Filipinos Miss the Jackpot

LUBAO, Philippines — If these were normal times in the Philippines, you would know exactly what to do the moment you woke up after dreaming about a priest.

You’d pick number 29 in that day’s jueteng draw.

When it comes to jueteng (pronounced “who-way-teng”), the underground numbers game that is the national obsession, every dream has a meaning, every vision a corresponding number to bet on.

See a car first thing in the morning? Bet 4. A spider? Choose 22.

But these days, the jueteng code of dream interpretation and number selection is of no use to anyone. With Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo facing possible impeachment over allegations that she used jueteng payoffs for her 2004 reelection campaign, the gambling lords have decided to cease operations -- at least until the heat subsides.

Now you can’t place a bet. The cobradors, the ant army of collectors who trawl the towns and cities taking wagers door-to-door, sit idle. “No jueteng” is the lament in the billiards shacks and the karaoke bars boasting female “guest relations officers” that line the main street of Lubao, Arroyo’s marshy hometown about 50 miles north of Manila.

“It stopped around the time the pope died,” said Helen Aguilar, 41, from her stall in Lubao’s public market, where smoke rises from barbecues piled with local delicacies: chicken heads marinated in ketchup, vinegar and brown sugar; cubes of congealed beef blood; chopped pig snouts with chiles (the provincial specialty).

Behind her at the Philippine government’s lottery outlet, people line up to buy tickets, which, judging by the grumbling, are no substitute for jueteng. Nobody knows anybody who ever won anything in the lotto.

The Philippines is awash in gambling options. Children are reared learning how to bet. The spider fights that were the rage for previous generations of kids (now a fading pastime, at least in the big cities) have been replaced by betting on the final digits of pro basketball scores. As adults, they still chase the jackpot dreams, from legalized gambling in casinos and cockfights to card games held at outdoor wakes to illegal pursuits such as jueteng.

But it is jueteng that is king in this country of 84 million, 45% of whom live on less than $1 a day. Hope of a windfall at jueteng is their oxygen, the daily fix for people perpetually in search of the Big Score.

The game’s massive popularity rides on convenience and simplicity. Pick a combination of two numbers between 1 and 37, hand a few pesos over to a cobrador, and you’ve got a shot at real money. Jueteng pays off 45 to 1.

With up to three draws a day, this simple racket offers poor Filipinos an almost constant opportunity to gamble.

But as it has expanded in reach in the last 10 years, critics say jueteng has become a cancer on the country, sucking income from the poor and creating a minority of extremely rich gambling lords and a hierarchy of cops and politicians paid to look the other way.

Jueteng lords are alleged to have enough money and power to fix national elections. Enough to put presidents in power. Enough to take them out.

Four years ago, allegations that then-President Joseph Estrada accepted jueteng payola led to a civilian and military uprising that toppled him and propelled Arroyo, his vice president, into his post. The most damaging testimony against Estrada, who remains under house arrest outside Manila, came from a self-acknowledged jueteng lord who was then, and still is, a provincial governor.

Now Arroyo faces a jueteng scandal, with opposition lawmakers, including Estrada’s still-bitter allies, pushing for a Senate impeachment trial. Digs Dilangalen, Estrada’s spokesman, smiled wryly. “This,” he said, “is what you call karma.”

Separate Senate hearings into jueteng operations have produced witnesses claiming that Arroyo’s husband, Mike, son Mikey and brother-in-law Iggy all accepted payments from gambling figures. In late June, Mike and Mikey Arroyo left the Philippines for “voluntary exile” in California. They said they wanted to avoid being a distraction to the president, who denies the allegations.

Accusations of jueteng corruption are so pervasive that many say the only way to root it out is to legalize the game. Meanwhile, there is an anguished cry from impoverished neighborhoods that jueteng‘s hiatus is causing further economic pain among poorer Filipinos.

“Yes, we have a jueteng problem in this country,” Father Rudolfo de Guzman said as he stood in the 17th century nave of the time-ravaged but beautiful Church of St. Augustine of Lubao. “The problem right now is we have no jueteng.”

De Guzman sees no reason to stop the game. It takes hope away from those who need a chance to dream, he said.

“If you have casinos for the rich, why not jueteng for the poor? Lots of people in this town depend on jueteng. It’s a way of life here. The people who run it are very nice people.

“And now I’ve got people coming to me saying they cannot pay their bills. They cannot,” he said, his indignation showing, “send their children to school.”

*

Boy Mayor had it all. A big house. Seven cars. A private army.

Jueteng had made Mayor a big shot in the Philippines, the kind of guy who boasts that he can buy off politicians or have a troublesome cop transferred to another district. “The cops were afraid of me,” he said with a slight smile.

For almost a decade, Mayor (pronounced “my-orr”) financed one of the biggest jueteng rackets in the Philippines, with nearly 400 cobradors working for him. He started his career as a provincial construction contractor and, by the mid-1990s, he says, had figured out which politicians and military officers he needed to pay off to win contracts.

That’s privileged and valuable knowledge in the Philippines, which made him a natural for financing jueteng.

“The biggest need in jueteng is for protection, and I knew the people who could give it,” he said.

Over the next decade, Mayor ran a gambling operation that eventually brought in more than $50,000 a day. He paid 40% of it out in protection money, and an additional 20% in winnings. He says he knows which politicians were taking a cut and using it to finance campaigns. He knows the bank accounts they used to launder the money. He knows which local reporters were on the take.

“I have a PhD in jueteng,” he joked.

But somewhere along the way, Mayor said, he became troubled by the social damage his racket was causing. Two years ago, he began to consider getting out.

“I’m a religious man, and I watched people praying to God for their numbers to come in,” Mayor said. “It touched me. I’ve seen bank employees steal from the bank to finance jueteng. Men who lost their own businesses. Jueteng is like a drug. It ruins families.”

Mayor’s crisis of conscience didn’t impress everybody. When murmurs started that he might turn against the hand that fed him, Mayor got death threats. One night last spring, a mob surrounded his home.

Enter the archbishop.

Since Estrada’s fall in 2001, Oscar Cruz, the archbishop of Dagupan City, 120 miles north of Manila, had been waging a low-level campaign to expose the evils of jueteng. By this year, he had finally convinced sympathetic senators to hold hearings into the game’s links to politicians.

But he still needed a witness who knew the intricacies of the networks, someone who could name names.

So when Cruz got a frantic phone call from a friend saying that Mayor was in danger, he dispatched several priests to escort him through the crowd and into his embrace. Mayor has been sleeping in church safe houses ever since.

“The people knew Mayor was fed up, knew he was going to turn,” said the feisty 70-year-old archbishop. “So I sent the priests to fetch him. He is under my protection now.”

And who is protecting Mayor’s wife and three grown children who remained in the family home?

“Oh, I placed a call to the local police. Told them I didn’t want anything to happen to them,” Cruz said with a cackle.

“You know,” he added with a smile, “we bishops are a little Mafia too.”

*

The dead man is dressed in a white suit that almost matches his cream-colored coffin, and there is a glare off his translucent skin from the white lights that shine a halo on his casket as it sits on a Manila sidewalk. A bowl of nuts sits on top of the coffin, sharing space with a framed picture of Rolando Sumbillo at the wheel of the bus he drove for a living until he collapsed and died in July. He was 61.

It’s past midnight but Sumbillo’s family and friends are still up and gambling all around him. There are three tables with card games going, and three young men are flipping coins on a wooden board.

Gambling in the streets is illegal in the Philippines, but there are exceptions. It is allowed at wakes, traditionally to help the bereaved families stay awake through the mourning period.

It’s a loophole that a dedicated 21st century gambler can drive a hearse through. For a fee to the right undertaker in Manila, you can “rent” a body (usually one with no family) and thereby organize a legal outdoor card game.

Sumbillo’s wake is now entering its seventh day.

“My father didn’t play cards,” says the dead man’s daughter Liwayway, 35, when asked if the turnout and the betting would have meant something to him. “He liked to bet on the horses.”

Sumbillo had his fatal heart attack on his way home from the track.

For the gambler, the Philippines is a buffet. Imelda Marcos opened the nation’s first legal casino in 1975, shutting down the dozens of illegal facilities that had operated for decades. There are now dozens of licensed casinos, most competing to attract the new wave of Chinese tourists. For locals unconcerned about having plush carpeting underfoot, there are the cockfights, completely legal and held every weekend in dank arenas.

“Everywhere you go in this country, people are gambling,” says Pepito Fernandez, sitting ringside in the air-conditioned New Las Pinas City Cockpit under posters declaring “Mayor Nene Aguilar Welcomes You.” A few feet away, two roosters are pecking each other’s heads to a pulp. Fernandez has 500 pesos (about $9) riding on which will survive.

But the wager is small beans to Fernandez, who has made betting on cockfighting a career, not just a pastime.

“All my kids are professionals because of this,” he says, gesturing at the ring and the 700 or so hollering gamblers. “One’s an accountant, one’s a hotel executive, the other’s a physical therapist. Two are in the [United] States.”

He sits back in his seat, clearly proud.

“All my earnings come from here,” he says, smiling widely.

*

In June, Boy Mayor testified before the Senate. He named names. One was Sandra Cam, a woman whose bank account had been used, she later testified when called to the hearings, to launder jueteng money for Mike Arroyo.

“When Sandra came out,” Cruz said admiringly, “she came out boxing.”

Cam and Mayor’s testimony on jueteng has placed the first family directly in the archbishop’s line of fire.

President Arroyo has denied any links to jueteng lords. (She does acknowledge having met Lilia Pineda, the wife of Rudolfo “Bong” Pineda, who is known as the jueteng king of Lubao.)

But in a remarkable passage in her state of the union address last month, Arroyo called for a complete overhaul of the Philippine Constitution, saying that the “political system has degenerated to the extent that it is difficult for anyone to make any headway yet keep his hands clean.”

Still, the jueteng noose may be tightening around Arroyo. In Manila last week, a former government official told reporters he was present at a meeting at Arroyo’s house where Lilia Pineda distributed cash-filled envelopes to several of the country’s election commissioners, four months before the 2004 election. The aide, Michael Angelo Zuce, said Arroyo was in the house at the time.

Arroyo responded with a statement saying she “did not witness any distribution of bribes.”

So, for the second time in four years, the fate of a presidency rests upon its ties to an illegal lottery that mostly raids the pockets of the poor, creating an irresistible tide of cash that has the country in its grip.

“Everybody thinks jueteng is not a big deal because it looks like a small game,” Mayor said. “It’s small bets. But in all, it’s billions [of pesos].”

The fall of Estrada and Arroyo’s rise can be explained as a turf war over jueteng profits between political factions, he said.

“Jueteng is our equivalent of narco-politics,” said Cruz, referring to the corruption that swirls around drug trafficking in countries such as Colombia. “The jueteng lords are running a parallel government here. We thought, after what happened to Estrada, that this woman would learn a lesson,” Cruz said of Arroyo. “Instead, it became bigger.”

The archbishop said he had received numerous “suggestions” to drop his inquiry. An offer of 10 million pesos (about $180,000) was made “to improve my lifestyle for a lifetime,” he said with a laugh.

But then he sighed.

“Everything in the Philippines is for sale,” he said.

*

Times special correspondent Sol Vanzi contributed to this report.