Splitting P27 B in jueteng take

Going by jueteng exposés, it would seem all of Luzon is infested with the illegal numbers game. Yet believe it or not, 12 of its 27 provinces are jueteng-free: Batanes, Kalinga, Apayao, Ifugao, Mountain Province, Aurora, Romblon, Mindoro Occidental, Palawan, Marinduque, Catanduanes, Masbate. Not that there are no vice lords or politician-police shields in the dozen. Other gambling forms thrive: video-karera (horserace), tupada (illicit cockfight), or the easy Last-2 that plays on official lotto draws or final score of professional basketball matches. In his study, "The Truth About Jueteng," retired police colonel Wally Sombero says "townsfolk in these provinces simply do not know the mechanics."

By contrast, jueteng has been in place in the 15 others since the 1800s. It has bred networks of financiers, cabos (supervisors), cobradors (collectors), rebisadors (odds makers), bancas (draw managers), protectors, bagmen and fixers. Feeding the hundreds of thousands of assorted racketeers are millions of daily bettors who, Sombero notes, employ little skill and lots of superstition to hit that jackpot combination.

The aim is to bet on any two numbers from 1 to 37. A bettor chooses these from imagined signs on doorposts or comic strips or dreams, or from memorable dates. Or he may "calculate" the odds, as in it would likely take months for today’s winning pair to come up anew. Unknown to him, the jackpot depends purely on luck or the financier’s whim, Sombero reveals. Skill comes only by way of cutting deals with the cobrador, like a weekly paki or rolled bets made not with cash but on word of honor.

Bets can be as low as 25¢, all the way to how much cash is rustled up or paki is negotiated, sometimes with a home appliance as collateral. Every P1 wins P900, so a mere 25¢ can fetch P225. There’s a plum payout of P1,800 for every P1-wager on pompiang, just one number that rarely may be drawn twice. Winnings depend on how much one bets.

A typical jueteng draw has a transparent bottle in which the first 37 Bingo chips are placed. A banca draws the numbers as cabos watch. After the first chip is drawn, it is put back in the bottle for a possible pompiang. A second chip is drawn. The two numbers make up the winning combination of bola suerte (chance draw), held twice or thrice a day. (People in remote areas tell time by the cobrador’s rounds: 10 a.m. for the noon draw, 1 p.m. for the afternoon draw, 4 p.m. for the final draw.)

There is a second type of draw, bola diskarte, once a day, in which the financier dictates the winning combination. No draw is actually made. The cobradors just turn in all the betting lists, so the rebisador can derive which combination has the least number of bets. It’s a marketing ploy, Sombero writes. From the least-betted combination, the financier chooses a winner who is deemed likely to herald to the barrio his good fortune. It’s a cheating tool too, with the rebisador tasked to determine which combination has the least amount of bets. That combination is chosen to win a few measly pesos in jackpot, while the financier rakes in the rest of the bets.

Sombero says Luzon’s jueteng volume is P75 million a day – over P2 billion a month, or P27 billion a year. The loot is shared 65:35. Bulk goes to the local financier as profits, salaries of bancas and rebisadors, and payments to winners. The balance is for overhead: protection by national and local officials and police, fixer fees, and commissions of cabos and cobradors. This means that close to P26 million a day (P800 million a month, P10 billion a year) in grease money goes around. Not to mention the P49 million a day (P1.2 billion a month, P17 billion a year) that poor folk are cheated of. All that dirty money is called laban (splitting).

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Read the body language in this latest caper of wiretapped and altered cell phone conversations of President Arroyo.

There’s ex-President Erap Estrada, fuming denial that his mainstream Opposition is responsible for the illegal wiretap. Across town, however, his disbarred lawyer Alan Paguia gleefully was distributing two more taped wiretaps, in addition to two that Press Sec. Ignacio Bunye earlier had released to forestall a destabilization scheme. So much for that excuse of being too busy raising ducks in rest-house arrest to be plotting a coup.

And there’s Sen. Ping Lacson of a smaller Opposition faction, baying that Bunye be indicted for treason in possessing CDs of the wiretaps. Yet he was mum about Paguia who had even admitted to annotating his new set of wiretaps. Lacson ignores the fact that Bunye was acting on behalf of the victim, Ms Arroyo, and thus was not playing traitor. Laws draw from commonsense. A victim of planted evidence, say shabu, has all the right to show it as proof of the frame-up. But a political foe who puts forth illegal evidence derived from illegal acts is a more likely suspect in the crime.

Who could have wiretapped the highest official of the land? Erap might recall that Lacson, as chief of his Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force in 1998-99, had acquired three high-tech gadgets capable of simultaneous eavesdropping not just on land lines but also digitalized cell calls. This was stated by Lacson’s men during a Senate inquiry. None of the units was turned over to the new officers after Erap resigned in Jan. 2001. In June that year PNP Gen. Reynaldo Berroya raided a shop in San Juan and recovered one of the units being repaired prior to sale. On learning of the raid, all Lacson could utter was why Berroya was operating in Manila when he was at that time chief for Central Luzon.

Now, Lacson was the first to pronounce that the wiretapped caller of Ms Arroyo is a political aide named Edgar Ruado.

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