If intrusive politicos don’t have their way, the PNP can pull out all cops serving as their personal bodyguards. Then like decent businessmen they’d have to hire private VIP security. Actually it’d be better for them. Personal security men — real ones, not private army types — invariably are better trained and truly loyal. So unlike bodyguard-cops who are assigned to a politico only because of blood ties or no superior can stand them.
Progressive F.O.R.C.E. Concepts has been training and supplying private bodyguards for over a decade. “We don’t train our men so much as to kill an attacker than to protect a subject,” chief instructor Brian Hartman stresses. The philosophy behind the firm, with a branch at Clark Field, is to continually develop ways to better secure clients. “None of our training is final,” Hartman says. “For every old threat situation we think of new ways to secure, and then we predict new situations and find solutions too, in a never ending process.”
Tony Newman, director for Pacific operations, is reluctant to admit it. But PFC is reputed to have among its clients Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer; Turner Broadcasting’s Phil Kent and David Levy; and the Las Vegas gaming billionaire couple Steve and Elaine Wynn. “You will notice a good bodyguard only because he wants you to, as a deterrent,” says Newman, “otherwise he must be unobtrusive for the client’s comfort.” Newman, like Hartman, has had stints in Special Forces. Together they have custom-trained US and European lawmen in combat tactics, as well as airline pilots for anti-terrorist actions.
Real estate developer and pistol champion Jose Luis “Sel” Yulo, PFC’s local partner, is also reluctant to disclose Filipino clients. But among them are a mall owner, a telecoms bigwig, and a shipping magnate. Since starting Philippine operations last July, they’ve also trained Australian and California SWAT units. Yulo provided PFC with a seven-hectare training complex at Clark, near the Mabalacat gate. It has 15 firing ranges for different firefight situations, fitness and endurance courses, and barracks.
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Uh-oh, they’ve assigned the probe of Ted Failon’s wife’s suicide to NBI special agent Arnel Dalumpines. That means they’re up to no good, and don’t mean what they say. Interior Sec. Ronaldo Puno tried to assure the public that they’d undo the bumbling of Quezon City cops. That’s why, he said, they moved the case to “an agency that has never been involved in similar controversy.” Yet they gave it to a sub who specializes in manipulating big cases. Ted must be warned: Dalumpines is a gofer of Justice Sec. Raul Gonzalez, who has prejudged that Trina’s death was no suicide. They’re out to harass Ted for being so critical of admin graft and bungling. Gonzalez already did so twice last week; he will do worse now that the case is in a minion’s hands. They have many ways to make life hard for Ted, perhaps as a lesson to all critics. At the very least they can protract the probe while leaking nasty tidbits to the press, thru Gonzalez’s PR man whom ABS-CBN had fired for abuses.
Dalumpines was the same agent who “investigated” the concocted theft of the ZTE contract. They had contrived the “theft” two months after the April 2007 signing to evade disclosing the shady contents. Dalumpines went through the motions of flying to China and grilling a Filipino attaché who had handled the papers. For good measure, he announced that “that columnist” must have been in on the supposed theft “because he knows too much” about the deal. That was during an interview on my radio show, in which he kept stumbling on such basic questions as how many copies were there and if the four other contracts signed simultaneously in Hainan were also stolen. In the end he closed the case with no clear conclusions.
Dalumpines was also assigned recently to “probe” the bribery to weaken the Alabang Boys drug case. By then, however, Gonzalez already had cleared the five implicated prosecutors and one undersecretary. Dalumpines couldn’t contradict the prejudgment. More so, Gonzalez’s denial of two case fixers in his office named in congressional hearings. So Dalumpines expectedly saw, heard, spoke no evil. But true to form, he threatened with charges of obstructing justice the very narc major who had blown the whistle on the bribery but who doubted his probity. It had to take an independent three-man commission to undo Dalumpines’s lies. The six officials were suspended; one’s bank deposits were frozen for money laundering.
Dalumpines’s first move in the Failon suicide was to summon Ted’s businessman-friend Delfin Lee. This is proof that he’s acting on Gonzalez’s spiteful bidding. It was Gonzalez who first maliciously stated that Lee had helped Ted move the bloodied Trina from the bed to the bathroom. The justice secretary had called a press con last week to announce that he had received an anonymous SMS to that effect, and so had dispatched NBI agents to Ted’s house. A day before, Gonzalez also issued a hold-departure on Ted, supposedly on request of an unnamed in-law.
Former justice secretary Franklin Drilon said Gonzalez should refrain from making biased statements since he’d be reviewing the obstruction of justice raps that cops were filing against Ted and housemates. Too, a man of Gonzalez’s position (the justice secretary is a member of the Cabinet cluster on national security) must be circumspect about blindly believing just any SMS he gets. But then, Gonzalez has a not-so-hidden agenda to malign Ted.
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E-mail: jariusbondoc@workmail.com