The diary of Mary Ong

Interviews with Channel 2. An award for courage from the women’s group Gabriela, which also gives her a purple rose pin representing battered women. Visiting an office, she is mobbed for pictures and even her autograph. She is followed everywhere she goes by a cameraman of GMA 7’S Probe Team.

These days Mary Ong stays in a cramped safehouse with her two sons and can’t go anywhere without at least two bodyguards. But the change in her life since testifying before the Senate has been "overwhelming" for her, she says, and more than makes up for the inconvenience of being a heavily guarded government witness. 

For two years she had tried to tell her story to anyone who would care to listen. She got the contact numbers of all the senators but no one was interested. Her story started coming out in the press in trickles, and formal charges were filed against several of the people she accused of wrongdoing. 

But the man she was up against, Panfilo Lacson, was as popular and powerful as his political patron, Joseph Estrada. Few people were interested in a Chinese Filipina with stories about drug deals, kidnapping and murder involving Lacson. When then Sen. Teofisto Guingona dubbed her "Mata Hari" and finally prepared to present her before the Senate last year, Luis "Chavit" Singson exploded his bombshell and Mary Ong was forgotten.

* * *

Now everyone is all ears. Mary Ong, 45-year-old single mother of two, is the first credible witness presented so far by the military in its crusade against Lacson (Danny Devnani is a witness against Erap). I think the testimony of former police Narcotics Group commander Reynaldo Acop merely bolstered Ong’s credibility. They may argue about whether Ong merely infiltrated a Hong Kong triad or was in fact a member of the criminal gang, but there’s no disagreement over the fact that she was an insider.

Her ill-fated affair with Superintendent John Campos, a police officer who’s not a gentleman, has become a sideshow, but it was a key factor in her decision to come out with her story. Campos was handsome, Ong recalls – as handsome as Lacson. It was Campos who called her Rosebud as a term of endearment. She loved him even after he started beating her up, she says, but put her foot down when he turned on her son.

Now she has cast aside half of her life. Ong, who has a degree in economics and a master’s in business administration from the University of Santo Tomas, spent about 20 years with the so-called Binondo central bank.

"See these?" she says, pointing to varicose veins in her arms. "I got them from carrying all those dollars."

She draws a chart to show the set-up in the Binondo central bank. Ong loves doing charts. She also loves putting everything down in writing. As she tells her story to STAR editors, she keeps writing down names, dates, amounts on bond paper. She has kept a diary since her youth, she says. If she can’t get original documents, she photocopies or photographs them or copies them in a computer.

These records have given coherence to her testimony. When she can’t remember certain details, she consults her diary.

* * *

For a while she was worried about the reaction of the Tsinoy community to her revelations. She notes that Tsinoys, especially women, traditionally don’t come out in public with the accusations she has made.

Ong, whose father arrived in the Philippines from China in his teens, had earlier bucked tradition by marrying a Filipino doctor. The marriage produced two sons but didn’t last. Her parents naturally also did not approve of Campos, another Filipino, but relented, probably after seeing how smitten she was. 

She became an undercover agent and was called Lily in Hong Kong. When she was short-changed by her police handlers, she wrote the details down in her diary.

Ong does not deny some of the accusations hurled against her. She recalls running a small-scale bookie operation for "ending" from her Parañaque home because she was so short of cash. The house has been foreclosed.

She runs her rough fingers, nails cut to the quick, across my arm. "Feel the calluses? That’s from all the hardships I went through," she says.

She is also ready to face the estafa cases against her. "It’s just estafa," she says. Her enemies, she points out, are guilty of capital offenses including kidnapping and murder. "I don’t think even hell will accept them."

* * *

Ong says Tsinoys have been supportive of her since she testified before the Senate. She wants "to open the minds of the people to what I know" about the crime problem, she says, and she’s elated that she seems to be succeeding.

I ask her about her security. Does she live in fear?

"I’m safe," she replies, smiling. "What about you?"