Funding for Frontline is provided by this station and other public television stations nationwide and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Tonight on Frontline, the couple accused of stealing billions of dollars from the Philippines.
Mr. Marcos and his wife and their cronies were systematically looting the wealth of the nation.
Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos ruled for 20 years and lived a life that could not have been paid for by the president's salary.
Where did their money come from?
I deny that we ever stole government money.
Tonight, in search of the Marcos millions.
From the network of public television stations, a presentation of KCTS Seattle, WNET New York, WPBT Miami, WTVS Detroit, and WGBH Boston.
This is Frontline with Judy Woodruff.
Good evening. When Ferdinand Marcos fled the Philippines 15 months ago, he left behind a nation nearly bankrupt.
One reason? Marcos, his family, his friends and cronies had for two decades looted the Philippines of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Tonight on Frontline, producers Bill Cran and Stephanie Tepper follow an incredible paper trail.
The documents, the records, which tell the secret story of how Marcos got his millions and where he hid this wealth, estimated to be one of the world's largest private fortunes.
Our report is called, In Search of the Marcos Millions.
On a mountain in the Philippines, this vast bust commemorates former president Marcos, now accused of stealing millions of dollars from his country.
I deny that we ever stole government money or property or that we obtained regular commissions on contracts. Since it's about Marcos, the dictator, stealer of wealth, I become the villain.
But I would like to have the opportunity one day to be able to explain the sources of all of this money, not just in court, but before the Filipino people and the world.
The first family is now approaching the grandstand. The president's salary was never more than five thousand six hundred dollars a year.
It was shared by the president and the first lady together with her children. His tax returns state that in his 20 years as president, all his earnings and all his assets added to those of his wife, Imelda Marcos, amounted to less than three hundred fifty thousand dollars.
Mr. Marcos and his wife and their cronies were systematically looting the wealth of the nation.
His wealth was amassed essentially during the martial law years, the dictatorship years from 72 to 86.
In 1969, the man who was accused of amassing a hidden fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars set up a trust and told the people he was giving his personal wealth to the nation.
He looked very quiet, very modest, very subtle, very easy going. His real personality, those who knew him was just the opposite. He was vicious, he was calculating.
Marcos was a very deliberate man. He had said that I never make an important decision when I'm angry or when I'm in love.
They were called the conjugal dictatorship. Their self obsession led them to record their own lives on video tapes. A treasure trove of these has come to light since their fall.
The tapes are evidence of a lifestyle far more lavish than anything they could afford on their legal income.
They needed each other. Imelda needed Ferdinand because he was the president of the country and very powerful of course.
And Ferdinand needed Imelda because she had a following of her own. She's very charismatic.
Imelda was the frivolous, flamboyant, obscene type of squanderer. And Marcos I think sometimes deliberately allowed her to be the lightning rod so to speak. So people would say, well that Marcos is not all that bad, that woman probably can't control her.
He was the main evil. He designed what happened this past 20 years.
And in a country where 70% of the people live below the poverty level, the ostentatious wealth of the Marcos' and their unseemly corruption clearly contributed to the national revulsion against them and to the outpouring of support for Mrs. Aquino in the presidential campaign.
As president of the Philippines.
That same night the people stormed the presidential palace.
The Marcos family had fled only hours early.
For a moment, the poor of Manila stood on the threshold of the state apartments.
After the first flush of excitement, they began to notice evidence of gross luxury, pots of caviar and chilled champagne.
There were hundreds of jewelry boxes, all empty now.
And there were crates of cash, millions of newly minted notes.
But that night there was something still more valuable.
Papers being hurled out of the windows and tossed from hand to hand.
Marcos had left in too much of a hurry to clear his desk.
Papers and files were strewn everywhere.
In the communications room, three shredding machines had jammed.
To save this evidence, Aquino aides rushed to the palace.
Chito Roque shows what happened that night.
At around one o'clock in the morning, I was all alone, so I decided to walk around. I entered the room of Mr. Marcos.
It was like a hospital. I mean, it was really stinking.
And I could see a lot of gadgets. And later on we found out this was the dialysis machine.
And I saw this filing cabinet, so I opened it. And I was very surprised to see the combination.
Taped inside the drawer was the number of the combination lock.
I don't speak Swiss, Roque said later, but the files spoke for themselves.
These papers are the basis for the allegations against former President Marcos.
Next morning, more documents were discovered in a secret vault.
And others have come to light in Hong Kong, Hawaii, Switzerland, and the United States.
But what Roque found that night were the first clues in the search for the Marcos millions.
Come on. We never keep those documents like that in the palace.
Why should I keep secret files of accounts in Geneva in the palace?
Now tell me, what kind of a lawyer or president do you think I am?
You keep all the incriminating documents there?
Marcos arrived in Hawaii the day after the revolution, where he now lives in this luxury home.
When we interviewed him there, he maintained that all documents linking him to Swiss bank accounts are forgeries.
I would like to know which accounts I really put in there, if I put any.
And I will admit it, if it is really put in there by me.
I can give you the names that are alleged to be your accounts.
Oh, come on. Those names are all picked out of some allegations made by the Philippine government.
There is no document which indicates that they existed because of me.
Three days after Marcos fled, Cory Aquino's first act as president was to set up a special commission.
Its task was to trace and recover Marcos' hidden wealth.
But there was no time to spare.
It was less than four weeks later that a most unusual visitor made his way towards the headquarters of the Swiss Credit Bank in Zurich.
He was a Filipino businessman called Michael de Guzman, and he had come from Hawaii.
Marcos' son, Bong Bong, had told the bank to expect de Guzman.
He had been sent to make a withdrawal, $213 million in cash.
De Guzman then produced two identical documents that read, Please hold all securities and cash at the disposal of Michael de Guzman, who will present this letter to you in person.
He will identify himself by presenting his passport.
One was signed Ferdinand E. Marcos, the other Imelda R. Marcos.
The bank officials asked him to come back the next morning.
Then, late in the afternoon, they placed an urgent call to burn.
Because Switzerland's famous banking secrecy does not apply to dirty money, they wanted guidance from the Federal Banking Commission.
The man who took the call was Daniel Zuberbühler.
The bank said that for the time being they could hold him back,
and that on the next morning they would send us, the Telex, advising us that they would dispose of the funds within a few hours if we did not issue a prohibition order.
In Bern that night, the Swiss government was attending a state banquet.
The news from the banking commission sent them into a huddle.
At the dinner, they issued an order to freeze all Marcos' accounts.
We told those banks who had funds would have to give a confirmation in writing that they would not release any funds without prior approval by the banking commission.
Zuberbühler won't say how many accounts and how much money Marcos has, but he does confirm that Marcos has Swiss accounts.
I think we can, because otherwise these measures would have been obsolete.
There are certainly some accounts here.
The Swiss banking authorities froze the accounts without the Philippine government even coming forward to ask for it.
This is unprecedented. It has never been done in the past.
This is a result of concern around the world, but especially in Switzerland, about the use of the Swiss banking system to hide dirty money.
In Manila, the Swiss government's order to the banks gave breathing space to Jovito Salonga, the man heading the search for the missing millions.
Now he and his staff began building their case against Marcos.
When he became president in 1966, on the record, he was already depositing huge sums of money in American banks.
And according to our records, in 1967, during his first term, he was already depositing in Swiss banks.
It was in Zurich that Marcos opened the first of at least eight Swiss bank accounts, and one official at the Swiss Credit Bank, a certain Walter Fessler, was to play a special role in the private affairs of Mr. Marcos.
In the spring of 1968, the presidential palace in Manila received a visit from Herr Fessler.
These documents are the earliest evidence we have of Marcos' Swiss accounts.
Fessler wrote out this receipt for four checks worth $950,000.
He had also brought some forms for the Marcos' to fill in.
Imelda Marcos opened her accounts under the pseudonym Jane Ryan.
Marcos chose William Saunders as his false name.
If it was going to be secret, why William Saunders?
William Saunders, pseudonym, and then Ferdinand E. Marcos, true name.
Now you explain to me what crazy idea would cost me to do that given a minimum of rationality for both the bank and me.
So is it not right to question this?
Why should not we ask the bank or the one who presented these documents?
Where did they get it?
Who wrote it?
And is it in my handwriting? Is it?
I doubt it.
Yet here, on official stationery, President Marcos seems to have been practicing his new, unfamiliar signature.
And the William Saunders account is signed with his own name.
My signature is copied there.
To determine the forgery, we have to see the originals. But you must know whether that's your signature or not.
I can tell you this. It is questionable.
Partly he was corrupted by power, and partly he was already corrupt to begin with.
By 1969, corruption had become a political issue for the Marcos'
The opposition were claiming massive fraud in Marcos' reelection campaign,
and he was already being accused of being the richest man in Asia.
In the cities, strikes and demonstrations were turning violent.
In the country, Communist insurgency was spreading.
All this unrest did not go unnoticed in Switzerland, where his bankers felt it prudent
to draw an extra veil of secrecy over Marcos' hidden accounts.
Early in 1970, officers of the Swiss Credit Bank, including Herr Fessler,
transferred a million dollars from the William Saunders account to that of the Sandy Foundation,
a company they had set up for the Marcos' in Vaduz.
Vaduz is the capital of Liechtenstein, the tiny principality sandwiched between Austria and Switzerland.
Liechtenstein is famous for two things, tourism and tax evasion.
So many thousands of paper companies with no office and no staff are registered here
that special buildings, called bureau houses, offer the convenience of a postal address
and someone to forward the mail.
This one housed the Sandy Foundation.
Marcos told the Swiss Credit Bank that when he wanted to withdraw money,
they should send their Hong Kong representative to Manila,
where he was to contact Colonel Fabian Wehr, head of the secret police.
The letter helpfully listed Wehr's phone number.
It went on to say that when withdrawals were to be made,
Marcos would telex the words, Happy Birthday.
Birthdays were getting happier all the time for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.
The Sandy Foundation was only one of 15 Liechtenstein companies set up for the Marcos'.
In the next 12 years, at least $300 million would pass through them.
But that still lay in the future.
The 1972 assassination attempt on Imelda was part of a rising tide of violence.
Imelda escaped, but by then Marcos had made his decisive move.
In 1972, he went ahead with the declaration of martial law,
using as the immediate excuse the phony assassination of Mr. Juan Ponce-Renrile.
The Proclamation 1081, which proclaimed martial law throughout the Philippines,
is dated September 21.
But the assassination did not take place until the following day, which is September 22.
So Mr. Marcos was the one who planned it,
because how would he have known that Mr. Renrile was going to be assassinated the following day?
I insisted it was phony all these years, of course I was put in prison for it.
But Mr. Renrile finally admitted after the revolution in 1986 that it was a lie.
Many believed Marcos had been planning martial law for some time.
I think Mr. Marcos must have started this right after his re-election in 1969,
because then he was constitutionally prohibited from having another term of office.
He would have had to step down in 1973.
During martial law, Marcos enjoyed a regular round of golf at the Whack Whack Golf Club.
He liked to play for high stakes, but it didn't pay to beat the president, who was a notoriously bad loser.
But those who could afford to go on losing became part of his circle of cronies,
and this was to be the era of crony capitalism.
Few cronies were so trusted as Bobby Benedicto.
He'd known Marcos since law school, and even helped him to arrange his affairs in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
A letter transferring a million dollars from the Sandy Foundation is signed by Benedicto.
Checks for an account in Geneva worth $37 million could be signed by both men.
Notes on Benedicto's own notepaper show that he helped Marcos keep track of his hidden wealth.
That's how we know that in 1975, Marcos had $30 million in five foreign banks.
Marcos believed in buying the loyalty of men like Benedicto.
His prize was a monopoly on the Philippine sugar industry.
No sugar could be bought or sold without Benedicto's say so.
In a country where cane cutters are lucky to earn a dollar a day, Benedicto would help Marcos make millions.
It wasn't only the workers who suffered. Sugar dealers were forced to pay sweeteners as Marcos and Benedicto tightened the screws.
The presidential papers itemized some of these donations.
In just three weeks, one businessman donated over $100,000. Some was paid in cash.
A Marcos aide notes that, I personally counted it and placed the same in this records jacket. All this added up.
A motion before the Philippine Supreme Court claims that in one year, Marcos and Benedicto pocketed $500 million.
Government officials have been trying to trace Benedicto, who has fled the country.
Marcos used favorites like Benedicto to take charge of all the nation's resources and every big economic venture.
Martial law gave him the power to manipulate the entire economy.
With a stroke of the pen, he could seize his enemy's assets.
In this way, he gave a newspaper to Imelda's favorite brother, Cocoy Ramaldes, and a $400 million electric plant that had belonged to a rich family, opposed to Marcos.
Herminio de Sini, an in-law, had a small cigarette filter business. Marcos slapped a tax on his rivals and made him a millionaire.
Marcos awarded construction contracts worth a billion dollars to Rudy Cuenca. The Marcos' were the biggest shareholders in his company.
Marcos put Danding Coenco in charge of the coconut board.
Government auditors now claim he pumped a hundred million of its dollars into a coconut scheme he owned.
Coenco, like de Sini, Ramaldes, and Benedicto, fled the country with Marcos.
Much of the finances for Marcos' business buddies came from public funds.
Mr. Marcos was an absolute dictator in this country. He was not just a president.
And therefore, institutions like the Development Bank were operating completely under his control.
If there was one person seeking the loan, they would just come around here and say that we need $100, $200 million for this project, which looks viable.
It's not viable, but Marcos says it is viable. When he says that, then it better be viable.
For instance, we were recently sent an account for $65 million that we are supposed to pay.
Now, apparently, this money was supposed to have put up a steel mill, a factory.
It was pretty big because under our currency, that would be more than a billion pesos.
So we asked to see where the factory is, and to this day, after several months, nobody has found it.
In short, the factory does not exist.
But $65 million is just a drop in the bucket.
The bank's newly appointed governors are still trying to trace billions that were given out as loans and never repaid.
From this bank alone, I'd say easily about $3.5 billion U.S. dollars.
And broken down roughly, say, about $200 million for the Decini Group, $100 million from the Benedictus.
This is the former ambassador to Japan.
From the Cuencas, $65 million.
The Cojuancos and the Rumualdeses, about $50 million each.
But this is not all.
We should be able to multiply this by at least a factor of three
to take into account the exposure of the government in other financial institutions.
Perhaps the best documented example of how Marcos enriched himself is the story of the North-South Highway.
To build it, the Department of Public Highways had to import a large amount of heavy construction equipment,
each of it bought from Japan.
And inevitably, the Marcos' took a cut, 15 percent, to be precise.
Once again, the point man in the highway scam was Bobby Benedicto,
who Marcos had made the Philippines' ambassador to Japan.
Japanese corporations might want to invest in the Philippines.
They needed, of course, to talk to the Philippine ambassador to Japan, which was Benedicto.
And before any venture or project was approved, money had to change hands.
And this was the role of Benedicto, was to set the terms of the bribe.
The presidential papers contain many like this, which adds up the value in yen of the road building equipment,
then works out what 15 percent of that is and converts it into the dollars to be collected.
In just one five-month period, these kickbacks amounted to $2.7 million.
There's nothing exceptional about this.
In the Marcos era, nothing from tin sardines to dump trucks could enter Manila Harbor
without the president getting his rake off.
The skim for spare parts on heavy equipment could go as high as 26 percent.
To get his payoffs out of the country, Marcos turned to his minister of highways,
a certain Balthazar Aquino, no relation of Corey Aquino.
Balthazar Aquino claims that he was coerced into acting as an emissary for Marcos with the Japanese corporations.
He made several trips to Japan to transmit messages regarding arrangements on commissions and kickbacks.
Marcos' bagman was sworn to secrecy.
He wrote this note for the president.
I assure you, sir, that I will never open my mouth, even if it will curse my life.
But Aquino has now confessed that every two weeks he was laundering payments worth four, five, or $600,000
through money changers in Hong Kong.
Here, Aquino converts Japanese yen into $600,000.
He then deposits the dollars in the Hong Kong branch of the Swiss Bank Corporation,
which telexses them to Freiburg in Switzerland, quiet, discreet, and well off the beaten track.
The bank here received eight of the $20 million Marcos may have made from Japanese payoffs,
and this is where Aquino's $600,000 ends up in account number 51960.
Now, that account is registered in the name of Foundation Rossellus,
and Rossellus is, needless to say, a foundation set up in Vaduz for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.
In light of all this, we asked Mr. Marcos, did he or did he not have any Swiss Bank accounts?
We had some, I think, but which were deposited not by us.
And that is why I want to know why they cannot seem to identify this.
We want to know whether we have any money there or not.
And if so, if it is in our name, how did it get there? Who deposited it for us?
Was it us who deposited it? Show it to us, or somebody else.
Then I want the authority. I want to know under what authority they deposited these amounts.
You're saying that if there is money in Swiss Bank accounts in your name, it's not yours?
No, it's not in my name. It's in the name of other people, and that is why we ask.
So what connection do we have with these other people?
Hidden wealth was the only possible explanation for the lavish lifestyle of the Marcoses.
Imelda's extravagance was an endless source of malicious gossip among those who knew her, like Renee Connect.
She certainly will be remembered as the most extravagant woman, perhaps, of this century.
She has to be, because nobody else has spent money the way she has.
She has an incredible collection of jewelry.
According to a major jeweler I know in Beverly Hills, she was the largest buyer in the world in the late 70s.
And her collection is really one of the finest, certainly better than most queens.
She had a necklace made of diamonds, of flawless diamonds, which came from Winston.
And this cost $16 million about five, six years ago.
Imelda's social ambitions went far beyond the Philippines. Steve Sinakis.
Her ambition her whole life was centered in reaching her goal, which was to be the richest woman in the world,
accepted by the highest society people in the royalty and the international jet set.
She was described as a social climber of alpine proportions.
Imelda wanted to impress jet-setting friends like George Hamilton.
On a shopping spree in New York, she bought dresses, flowers, jewels, sheets and towels, all this in six weeks.
Imelda liked to overwhelm her guests with hospitality and gifts.
Through one of her companies, she lent George Hamilton money to buy a lavish mansion in Beverly Hills and a plantation house in Mississippi.
But at her daughter Irene's wedding, Imelda surpassed herself.
The horses were flown in from Morocco, the carriages from Austria.
When spring came late and the trees failed to bloom in time, paper flowers were pinned to their branches.
She definitely wanted her children to marry European royalty.
She wanted her eldest daughter to marry Prince Charles.
Imelda had to settle for a local boy from a wealthy family, but she made up for that with a royal-style wedding.
Obviously you know about how often she was being criticized for an exhibit of all this wealth and opulence,
what many of us consider obscenity.
She always attributed, what value is there for beauty? How can beauty be expensive?
How can it be a waste of money to put money on beauty?
It is always beauty and power, it's always beauty that I reach for.
The palace basement is now a museum to Imelda's extravagance.
What few realize is that all this is only what she left behind.
This is probably the room that has shocked people the most.
Here you will find about 1,000 gowns, 1,500 handbags, and about 2,600 pairs of shoes.
This dress was hand embroidered with silver threads, and it probably took about six months to finish it.
Now this dress is made of swan-down feathers.
Here we see a bulletproof bra.
Another dress studded with Russian diamonds.
And now for her world-famous 2,600 pairs of shoes.
In one interview Mrs. Marquez claimed that the reason why she had so many pairs
is because she wanted to help promote the Filipino shoe industry.
As you can see, they're mostly made in France and Italy.
And the sad thing about this is that the average per capita income of the Filipino
is roughly the cost of one pair of her evening shoes.
She believed that the people loved it because those who arranged for her trips would make sure to it.
That thousands of people would be there, cheating her on and trying to treat her like some loved person
because if those responsible for arranging for the reception didn't do it,
they wouldn't be working anymore the following day.
She always used that expression, I'm an SNS slave and a star.
Well, slave meant that she was working all the time for her good little people, as she calls us.
And a star being the beautiful, bright star that people wanted to be.
We are all planning for man, man as individual and man in community.
This is Smokey Mountain, where people make a living off the city's garbage.
Of course, it has been filmed by just about every foreign TV crew to visit the Philippines.
Imelda's solution was to start to bulldoze the shanty town, which housed 490,000 people.
So Mrs. De Jesus, her four children and her husband Eduardo lost the home they had built out of scrap
and found themselves dumped several miles outside the city.
But when they got there, there was no water, no electricity, no work.
And so, like thousands of others, they drifted back to Smokey Mountain,
where they could earn all of 15 pesos a day, 75 cents.
After six months, there was no job there.
So I decided to work in the Smokey Mountain because in the Smokey Mountain,
there's some little job.
If I earn 15 pesos, my family was revived.
But Mrs. De Jesus has had to look on as her two daughters and then her son die.
The little girl, the youngest, was very sick on the day these pictures were taken.
Smokey Mountain may be an extreme example, but under the Marcosas,
the number of people who had slipped below the poverty line went up from 27 to 70 percent.
In many ways, a once prosperous country was now no better off than Bangladesh.
The Marcos children had it better.
This is their daughter's 21st birthday party.
They would be amply provided for.
Her parents had set up a trust account for the three children.
Aimee Bongbong and Irene would share this inheritance when their parents died.
By 1982, account number C7711 was already worth more than 20 million dollars.
It seems as if the wealth of the Marcosas
did indeed make the world their oyster.
So much Marcos money was being invested abroad that in 1982,
the CIA commissioned a report on their foreign properties.
More than anything else, perhaps, Imelda's activities in Manhattan
drew world attention to the family's hidden wealth.
When in town, she liked to stay here.
This is really the Philippine consulate, but Imelda treated it like private property.
Upstairs, she had a disco installed.
Here, she loved to hobnob with people like Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi billionaire.
But it wasn't just the social life that drew Imelda to Manhattan.
She was beginning to take an active interest in New York real estate.
Though she tried to be discreet, press reports were naming the Marcosas
as the real owners of a 63 million dollar shopping center on Herald Square,
a 95 million dollar skyscraper on Wall Street,
a 60 million dollar office building on Madison Avenue.
Over on Fifth Avenue, the Crown Building, worth 101 million dollars,
and a luxury estate on Long Island.
These properties were the subject of special hearings conducted by Congressman Stephen Solars.
His star witnesses were the Bernstein brothers,
whose real estate company had managed the four Manhattan properties.
They had refused to testify until Solars threatened to cite them for contempt of Congress.
Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give is the truth,
and nothing but the truth, to help you God?
I do.
Have you located properties for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos?
Yes. Yes.
Have you acquired properties for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos?
Yes. Yes.
Have you managed properties for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos?
Yes, but let me qualify that.
When we say yes to that, it's through the string of companies that were described previously.
Four strings of companies were set up to conceal the real ownership of four New York properties.
The principals, the Marcos's, hid behind a layer of three Panamanian companies,
which in turn owned Basic Cover, a company in the Dutch Antilles,
and this was the legal owner of one of the New York properties.
You will never find anything that will have Marcos's name in it,
unless, of course, you find some person who will attest to having done this on behalf of Marcos.
There's no piece of paper that will show that President Marcos had anything to do with his properties.
The man who devised this paper chase for Marcos was a certain Rolando Gapud.
Mr. Gapud set up bank accounts that only he knew about,
and this bank account then was the repository of funds coming from all over the world,
illegal funds, funds that were stolen by President Marcos.
It was Gapud who signed documents that show that Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos
were the real owners of a series of accounts numbered 77.
President Marcos was very superstitious, and apparently he thought the number 77 was a lucky number for him.
Of course, that made us trace him that much easier that he had all these 7,700 accounts.
But the Marcos's disguised their names as Beneficio Investment Inc. and Bueno Total Investment Inc.
Beneficio and Bueno are both Panamanian corporations.
The reason why so many foreign banks set up in Panama is that easygoing banking and business laws make it a financial center.
It is, in effect, a Latin American Lichtenstein and attracts thousands of dummy companies.
Have you or associates of yours ever set up dummy companies in Panama, in Lichtenstein, in the Dutch Antilles?
Of course not. Of course not. And if anybody says that we did, where is the evidence?
Somebody has to sign something. Who signed it? What connection do we have with them?
Morton Stabas is a lawyer working on the New York property suit.
He says there are documents connecting Marcos directly to that string of dummy companies.
I'll read to you the first sentence in the first document, which is fascinating.
By this instrument, the undersigned, the undersigned is Joseph E. Bernstein,
hereby acknowledges that he shall act as a trustee for the benefit of President Ferdinand E. Marcos
with respect to all matters relating to Lastura and V, a Netherlands Antilles corporation.
This evidence seems to link Marcos directly to Lastura, the legal owner of the $101 million crown building.
Do you recognize these documents? Yes.
Okay. Are they authentic documents? Well, they're copies of authentic documents.
Did you sign these documents? Yes.
And they all realized that it was a mistake to have Marcos' name on this piece of paper.
But as those things happened, somebody forgot to tear it up. And there it was.
And this was, if you please, the smoking gun.
And what is the Lastura Corporation?
The Lastura Corporation was a Netherlands Antilles company that had acquired the building at 735th Avenue
the prior September, which later became known as the crown building.
Well, you said that there was evidence connecting the Marcoses. Where is this evidence?
The evidence, surely, if there is any, is in the Bernsteins testimony.
Oh, come on. Will you want to read the stenographic now?
I have them. Okay.
Will you get this from Helen, the Bernsteins testimony?
Now, I'd like to ask each of you a series of questions.
In your opinion, are Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos the beneficial owners of the following real estate properties in New York?
First, the crown building.
That is my impression and belief.
The Herald Center. Yes.
40 Wall Street. Same answer.
200 Madison Avenue. Same answer.
Okay, so let me now put this.
And Mr. Ralph Bernstein, is it your view that the Marcoses are the beneficial owners of each of those four properties as well?
That's my impression.
Don't the Bernsteins say that, in fact, you and Imelda Marcos were the owners of the crown building?
They did not directly say so. They said that this was their impression and belief.
Page 25, line 517.
Doesn't that sound like a confirmation?
Presumption? Presumption is never evident. Never.
And this is ahead by a lawyer.
When you say, I presume you're saving yourself from perjury.
Do you think the Bernsteins are perjuring themselves against you?
I think they may have.
Marcos also flatly contradicts the Bernsteins' version of a conversation with Imelda Marcos that they allege took place in this restaurant.
She indicated that she had a Swiss bank account, and I sort of remember her pulling out a statement and waving it.
I didn't actually see the numbers, but my impression was that it was something in the nature of $120 million.
In other words, at this dinner at the Sign of the Dove restaurant, Mrs. Marcos indicated that she had a Swiss bank account and took out a bank statement, which presumably indicated that that was the case.
That's what I recall.
Do you recall what led her to do this? I've been to a lot of dinner parties before, but nobody's ever proclaimed their control of a Swiss bank account.
It's kind of hard to forget that.
I would say so.
Now that's a complete lie.
We can prove it.
She never had a Swiss bank account.
She does not hold any now, and she never had one.
So what could she have been showing to him?
Allegations against Marcos increased up to the last days of his regime.
The Philippine government is investigating quantities of gold that left the country by plane.
The first of three flights worth $40 million left in late 1983.
A cable sent by the U.S. Naval Investigative Service lists three more alleged Marcos shipments of silver and gold which left the country by sea.
The bullion was sold in New York, and some sources say the money went to Switzerland.
This telex shows how in his last year, Marcos transferred $94 million from the Philippines.
The money passed through banks in New York into numbered accounts in Luxembourg and Switzerland.
The last half million dollars left six days before Marcos fled his country.
Meanwhile, as the banks maintained their code of silence and declined to be interviewed, a sense of bitterness grows far away in Manila.
This is one of the sources of disappointment, disillusion, if not anger, not just of our people,
but I think of most peoples in the Third World who find themselves saddled with incredible and mind-boggling foreign debts.
And that is, it is inconceivable that the heads of the various financing institutions, the huge ones around the world,
were not aware that these corrupt leaders in these countries who are borrowing,
were actually taking the money out of those countries and depositing it back with them.
Where else will these billions go? Mr. Marcos' $10 billion are not here.
They are somewhere. They must be in some bank abroad. And I don't mean one bank.
They must be in 10, 15, 20 banks. And who are those banks, if you look at them?
They probably are the same banks that also lend to us.
So they know that this money keeps going back and forth. And who are they using as collateral? The 56 million Filipinos.
Exiled in Hawaii for 15 months, the Marcos' still have their supporters.
But can they get their hands on their hidden funds?
We have no funds. We have no funds.
We are living on borrowed funds practically.
We're miserable. We can't move. I can't go back to the Philippines.
To use their money would be to admit its existence or give away its whereabouts.
And so, ironically, they plead poverty and accept handouts.
Shoes, dresses and food parcels for one of the world's wealthiest couples.
This twist of fortune is hardest on Imelda.
This is worse than death, which will even defile your basic human right of country, of citizenship, of freedom, of honor.
If this is life, I'd rather die anytime. And I'm going to go back, even if I have to face impossible bullets.
The former strongman of the Philippines is keeping fighting fit, dreaming of a coup or a comeback.
But his real battle is in the courts as he tries to stop the new Philippine government from recovering his hidden wealth.
We are essentially establishing a jurisprudence of the post-dictators.
What that means is that new standards, new international standards of morality will be created and is in fact already being created by these cases.
These standards say that no dictator can pillage his country and loot his country's treasury and expect to retire comfortably on the spoils of his corruption.
Some say they have five, others $10 billion.
The presidential papers we have obtained suggest an absolute minimum of $2.1 billion.
Because of you and what you did, we who are here will be with you and we'll always pray for you.
We love you Mr. President, First Lady and family. Your being here will always be our memory and legacy.
The Philippine presidential commission on good government formed to track down the missing Marcos millions is still on the paper trail.
The commission hopes for a breakthrough next month when the Swiss Supreme Court is expected to give it access to Marcos Swiss bank account records.
Meanwhile, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia is looking into the possibility Marcos skimmed off American military aid money.
Another federal grand jury in Pittsburgh is investigating commissions paid to Marcos cronies by Westinghouse Corporation in order to build a nuclear reactor.
And the Japanese National Tax Administration Agency now is investigating alleged commissions paid by Japanese manufacturers to Philippine agents, money which ended up in Marcos Swiss bank account.
Thank you for joining us. I'm Judy Woodruff. Good night.
Coming up on Frontline, a girl from Minnesota becomes a star of porn films.
She enjoyed the recognition. She enjoyed the money.
Colleen Applegate did not like doing sex on film, period.
She chose to do it. She could have stopped.
A young life ends with a gunshot and questions. Watch Death of a Porn Queen on Frontline.
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