Customs agent implicates cohorts in shabu smuggle

A Customs intelligence man involved in the shabu smuggling at the Manila pier will turn state witness. To be pinned down are big-time cohorts in government, says investigating Sen. Richard Gordon. The link between two shabu shipments in Manila and Cavite is established. President Rodrigo Duterte has been informed, he adds.

Agent Jimmy Guban of the Customs Intelligence and Investigation Service has admitted what he knows, Gordon says. Aside from Customs superiors, among those implicated were a deputy of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, and a police colonel.

Duterte recently linked to drugs the latter two: PDEA deputy Ismael Fajardo and PNP Sr. Supt. Eduardo Acierto. Dark pasts show in intelligence verifications, Duterte said. Fajardo was removed in Sept.; Acierto on Aug. 14, a week after the shabu smuggling, for different offenses.

It was Guban who instructed Customs men where exactly to cut open two magnetic lifters to “uncover” 355 kilos of concealed shabu. Guban swore that Acierto had told him how. Giant cylinders made of 1.5-inch thick steel, electromagnetic lifters have hollow insides. Acierto denies Guban’s claim.

Guban is under custody of the National Bureau of Investigation. Gordon earlier had detained him at the Senate for perjuring in Blue-Ribbon Committee hearings. Guban at first was covering up, but later said he would “be on the side of the government,” Gordon says.

Gordon will name the high Customs officials involved when he wraps up his probe after one more hearing in Nov. Made to testify last month were Customs commissioner Isidro Lapeña, deputies Ricardo Quinto and Gladys Rosales, and past and present intelligence directors Adzhar Albani and Jeoffrey Tacio.

In one hearing Gordon grabbed a “codigo” from which, he says, Quinto was reading their cover-up script of dates and concocted actions. Gordon also berated Rosales for administrative oddities. Responding to info from the suspended Albani about impending drug smuggling, Rosales ordered him to relay it to Tacio. Thus Gordon likened Rosales to a former President entrusting a delicate commando raid to a suspended PNP chief.

Guban, Acierto, and Fajardo claimed to have held several case conferences to interdict an impending shabu shipment. Yet there were no reports on what were discussed, Gordon says.

Between meetings, Gordon says, the trio tried to alter the shipment contents, consignee-for-hire, and warehouse location from Manila to Cavite. Consequently on Aug. 7 Guban led the cutting of the steel lifters to disgorge 355 kilos of shabu. Worth P3.4 billion, that shipment came from Malaysia via Hong Kong.

PDEA chief Aaron Aquino believes that the shabu in the two lifters were a decoy. It was meant to distract them from a bigger shipment that had slipped past Customs as early as July 14. PDEA found out about the four other lifters in Gen. Mariano Alvarez, Cavite, on Aug. 8. A warehouseman tipped them off upon seeing the two lifters on TV news. Seven Chinese lessors and companions already had emptied the lifters of contraband on July 15, using electric saws. Checking the weight of the truck and cargo container against the gross and net weights in the import manifest, PDEA determined that the contraband weighed 1,600 kilos, five times more than the other one. Sniffer dogs detected drugs. That shipment was from Vietnam via Taiwan.

Gordon disagrees with Aquino’s decoy theory. He says Guban et al intended from the start to smuggle in the shabu from Malaysia. But the preparations, including changes of declaration, names and addresses, went haywire so they decided to “uncover” the smuggling.

Still, Gordon and Aquino’s data tally: The two lifters with shabu seized at the Manila pier were made in Vietnam like the four found in Cavite. Meth was found in Manila by sawing through the lifters’ weak steel underbelly; the same portions were cut open in the lifters in Cavite. The plastic bags of shabu in the former were wrapped with heat-shielding asbestos fabric; similar asbestos wraps littered the floor around the emptied lifters in the latter. Metals often are used to hide contraband; asbestos has nothing to do with the operation of lifters. Needed to operate electromagnetic lifters are cranes, chains, and support frames; neither the Manila nor the Cavite shipments contained those parts. The lifters were for hiding illegal drugs.

Testimony by Customs officer Atty. Lourdes Mangaoang bolster the findings. As head of the container x-ray unit, she notes from a review of the scans that the four magnetic lifters contained contraband. Based on standard procedures, the x-ray operator should have ordered a physical inspection. Instead, the lifters were cleared for release. It was done at 7:30 a.m., before the start of regular work, on July 14, a Saturday.

Less reliable swabs of the lifters’ insides tested negative for drugs. With that, Lapeña cleared the Customs officers of any wrongdoing. But citing a memo from deputy commissioner Quinto to Lapeña on Aug. 6 about possible drugs from Malaysia, Vietnam, China and Taiwan, Mangaoang says Lapeña should have known about drug smuggling. She says it was incredible for his deputies to not have informed him that something was amiss.

Aquino says shabu street prices suddenly dropped in Metro Manila in late July. Also the police began to net bigger amounts of shabu than before from street pushers in raids and buy-busts. There apparently was a sudden flood of drugs. Also, lab analyses of five recent major shabu busts in Metro Manila showed the synthetic chemical of the same high-grade purity as the 355 kilos “found” at the Manila pier.

Lapeña, a past PDEA chief, chided Aquino last week for blaming Customs for the shabu onrush, despite unsubstantiated contents of the four Cavite lifters. Siding with Lapeña, presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo dared Aquino to show proof, other than dog sniffs, that the lifters had contained drugs. Mangaoang says only Lapeña disavows shabu in those lifters.

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