Guess who's stealing stolen pirated DVDs?

I was reading last Sunday's Entertainment section of The Freeman, which headlined an interesting story on my good friend, Edu Manzano who apparently has been receiving death threats due to his position as Chairman of the Optical Media Board (OMB). Indeed, this type of work entails stopping illegal business from flourishing and whenever we see illegal business, people do not want to stop; hence, a quick fix is to threaten those who threaten their very existence.

You might want to know why I count Edu as a good friend. Actually I knew him a long time ago, in the days when he was still courting soon-to-be superstar Vilma Santos. I was helping Regal Films with their on-location shooting for the movie, "Yakapin mo ako, Matapang na Lakaki" starting of course, Vilma Santos! Edu was not yet a star and he was literally "stalking" Vilma. He finally had the courage to ask me to allow him during the shooting in our disco "The Brass Circuit". I took Edu inside and yes, he had a long chat with Vilma in the disco and the rest is history!

Of course, I haven't seen Edu for some time now, but when I wrote something about video piracy in the Philippine Star, which was both good and bad for him, he finally called me on my cellphone and asking me if I still remembered him. Well, he repeated the story that I'm writing to you now, that it was one of the most unforgettable time of his life. Since then, we've been texting each other especially about his anti-film piracy campaign.

Yesterday, I got a call from Edu who asked me to write this incident, which he emailed to me because he wanted our authorities in Cebu to be alert to what happened at the Maharlika Village, Taguig City last July 28, 2006. As the report goes, his operatives seized six boxes, 30 sacks and 10 pieces of pirated DVD films with an estimated street value of P335,000. But they got more than they bargained for. With that haul, they also found six jewel cases containing one sachet of crystalline substance, 230 live M-16 ammunition and two hand grenades.

What OMB operatives have seen is exactly what we've known a long time ago. When one goes into an illegal business you can bet that covers anything that quick money can buy or sell. So the owner of that house in Taguig City was not only a video pirate, he was also a drug pusher or user and a gunrunner rolled into one! What was disturbing in that raid was that, the boxes they seized all carried a Cebu address, which of course we are not printing here, but is hopefully under surveillance by intelligence authorities. For sure, the Cebu and Manila pirates are networking amongst themselves!

Chairman Edu also sent me the incident report by Dean B. Perez, Head of the OMB's Inspection Unit about the raid they conducted in Cebu last July 21, 2006 along the sidewalks of Osmeña Blvd and the Cebu Market Center, where they seized some 97 sacks of VCD and DVD pirated video films. What I found disturbing in that report was that there seems to be no control at the PRO-7 Camp Osmeña. Let me reprint that portion of the incident report.

"We immediately went to PRO-7 Camp Osmeña for assessment and regroup ourselves to our next target. When we arrived inside the Camp I estimated the seized items at around 90 to 97 sacks but during our inventory, I notice at the PRO-7 that some of the PNP and civilian employees/personnel in the premises who saw the cargo truck, blatantly stole copies of DVDs//VCDs even in the presence of their officers and three television crew from ABS-CBN."

Honestly speaking, I wasn't a bit surprised to hear that even in the PRO-7 this would happen. Too many of our policemen think that we are playing cat and mouse games against film pirates. Like the traders (notice that I didn't tag them as Muslim?) who are in the business of Film Piracy, they don't believe that this is a crime at all. It is just another business. But shame on the officers of the PRO-7 for tolerating such unruly behavior before the cameramen of ABS-CBN. Stealing stolen property is still stealing!

Twenty years ago, I was also in charge of the Cebu end of the Anti-Film Piracy Council and we conducted a raid in one of the residences near T-Padilla (those were the days of the Betamax and VHS). We found an illegal firearm stashed among the pirated tapes. The owner pleaded with me not to slap him with a criminal offense for having an unlicensed firearm and the Manila police who conducted the raid on behalf of the Videogram Regulatory Board (VRB) which preceded the OMB took pity on the pirate and only slapped charges against him on the illegal tapes. Like what we said, when one turns to illegal business, there's no stopping them from doing worse!

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