property where the Marcoses eventually settled for the long run in their exile in Hawaii. Through his Ancor Holdings, N.V., one of his several shell corporation registered in the Netherlands Antilles and set up with Roland Gapud’s help, he fronted for the purchase and ownership of three adjacent condominiums at the Olympic Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, for Imelda. The walls of the three units were torn down to form a gigantic L-shaped apartment creating a panoramic view of the midtown Manhattan skyline. This was where the overflow of Imelda’s French Impressionist masterpieces was stored when they could no longer fit in the East 66th Street townhouse.
Despite his very obvious close ties to the Marcoses, Floirendo was strangely cleared of illegal amassment of wealth by the PCGG.
If Marcos had his United Labs and Jose Yao-Campos, Imelda had her Pascual Laboratories and Dr. Eleuterio “Teyet” Pascual. Pascual Labs was not so big as United Labs is or was, and while Imelda never muscled in on Pascual Labs in shares or otherwise as it was a family-owned enterprise, nonetheless, she partook of the largesse and profits it generated for its chief owner, Teyet Pascual.
Among those who benefited from floating in the orbit of Imelda’s glow were the Enriquez-Panlilio families (of Plaza/Sulo Hotel & Restaurant fame) who supplied food for most of Imelda’s events and extravaganzas. With that proximity to power and trust, came access to lucrative contracts. They expanded their hotel empire to the larger Silahis International and are also said to have partnered and fronted for Imelda in the Plaza International Hotel (now the Sofitel); and set up the Puerta Azul luxury resort in Ternate, Cavite, at the expense of disrupting and dislocating the lives of many poor families. They were also into real estate and shipping.
Perhaps the most controversial, egregious and blatantly obeisant of the Imelda cronies were the Tantocos (Bienvenido and Gliceria) of the Rustan’s Department Store empire. After her relatives, the sleaziest of the Imelda sycophants was “Glecy,” as she was better known in Manila circles.
Bienvenido and Glecy Tantoco built Rustan’s from a small gift shop in their garage at their old home in San Marcelino Street to the premier retailer in the Philippines in about twenty years’ time, before ShoeMart edged them into the number two spot.
Like the other cronies, the Tantocos squeezed special deals and legislation from their masters (for which they evaded a lot of taxes) just to line their pockets. For example, a 1974 presidential decree gave them a lucrative franchise to operate tourist duty-free shops at international airports, hotels, and choice commercial centers, in addition to Rustan’s. The decree per-mitted the Tantocos to import luxury goods without paying import taxes.
They were also active in gold, copper, and precious ore mining ventures, one of which was Eagle Mining Corp. When Bienvenido was president of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila (which his wife helped stock with the second-rate and bargain-basement Italian “masterpieces”), more than half of the museum’s original endowment of $595,000 was “loaned” to Eagle Mining. That loan was never repaid.
Glecy was an extremely active partner in Imelda’s secret New York real estate adventures. She was also notorious in Madison Avenue art galleries and at times was known as Imelda’s 5%-er advance-rear guard flunkie. She vetted art galleries for Imelda. When the galleries got word that Glecy and/or Imelda was stopping by, they knew to raise prices 15-25% more because Glecy drove a hard bargain. They knew she would insist on a 10% discount on the sale price and still extract an extra 5% agent’s commission.
In order to shield Imelda’s participation in the sale, Glecy would have the purchases billed either to Rustan’s or to Galerie Bleu, her store’s poster gallery. In many purchases, Tantoco could very well have made an extra million dollars or two in the dozen years she fronted for Imelda.
Eventually, the Tantocos faced a rather messy and ignominious end to their high-flying diplomatic lifestyle. Where Bienvenido once held the Philip-pine ambassadorship to the Vatican, he ended up facing terrorism charges in Italy. Glecy was actually arrested in Rome, and the couple eventually became international fugitives.
When his ambassadorship was recalled in April, 1986, he tried to seek political asylum. But on the sly, he also was buying and hoarding arms for a possible armed rebellion return in Manila. Instead of being considered for political asylum, the Italian carabinieri raided his exclusive Via Attica estate, where the ex-envoy and five bodyguards were arrested. The police found an arsenal of weapons one does not normally associate with a diplomat. There had been rumors that it was oldest Marcos daughter, Imee, who squealed on the Tantocos to the Italian authorities.
Glecy, meanwhile, was making damage of her own in the Americas. While her husband was fighting for his reputation in Rome, Glecy was still doing the bidding of her puppeteers. In late April, 1986, she traveled to Panama and had Declarations of Trust on the transfer of the New York properties to Adnan Khashoggi backdated to August, 1985, before the March, 1986, US court order freezing the Marcoses’ assets. And then she continued on to West Germany to take receipt of $25 million cash that Khashoggi withdrew from one of the Marcos-connected bank accounts in Geneva.
After a year of skulking in countries where she couldn’t be extradited, and with her husband under house arrest in Rome, Glecy tried to sneak into Rome International that same August, 1987, but she was arrested on arrival at the airport and spent seventy days in jail. Pleading a “bad heart,” she posted 100 million lira bail (about US$100,000 at the time—chump change for people who were probably worth $80 million at the time), plus, I’m sure, a few well-placed bribes to the prison guards. Three days later, the couple fled Italy. It seems they ended up in Morocco together with other Marcos refugees, like daughter Imee. With the right connections, they eventually returned to Manila, without facing any jail time there.
The Marcoses and Tantocos were thick as thieves to the end, because the Marcoses eventually stayed at the Tantoco manse in Honolulu for the longest time of their exile. In all the glowing write-ups of what a retailing pioneer the couple were, nowhere are their Marcos adventures, profiteering, being diplomatic pirates, mentioned. As particularly rapacious accomplices of the Thieving Tandem, their deplorable deeds should not be forgotten.
The cronies ruled and sat on the boards of at least twenty to fifty companies —although many of those were mere entities that existed on paper and had “headquarters” in P.O. boxes of tax-haven states like Liechtenstein, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands and Panama. A number of the cronies still have pending cases with Philippine courts (page 124) and per the Forbes’ 2015 List of the 40 Richest Filipinos, eight who had connections with the Marcos regime and profited from that relationship, retain their positions on the list even after the PCGG tried to go after them:
Rank and Name:
#2 – Lucio Tan
#20 – Roberto Ongpin
#23 – Eduardo Cojuangco
#24 – Beatrice Campos (widow of Jose Yao)
#31 – Bienvenido Tantoco
#32 – Manuel Zamora
#47 – Juliette Romualdez (widow of Kokoy).
The Generals
Ferdinand and Imelda courted and rewarded as many generals and colonels of the Armed Forces as they could. While each had their own following, Marcos had the upper hand in support in the Armed Forces. To neutralize her husband’s advantage in placing many of his own province-mates in key positions, Imelda and her brother Kokoy courted the generals’ wives instead. They took pains to learn who could control or at least exert undue influence on their husbands when it came time to choose. But Imelda’s plans backfired when she “ordered” a number of generals to perform a skit in drag during birthday celebrations for husband Ferdinand in 1973. They resented the utterly strange “request” and never forgot the humiliation.
Sources:
Manapat, Ricardo, Some Are Smarter than Others, Aletheia Publications, New York, 1991
http://articles.latimes.com/1988-03-23/news/mn-1864_1_united-states