Deep throats

E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL

Deep throats
Sunday, 06 05, 2005

After three decades of anonymity and self-enforced silence former FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt has finally owned up to being “Deep Throat,” the informer who led investigative journalists Woodward and Bernstein through the mazes of the paper trail that brought down a president from the White House.

To have been able to keep secret his identity for so long, and for Felt to have been so effective while he remained incognito is one lesson that should be learned by our so-called whistleblowers.

Mawanay. Mahusay. Mary Rosebud. The list could go on. Each of them had stories to tell about the supposedly sinister involvements of many a public figure in our midst. The muck they raked up were good copy for as long as they were credible to the extent that media - and our personal perceptions of the villain of the moment - made them appear to be. For a while, they had their few minutes of fame until they, to paraphrase Shakespeare, reduced themselves to being poor players that strutted upon the stage, and then were heard no more.

Enter Wilfredo Mayor. Will his revelations be another “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”?

But Mayor, it would seem at the moment, is not simply weaving a likely tale. He claims to be knowledgeable about jueteng. He says that he has been sufficiently deep inside the racket that he knows who receives payola and in specific amounts, who the bagmen are, and who the protectors are. He can also describe exactly the circumstances of a meeting between him and the incumbent chief of the Philippine National Police, and what they talked about. He has divulged so many details which only one who has been moving in this shadowy underworld of jueteng could know.

Unlike Woodward and Bernstein’s “Deep Throat,” Mayor has opted to come out in the open this early. With seeming equanimity he faced a Senate hearing and narrated a story whose details must have sounded to some as being harsh and discordant as the sound of boletas being shaken around inside a tambiolo before the two winning numbers come tumbling out. Now, will Mayor come out a winner in this draw? And therein lies Mayor’s problem: his credibility will now be subjected to scrutiny.

One man’s exposé is another man’s demolition. Already, two erstwhile cohorts of Mayor have come out to denounce him as having received five million pesos in exchange for his story. They picture him as a bum, a criminal, incapable of giving out the payola he claims he had been giving. Whether he will weather this counterattack on his credibility can only be answered by the nature of the testimony that he will present in the subsequent investigations.

Mayor will either rise or fall with the kind of corroborative evidence that he will unravel during the investigations. Mayor identified the coddlers and bagmen, and to his credit - which adds up to his credibility - they turned out to be real people, not mere faceless and nameless figments of his imagination. But whether they will eventually be established as culprits is another story, and it remains for Mayor to prove that to the satisfaction of the public.

Mayor, if we are to believe him, was perfectly placed to know all the details of the jueteng racket, as well as the occasional, ostentatious attempts of public officials to “derail” it just to quiet down indignation from some quarters. Information has it that in the last elections he had hoped to become mayor of Daraga, Albay, only to be dumped by his protectors, whom he thought were his political allies. So Mayor has motives both high and low for wanting to get the story out. The high motive could very well be what Stokeley Carmichael has called the law of conscience being higher than the law of government. The low motive might be that Mayor is mad and he wants to get even - for the shabby treatment he got from people whom he thought were his friends.

It's perfectly logical. After all, did we not see a similar scenario during the Estrada impeachment trial?

The credibility of Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal was unsullied notwithstanding his anonymity because Woodward and Bernstein made sure that everything Felt disclosed was true. His anonymity made him believable in the course of the investigations, without any hint that that he had made the disclosure with a political motive. But last week we discovered that Felt had a deeply felt personal motive: he thought he was unjustly passed over for the position that J. Edgar Hoover had vacated. Does this act of getting even - betrayal, to Felt’s associates - make him less of a hero in the eyes of the American public?

When he spilled the boletas, Mayor undoubtedly made himself fair game for demolition. The political motive for singling out a presidential son is not lost on the public, which makes his hotter than a jueteng collector who has welshed on a winning bettor. There’s an enraged group of people of consequence out there, impatient to get at him so they could tar, feather and quarter him - figuratively, I shudder to hope - when he appears again at the Senate.

It will be his turn to belie the accusations that impinge on his credibility. More important than bringing along with him another warm body to substantiate his claims, Mayor would have to come out with more details that relate to his giving out payola. Why, for example, the disparities in the payola given to three congressmen within the same province? Why the measly monthly amount alleged to have been given to the presidential son in return for unhampered jueteng operations in areas where millions are supposed to be grossed on a daily basis?

That Cruz has shepherded Mayor lends a grudging credibility to this latest round in the continuing saga of the nation’s whistleblowers. But that credibility can only be sustained, with the public expectedly riveted to the honesty of Mayor by incontrovertible details only he can supply. Otherwise, the whole sordid affair would be just another tale told by sore losers with sore throats, signifying what the public has known all along but conveniently refused to believe.


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