The Magician’s look-alike hunted by cops

An alleged look-alike of world billiard champion Efren "The Magician" Reyes is now being hunted by the Manila police for allegedly selling four boxes of chemicals worth P300,000, which contained only eight big cans of green peas.

The still unidentified man was reportedly with four others when they convinced the victim, Erlinda Recinto, 57, into buying four boxes of "plasticizer," a supposed raw material for making plastic.

As it turned out, the three-by-six-inch boxes only contained eight cans of green peas.

A resident of Singalong, Manila, Recinto identified the other suspects as Dante Reyes, whom she described as Chinese-looking, a supposed Japanese by the name of Kogi Matsumoto, one Nenita Dayrit and an alleged male engineer. The Reyes look-alike was reportedly the group’s driver.

Recinto said that one of the suspects first expressed interest in buying the piece of land she is selling. Two other "interested buyers," she said, came one after the other offering to buy the property but confided that they have difficulty raising the money due to a raw materials problem in their plastics factory. Recinto said that the first interested buyer later asked her if she could find him a supplier of "plasticizer."

Recinto ended up becoming a middleman for the two groups and having earned a modest profit from the initial transaction amounting to P25,000, she was later induced to purchase four boxes of raw materials worth P300,000 so that she could deliver more to the buyer.

Unfortunately, the seller and the buyer disappeared altogether leaving Recinto with four boxes containing large cans of green peas.