Erap should be in jail / Tulfo bares all about Ping

I’m just about sick of all this mountebankery that Joseph Ejercito Estrada should be entitled to house arrest, considering the dignity of his former office, its Gothic hold on the citizenry, the majesty of power at the very top. Nuts to that. The excuse this time – brazenly lofted by Estrada lawyer Rene Saguisag, who else? – is that "the Estradas (Erap and Jingoy) should be allowed to spend some time at home to look at their records to prepare for the pre-trial and trial, to be stipulated as to dates and time."

Look at their records at their Polk St. residence in Greenhills? And pee and de-fecate in its marbled toilets?

What Erap and Jinggoy should be looking at are prison bars. No less and no more than any other prisoner in the land, or the overwhelming bulk of prisoners in other lands. If they are sick and this justifies their continued stay at the Veterans Memorial Medical Center, so are other prisoners by the tens of thousands. In city, municipal and national penitentiaries. I know of prisoners by the hundreds coughing blood, doubling up with abdominal and respiratorial pain, their lungs shot, sputum spilled like filaments in the air, their insides crawling with all sorts of viruses, packed like sardines in jail, their bodies wracked by disease, queuing up starting five in the morning for a smelly drop-dead toilet infected by bacteria. There are roaches everywhere.

Yet these prisoners have no immediate access to doctors and nurses. Air-conditioned hospital rooms with suites. They are not allowed any kind of leave to go to medical specialists. In the worst cases, they lie there and they die there.

Why should the Estradas be given any special privilege? What’s special about them? The law knows no or allows no hierarchy for the criminal or the accused criminal. The Tower of London, the Bastille, Treblinka, Sing-Sing, Alcatraz had fallen royalty or prominentoes lodged in their prisons, men and women of previous renown and high distinction. But once they were jailed, they put on prison uniform, and bade goodbye to an outside world they once inhabited with aplomb and all the luxuries they could afford. That is what prison is for. Immediate punishment and isolation from society against which crimes have been committed. Otherwise, society as an institution perishes. Crime has to be punished.

Ask Slobodan Milosevich. Ask Antonio Noriega. Ask Choon doo-Huan and Roe Tae Woo. Ask Kakuei Tanaka. In reverse, ask Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela. Ask Mahatma Gandhi. Ask Ninoy Aquino. Ask Jesus Christ.

Rightly or wrongly, all were clamped into prison with the least or no amenities. Slobo deserves what he is getting today for he was the Butcher of the Balkans, the Ethnic Cleanser with malevolent eyes. Choon and Roe plundered the treasury of South Korea and paid dearly for it. Tanaka accepted bribes from Lockheed Corp. for which he was jailed four years. Havel’s only crime was a defiant fist against communist tyranny. Mandela spent 27 years in prison with hard labor for defying apartheid. The Mahatma stirred all of India against British colonialism. Ninoy was in isolation for seven years and seven months for no crime at all except that he told the dictatorship to go to hell. Jesus Christ was history’s greatest prisoner.

And who is this Joseph Estrada and his son Jinggoy to tell us they do not deserve prison at all? And should be sent back to their mansion in Greenhills? Ye gods!

Sirs, you are nobodies today. Time and tide have consigned you to oblivion. Your time has long passed. You are ordinary felons. History owes you nothing. The republic owes you nothing. It is you who have committed – according to the charges – great wrongs against society. You must atone. You must kneel down and seek forgiveness. You must walk on your knees on broken glass, while reciting the Psalms. But what do you do? What do your lawyers do? You would have us believe you are absolutely innocent, that Luis Chavit Singson never existed, that Clarissa Ocampo and the others never existed – or they told lies – that you have been unjustly crucified by the media.

You invoke the law, and yet you are deathly afraid of the law. Because if the law really takes its course, you know the evidence is more than enough to strip you naked and feed you to the wolves. So you stall, you lie and you prevaricate, you file dozens of motions to delay, interminably delay. But finally you have been arraigned before a judge who is a poet at the same time – we are told – he considers the law a thunderbolt to fling at you when the time comes.

When the time comes, your last resort is the Supreme Court. If not the Supreme Court, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The same High Court that lowered the boom on TV coverage of the trial – an insane decision brokered by reptilia – will be the court that could reverse a conviction by the Sandiganbayan. Or, of course, GMA, the diminutive Madonna of the Forgiving Countenance who favors house arrest, will or could pardon you. Win-win? That’s what you think.

* * *

The second part of today’s column is a toast to courage, to a colleague in journalism who’ll probably go down in journalism’s annals as the man who stood up to Panfilo (Ping) Lacson and exposed him – in his own words – as a ruthless, coldblooded, bestial killer. It takes a lot of guts to do that. And for my money, Ramon Tulfo richly deserves the croix de guerre for sheer, raw courage above and beyond the call of duty. In his open letter to Lacson, Tulfo plunges the blade deep: "You, too, are as corrupt as, if not even more corrupt than other PNP officers… I strongly believe – having known you as I do from way back – that you masterminded it (abduction and killing of publicist Bubby Dacer.) I also believe you had something to do with the disappearance of Edgar Bentain."

This has the ring of Emile Zola’s J’accuse and like J’accuse, should be reprinted in the hundreds of thousands of copies as it was in January 1898 when Zola accused the military of unlawfully convicting Dreyfus for crimes he never committed. Well, Tulfo has accused Lacson of a shocking slew of crimes, crimes all the more sickening (if true) because Lacson headed the Philippine National Police and the PAOCTF (Presidential Anti-Organize Crime Task force). Both were supposed to blanket the citizenry with security and both under the aegis of Lacson – as Tulfo avers and so do many others – instead stuck long daggers into the belly of society.

"You have become a monster, Ping, and people should know," Tulfo states in his Open Letter to Lacson.

"You have become callous after seeing human lives wasted in the name of justice, your brand of justice. Your callousness toward killing criminals has extended over to killing even innocent people. For how else can you justify the ‘salvaging’ of Bubby Dacer, his driver Emmanuel Corbito and Bentain?… As I write this letter, I feel a lump in my throat. In the back of my mind is the realization that someday there would be an attempt on my life. I have prepared for that time, Ping."

That lump in the throat I have felt since the night of November 20-21 when five armed criminals struck at my residence, hogtied and blindfolded everybody, and threatened to kill me on the spot. I knew why they came. I had been writing very critical, strongly-worded columns against some men strongly entrenched in power, who had committed high crime. After that, every now and then, they broke into my house, cut off my telephone lines and disabled my computer, to remind me they were still around and could get me any time. I simply ignored them.

Tulfo, relentless, accuses Ping Lacson of stealing a Patek Philippe wristwatch, expensive as all get-out, from the wrist of a prisoner "that your men had executed."

The coup de grace of that Open Letter is delivered with the fine, coruscating pen of Feodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment). Tulfo says that Lacson wooed and won "a very pretty woman", Alice, wife of an MISG detainee. Several months after the husband was released from detention, Tulfo writes, "he was run over by a truck. Somebody deliberately ran over him. And where is Alice now? I understand she is now Mrs. Panfilo Lacson, Ping."

That was Tulfo’s envoi – and what an envoi it is, maddeningly romantic as it is macabre.

As far as I can gather and analyze, Ramon Tulfo wrote his Open Letter to Ping Lacson because he already had the goods on him. For one investigator on top of the case or cases against Ping Lacson is former PNP chief Roberto Lastimoso. A PMA sponsor of Tulfo’s PMA membership. Remember him? He was GOMA in the ledger of Luis Chavit Singson. He sought to expose Lacson at a time Lacson, according to Tulfo, "held Erap by the neck." So Goma was out as PNP chief, and Lacson was in with a vengeance.

Mon Tulfo, brother journalist, I stand bareheaded in the wind.