The Al Capone solution

By: Conrado de Quiros

Philippine Daily Inquirer

 1share21 20

The Philippine National Police’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group has charged Mike Arroyo with plunder in the Office of the Ombudsman. That has its upside and downside.

The upside is fairly clear. First off, it’s about time someone filed a case against one of the First Couple. There has been a plethora of exposés against them, ranging from grand larceny to even grander electoral fraud, but until now no legal action has been taken against them. They have been tried largely before the court of public opinion. That is not to say that the court of public opinion is lesser compared to the court of law—in this country it is often higher. Unfortunately, it carries no sanction. Unlike in other countries, where the corrupt are looked upon with such scorn that they are compelled to self-destruct to spare their families the shame, here the corrupt are dismissed with text jokes and invited to become the baptismal or marriage sponsors of one’s children. Certainly, public opinion does not carry the legal sanction of jail.

The CIDG’s case does.

Second, the CIDG has included in its charge the police officials involved in the scam, including former Interior Secretary Ronaldo Puno. About time too they cleaned up the snake pit that is the police. The AFP at least is reformable, the PNP is not, or looks past it. You know what they say: We have the fastest police response time to crime; when a crime happens, the police are already there. That’s not really a joke.

As to Puno, why is this guy still running around free? If I recall right, he was the one who stormed the Makati City Hall some years ago with policemen and soldiers to oust Jejomar Binay as mayor. When Binay was an elected public official and Puno’s boss was not.  Puno’s reason? Binay was corrupt. Well, Binay was not in the business of passing off ukay-ukay helicopters as new.

About time somebody did something about him, too.

Third, this is one case where small is beautiful. Mike Arroyo does not lack for prosecutable offenses, some more monstrous than others. Even in the simple case of theft, he can be sued for far bigger scams than this. Of course, the sale of three choppers, two of them used, for P104.5 million is a big deal too. Most of us have never seen a million in one blow in our lifetimes, let alone more than a hundred million. But compare that, for example, to the ZTE deal where Benjamin Abalos was willing to give Romy Neri P200 million just to approve the contract—imagine what the First Couple would have gotten—and that looks like loose change.

But that’s the killer. The CIDG may not know it, but their charge takes on a subtle subtext, one that has tremendous cultural reverberations. It strikes at the pit of the Pinoy psyche. That subtext is: There is nothing too small, or too petty, for the not very first and not very gentlemanly first gentleman to let pass. The Tagalog puts it better: “Walang pinalampas.”

Fabulous sums are an abstraction for Filipinos, small sums are not. And though P104.5 million is by no means small, it is more visible than the sums involved in the bigger scams. And it comes with the very visible form of second-hand helicopters. And it comes with the valuation, “walang pinalampas.”

It gives whole new meanings to scraggly greed.

But there’s a downside here too.

The CIDG’s case looks every bit like an Al Capone solution. Al Capone, of course, was the mobster the US government pinned down for tax evasion in lieu of far graver crimes, which included the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. The reason for it being that it was infinitely easier to prove than the other crimes. That seems to be the logic in the case of the helicopter scam. It’s a lot easier to prove than electoral fraud or the NBN.

Two things however about the Al Capone case: First is that the United States puts some of its best intelligence and legal minds in its Internal Revenue Service. Fighting tax evasion is a top priority of the US government, along with counterfeiting, both tax evasion and counterfeiting being regarded as threats to national security. And second is that the US treats tax evasion as a serious crime, quite unlike here where we regard it as a national pastime. Only two things are inevitable in America: death and taxes. Al Capone got 11 years, in great part in Alcatraz, and got out of it a sick and broken man.

Which raises the question: Do we have the same bright boys in the CIDG to make the charges stick? The lawyer of former PNP Director General Jesus Verzosa might not have been whistling in the dark when he enthused that the charges were a “welcome relief,” adding: “At least now, we shall be dealing with the rules of court, evidence and basic rudiments of fair play.”

Mike Arroyo has himself been claiming that government’s case rests solely on the accusations of Archibald Po, an unsavory character “with a questionable background.” Of course, he forgets that his wife became president because of something worse: the accusations of Chavit Singson whom Estelito Mendoza depicted as the most untrustworthy person on earth. But armed with a de campanilla lawyer and bribable judges, there are no limits to what the most shadowy of characters can do.

That puts an immense burden on the CIDG to make its charge stick. Of course, even if it loses this case, the government can go on and charge Mike Arroyo with other, far graver, things. But this is a flashpoint. It is not merely that losing this will set a dangerous precedent, it is that it will bolster Arroyo’s claim that he is being persecuted if he is prosecuted for other things after government fails in this. The principle of, “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again” may be a good attitude in life, but it is not a good attitude in law—or at least in trying to put someone behind bars.

Makakalampas pa rin ba ’yung walang pinalampas?

Abangan.