gloss over in his past.

There are many other episodes in his past that Erap would now want buried forever, as he dreams of regaining the presidency that he lost under the most ignominious circumstances.

But not if Lacson can help it. Lacson is one of the few people who should know where many of the bodies are buried.

His risk in his kamikaze tell-all public speeches is that he could end up implicating himself.

The gain for the public is that many of the dirty secrets that have long been hidden might finally be known. From that knowledge of how power is used and abused at the highest levels of government, reforms could be implemented and the guilty punished.

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Several people who have known Lacson since his days as a member of the Philippine Constabulary-Metrocom Intelligence Service Group told me that he would never turn against his former boss, Erap.

The same people cast doubts on Cezar Mancao’s story of how he allegedly overheard Lacson, as head of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force, giving instructions to PAOCTF officials to take out publicist Salvador “Bubby” Dacer in 2000. Those who know Lacson said it was not the way he operated.

Lacson never tossed the blame to Erap for the murders of Dacer and driver Emmanuel Corbito. Lacson has simply maintained that he was not part of the plan to eliminate Dacer, purportedly code-named Delta.

But I guess every individual can be pushed against the wall. When Mancao testified in court that the former president himself was in on the plot, Erap washed his hands of the crime and said the PAOCTF was under the direct supervision of Lacson.

That apparently prompted Lacson to go on the offensive.

Now he’s dredging up all the skeletons in Erap’s closet, including those that are no longer even secret, such as the jueteng payoffs that contributed to Erap’s impeachment and prosecution.

In the denunciations and counter-denunciations on the Senate floor in the past two days, Lacson is enjoying the upper hand, even if it took him years to hurl his accusations.

He’s not exactly too late the hero, since the object of his campaign — with a promised Part 2 next week — is aiming once again for the nation’s highest office.

Ping Lacson is not seeking the presidency in 2010; he has other problems requiring his full and urgent attention. But he can campaign against an Erap presidency, Take 2.

If Lacson is acting in typical fashion, he is zeroing in only on criminal activities where he has evidence to present, just in case the concerned parties decide to add to his legal woes.

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The cases Lacson raised were hardly new. Mass Media ran stories about those 20 shipping containers full of dressed chicken that were brought in by a notorious smuggler who’s still at it, who has successfully laundered his illegal wealth and now enjoys the protection of the current capo di tutti cappi.

Rice has been smuggled under every administration. Lacson has not yet mentioned the smuggling of sardines ostensibly for relief operations.

What was new, though already rumored, was Lacson’s story about how Alfonso Yuchengco was forced to sell his shares in Philippine Telecommunications Investment Corp. to Metro Pacific, which is headed by businessman Manuel Pangilinan. The Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. Group of Pangilinan has said it maintains cordial relations with the Yuchengcos.

Lacson insinuated that Erap received a commission from the sale after Yuchengco’s son was framed on drug charges in the first months of Erap’s presidency. How deep Yuchengco wants his family dragged into this mess is anybody’s guess.

In the next installment of this drama, Lacson has promised to talk about the first major scandal in Erap’s rise to the presidency: the disappearance of casino worker Edgar Bentain.

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Bentain’s loved ones don’t know whether he is still alive, but Lacson is hinting that the casino worker is dead.

One person with a possible motive to have Bentain eliminated is Erap, who was in a video that the casino worker reportedly passed on to sweepstakes chief Manuel Morato at the height of Erap’s campaign for the presidency in 1998.

That video, as we still remember, showed Erap playing high-stakes poker in the VIP pit of a government-run casino.

Erap should not have worried about the video at all. He still won the presidency by the largest margin ever, despite a campaign against him by the Catholic Church, despite the release of the video, and despite his known drinking and confusion over which of his women and children would join him at Malacañang.

The counter-attack by Erap’s camp yesterday was a dud, with his son, Senator Jinggoy, voicing what they also suspected in 2004, that Lacson was secretly working for the Arroyo administration to destroy the opposition.

There was no real bombshell against Lacson, who truly tried to keep his nose clean when he was a cop when it came to payoffs.

Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago called the battle between the two former allies MAD — mutually assured destruction — and she’s right.