Come out of hiding

Sen. Panfilo Lacson should make up his mind. Does he want to clear his name, or does he want to evade arrest?

He can’t have both. His Senate colleagues should stop trying to intervene in judicial matters by demanding a reinvestigation of his case even without the presentation of new evidence for the defense.

Lawmakers should set the example in upholding the law and dispelling perceptions that there are two types of justice in this country: one for VIPs and the other for the hoi polloi.

The Court of Appeals has already rejected Ping Lacson’s petition to quash his arrest warrant. The best that he can hope for is not a big helping hand from the old boys’ club in Congress – this case has nothing to do with legislation – but a detention cell of his own instead of being lumped together with other inmates after his arrest.

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In the time of Jose Pidal, Lacson had every reason to worry about being arrested for any offense. He had made powerful enemies in the previous administration.

As a former top cop, Lacson sent many criminals to prison. Behind bars, he would have to keep looking over his shoulder and would not get a good night’s sleep.

It’s a safe bet that he would have been worried in particular about a fellow police officer he had sent to prison for ransom kidnapping: Reynaldo Berroya, the man who recruited him into what was originally called the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission (PACC).

Lacson would later eclipse Berroya in the PACC and in the heart of their boss, then vice president Joseph Estrada.

Berroya served time at the national penitentiary for the kidnapping of drug trafficker Jack Chou. Berroya was freed after his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court – on a technicality, his critics like to emphasize. He was recruited into the Arroyo administration, where he served mostly in the Department of Transportation and Communications. Berroya was still with the DOTC when the arrest warrant for Lacson was issued.

It was no surprise that one day Lacson did not return from an overseas trip, as the town buzzed about the issuance of a warrant for his arrest in connection with the kidnapping, torture and murder of Salvador “Bubby” Dacer and the publicist’s driver Emmanuel Corbito.

The brutal twin murder case would not allow Lacson to post bail. He knows it, and he has said in an interview that he would rather die than be arrested.

This indicates that Lacson is more interested in avoiding arrest than clearing his name. Is this really what he wants?

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President Noynoy Aquino is a Lacson ally, and has in fact recruited some of the fugitive’s former aides into the new government. So Lacson can no longer claim that he can’t expect a fair trial if he surfaces.

If he is finally put behind bars, he can claim threats to his life in demanding to be detained alone in a cell.

Flight usually reinforces perceptions of guilt. It is no different in Lacson’s case.

That perception was not created by Berroya or the Arroyo administration. From the moment members of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force (PAOCTF, renamed from PACC) were implicated in the twin murders, suspicion immediately focused on Lacson. And not just because he has figured directly in several sensational cases of executing kidnappers, bank robbers and other thugs. Lacson used to joke about the acronym PACC, pronouncing it the Pinoy way – PAK PAK PAK! – to make it sound like gunshots. He was a cop who took pride in “neutralizing” criminals.

Dacer and Corbito, however, were no kidnappers or bank robbers. No personal motive for the murders has been attributed to any of the key PAOCTF members implicated in the gruesome crime.

Those former PAOCTF officers were, like Lacson, among the finest operatives in the Philippine National Police (PNP). Too bad their law enforcement skills were used – if the indictments are accurate – for twisted purposes and their promising careers destroyed.

Murdering a high-profile publicist together with his driver is not done by an elite unit like the PAOCTF on a whim, with teams operating independently; it needs top-level clearance.

If Lacson surfaces and faces the music, he might actually convince the public that he was not directly involved in the crime. But only if he can point to someone else who might have, at the very least, known about the operation and given the green light, sort of, for it.

Lacson had earlier said he was already out of the loop in the PAOCTF when Dacer and Corbito were waylaid in November 2000 at the boundary of Manila and Makati.

PAOCTF operations were being kept from him, Lacson said, apparently because he had lost the confidence of higher-ups.

At the time, Lacson was concurrently PNP chief, and the only higher-up who could have lost confidence in him was the president himself, Estrada. But Erap has repeatedly denied involvement in the murders, and Lacson has never really implicated Erap directly.

The story that has been going around, largely unchanged in the past decade, is that a civilian presumed a government official was so angry with Dacer the official wanted the publicist dead. It was this civilian who, according to the buzz, green-lighted the operation to the PAOCTF.

The story goes that when the foul deed was done, it was reported to the official who supposedly wanted Dacer dead. The official reportedly turned his back without acknowledging the report, so no one really knows if he heard the story. So the official can claim innocence.

After the operation, could the PAOCTF officers still have kept their direct boss Lacson in the dark? Or did he know but kept his silence, which would implicate him in the crime?

Lacson can argue his case – but only in court.

For this he has to surface.