He Lives Like King but Dies like Pauper

 By Mortz C. Ortigoza

In a huddle with a seasoned former mayor, he told me that an ex- city mayor, after several attempts to reclaim his post, lives now in a financial distress.

The former Hizzoner and his favorite contractor for nine years live in an economic agony.

The misery of the veteran politician was aggravated by his addiction to casinos while the contractor – one of the biggest in the province before – could not even pay the two million pesos he promised to my former mayor friend when the latter interceded to sell a land to a government agency.

A poor man waits for his death.

“Wala na kasi ang mga mayors na kaibigan niya kaya naghihirap na siya ngayon,” the former Hizzoner told me.

Material wealth is not absolute. These people I mentioned live the life of opulence before where they threw monies to anybody as if there would be no tomorrow.

***

I remembered Pangasinan’s Jueteng Lord Bong See (real name: Bong Cayabyab) of San Carlos City.

When I was new in the media profession I was in the city covering an event of the mayor there when I saw village chiefs (Kapitans in the vernacular) and media men milling and ingratiating with Bong See at the rear part of the public gym.

“Who’s that white Chinese looking guy,” I asked veteran broadcaster Harold Barcelona and a friend of the Gambling Lord.

“He is that Bong See I told you”, Harold told me about See who would just give wads of bills at a drop of a hat after conversing with those folks he rubbed elbow.

The gambling czar who was a Lothario told me in the early 2010s he gave as an average twenty thousand pesos to a beauty contestant of Manila in a tryst in a hotel in Dagupan City.

“Meron pa nga nirito sa akin maganda raw. Noong pumasok ako sa hotel di ko type. Ginawa ko binigyan ko ng biente mil (P20,000) at binigay ko na lang sa body guard ko,” he told me with a chuckle.

He was an accountancy undergraduate who was jailed in the national penitentiary in Muntinlupa. Upon his released from the slammer he became the gambling boss of the forty- four towns and four cities province.

He gave generously to solicitors like police brass, politicians, reporters, and the indigents.

Bong See’s house near the justice hall of the 86 barangays’ San Carlos was secured by armed body guards.

Media men regularly go there to get their allowance to buy their silence.

Harold told me that when Bong See and the Mayor of the city occupied the second floor of the Warehouse Club in Dagupan City for booze with nursing students of one of the universities in the city, the gambling lord and the Hizzoner quaffed an expensive Remy Martin’s champagne-cognac. Their female friends were wide eyed in the endless delivery by the waiters of finger foods (pulutan) and San Miguel Beer Lights on their tables till the wee hours while the body guards of the duo at the corners watch the surrounding.

***

When the power in the province got a new gambling czar, life for Bong See went south. He died not only of ailment but his family’s incapacity to bring him in a good hospital and provide him with effective medicines.

The late Guardian Newspaper Editor Lorna Hermogeno –whose genius was mistaken for lunacy – of San Carlos City told me: Mortz, Bong See lived like a King but died liked a Pauper.

To rephrase a word of my English speaking (yes Virginia, media men of yore speak with each other Shakespeare’s language unlike the present crop) friend Lorna – a magna cum laude at the University of Pangasinan – for those average I.Q readers of this column, she cited the gambling czar lived like a king but died like a very poor person.

His misfortune could be similar with the former seasoned city mayor and his contractor I mentioned earlier: They lost their connection to the power that be.