Fantastic plot revealed by incredible official

Bong Villafuerte is suddenly the talk of the town. People invariably are asking why he is executive director of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission, when he reportedly is a jueteng lord. “Isn’t jueteng an organized crime?” is the recurring question in coffee shops and radio shows, letters to the editor and blogs.

Bong’s odd Palace position came to light last weekend, when he went to the press with a fantastic tale. Supposedly he had just unearthed a plot to spring military rebels from jail. Raiding a firing range at Clark Freeport, he claimed to have found six soldiers being trained by a foreigner in sniper and close-quarters combat. The six turned out to be among the Magdalo mutineers of July 2003, he added, aiming to free Sen. Antonio Trillanes and Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim from Camp Crame national police headquarters. All this he learned from a godsend informant, he intoned.

Newsmen were incredulous. More so when, checking with military sources, the Armed Forces spokesman denied any intelligence monitoring of such plot, and the Special Action Force said its detention facility is an impenetrable fortress within a fortress. Trillanes’s lawyer wondered aloud why the senator would try to escape, when all he needs to be rid of coup d’etat raps is cut a deal with Malacañang. “That Villafuerte fellow must either be crazy or high on something,” Trillanes alluded to Bong’s other rumored pastime. But Bong was unstoppable. Two days later he upped the ante, saying the escape plot was part of a bigger conspiracy to assassinate the President. Butch Belgica, Bong’s chief at the PAOCC, echoed his claim. This time higher officials reacted. Armed Forces chief Gen. Alexander Yano said assassination is unlikely. Cabinet Secretary Silvestre Bello added that the info is so raw it shouldn’t be discussed publicly. Sen. Rodolfo Biazon, as ex-military and now defense committee head, said Malacañang had better clarify what its two factotums were saying, or else he’ll stage a full-blown, potentially embarrassing inquiry.

They found more amazing the delicate post Bong is now holding. The PAOCC is the President’s elite arm against kidnapping and other crime syndicates. Attached to it are crack teams from the military, police and NBI. That Belgica, a paroled convict, is now heading it became public only in January. (He had drawn fire for calling Alpha Phi Omega, an international fraternity that includes such members as Bill Clinton and RP’s oldest, a “destructive gang.”) Now it turns out that controversial Bong is Belgica’s right-hand man.

Bong was last prominently in the news in June 2005. Senate witnesses had denounced him as jueteng lord of Camarines Sur, allegedly abetted by his father Luis, congressman and president of Gloria Arroyo’s Kampi party. In at least two earlier congressional investigations during the Aquino and Ramos tenures, Bong was also linked to the illegal numbers racket. In Nov. 2007 the provincial capitol blamed on Bong the rash of replacements of police chiefs diligently raiding vice dens. In July 2008 a tabloid columnist called Bong an “untouchable” who rakes in P5.3 million a day from jueteng. Only last March his own brother Gov. LRay Villafuerte called Bong the corruptor of cops to play blind to worsening vice in Bicol region.

“Malacañang believes that it takes a thief to catch one,” a top radio commentator quipped after a news bulletin on Bong. Jueteng irrefutably is organized felony. Former police superintendent Wally Sombero, in an in-depth report for the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, drew a table of organization of national protectors to provincial, city and municipal financiers, down to barangay, sitio and purok bet collectors. Economist Sixto K. Roxas, in Jueteng-gate: The Parable of a Nation in Crisis, shows how the vice worsens poverty. In Phoenix: Saga of the Lopez Family, Raul Rodrigo traces jueteng’s roots to a governor-granduncle of presidential spouse Mike Arroyo, linked to Bong in the 2005 Senate hearings. In 2006 University of the Philippines economics dean Raul V. Fabella wrote about how vice lords ruin social institutions. Ariestelo Asilo in autobiographical Anak ng Jueteng describes the vice’s community setups. How Bong landed in the President’s anti-organized crime corps, Malacañang couldn’t explain. Spokesmen tried in vain to disavow knowledge of Bong’s clout. News of Bong hit the Senate this week as Minority Leader was criticizing Malacañang’s promotion of soldiers implicated in the 2007 abduction of farmer leader Jonas Burgos. On interpellation Sen. Pia Cayetano noted the admin’s penchant for punishing the good and rewarding the guilty. Bong’s public appearance couldn’t have come at a worst time for Palace troubleshooters. ZTE scam whistleblower Jun Lozada was jailed Thursday on perjury raps, while the admin bigwigs he had exposed in the $329-million graft remain uncharged.

Whether true or not, assassination scenarios tend to picture a President as weak and beleaguered, and turn off needed foreign investors. Bong’s raid may have done just that to New Zealander Tony Newman. The man, a P15-million co-investor with real estate magnate Sel Yulo in a VIP-security firm at Clark, happened to have a run-in with Bong. Yulo recounts that Bong, whose Iraq-bound Blackwater recruits they had refused to train four months ago, had an axe to grind. When Newman turned down Bong’s use of their firing range on Apr. 23rd, the latter threatened to return with big guns. And he did, with PAOCC agents and immigration agents, poking guns and stripping Newman naked. The “assassins” were actually retired navy commandos undergoing training as VIP bodyguards in Afghanistan. Only one of them was a Magdalo mutineer, long discharged but pardoned. All six just needed a job, and were in fact filling out application forms when Bong came a-raiding. Pampanga police hesitated to book them on flimsy claims of terrorism. Still Bong took Newman, with Filipino wife, to Manila for detention allegedly as an illegal alien. (The immigration chief has since released him.) And Bong’s informant turned out to be an Australian whom Yulo and Newman had fired two months ago on money matters, and so wanted to get back at them. Yulo is readying charges of illegal arrest, detention, and theft of equipment and papers. “The only assassination here was against my character,” Yulo laments, “He called me the financier of a criminal plot, when we’re only doing legitimate business.” Incidentally the military and police are tapping Yulo’s firm to train early retirees for gainful work.

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