The famous Admiral Yamashita lived across the street from Rene in the compound, in a house that belonged to an esteemed American lawyer named Self and which is still there next to the Copacabana. “I knew Yamashita,” he says. “He used to let me carry his sword. According to rumors—and I can’t prove this—Marcos believed that a lot of Yamashita’s gold was buried in the ground under our compound. A quien sela metio en la cabeza, no se.” Rene lived in that beloved compound—with a real estate value of over a billion pesos today—until he lost it in a fateful land-grab that would change his life forever.

“I first saw Rene in his swimming trunks in the polo club. My eyes popped out of their sockets and i said, ‘Who is that one?’”

Rene in Puerto Galera in the early eighties with Lynnie Laurel, Wolfgang Bierlein, and Chita Reyes.

Coming of age in the compound was like a rare Lafitte approaching its peak of taste and sophistication, and Rene grew up to become a true renaissance man in every sense of the word. He was well educated and spoke four languages fluently, including French, German, Spanish, and an impressive command of English. Being well read, he could speak intelligently about anything from history and literature to politics and religion to art and science. Aside from that, he was a chivalrous gentleman, a dashing ladies man, and a passionate sportsman—polo and sailing were among his favorite pastimes. In the fifties, he floated around upper crust social circles and traveled the world with the international jet-set, going to parties with friends like Mary Prieto and the handsome Aga Khan. To both men and women alike, he was considered the perfect man—handsome, smart, funny, and extremely wealthy. He had it all, and, in fact, many said he was too good to be true, too glamorous for a corrupt town like Manila.

Mary’s daughter, Marilou Prieto, recounts the first time she met Rene: “I was seventeen, and he must have been in his twenties. I saw him in his swimming trunks, diving off the diving board in the Polo Club, and my eyes popped out of their sockets and I said, ‘Who is that one?’ A lot of people said he looked like Bobby Kennedy, but, if you ask me, he was much better looking. For a long time I had a crush on him, and when I came back from my trip to Europe when I was nineteen, he took me out to a cocktail party, and, of course, he stood out—tall and handsome . . . the handsomest man in Manila, really. And on top of that, he had a fantastic physique. Simply the most gorgeous man you will ever set eyes on.”

Lavish parties were thrown at the big house in the compound, where guests—oftentimes his mother’s friends—danced on Persian carpets, gazed at beautiful paintings, drank fine wines, and feasted on fabulous French dinners and 40-dish Indonesian rice taffels. He adored classical music, and there was always some piano or string concerto playing softly in the background. “Rene had an eye for beauty and impeccable taste,” says Marilou, “not only in how he dressed, but also in the way he took care of his house and gardens and the people he chose to associate with.” One of Rene’s best friends was the famous artist Lee Aguinaldo, so his house was full of his paintings. He took Mary Prieto to the Silver Slipper and Marilou to the Nile, a casino dining club where he bought her chips to play with. “I went to Baguio one time and Joe Vincent De Leon was supposed to be my date, but he didn’t arrive on time, so I said yes to Rene instead,” she laughingly recounts. “We went to the country club, and I ended up meeting my husband there.”

But Rene has always been a part of Marilou Prieto’s life. After her marriage and separation to Manolo Lovina, they met up again with the Demimonde and the Coco Banana crowd which included Maurice Arcache, Alex Van Hagen, Ernest Santiago, Wolfgang Bierlein, the Valdes sisters, and the Reynoso sisters among others. Marilou calls them “the real party-party group. Discos every night until six in the morning, partying at Coco Banana. The Demimonde was the class of women on the fringes of respectable society. This was not the social circle of my mother anymore, but the younger crowd. Demimonde means ‘half-world,’ not exactly mainstream society but more of the racy crowd, more bohemian, artsy, rebellious, and generally frowned upon by the elder generation. We were the rebels of our time. Too adventurous, I guess. We would do all sorts of things like poppers while we were dancing, smoking pot and drinking, and doing all the things that you do when you’re young.”

“People say he was a drug addict—never. We did more drugs than he ever did. While we were smashed out of our minds, he would be sitting pretty in his linen suits and quoting Oscar Wilde.”

The group would have gatherings and parties at Bierlein’s house. “Wolfie was dating Cristina Valdes at the time,” recalls Marilou. “He was another society boy who was tall and handsome with Aryan good looks.” Because Rene was never married and ran around with the fast crowd, he developed a sort of reputation, but Marilou says he was never heavily into drugs. “People say he was a drug addict—never. We did more drugs than he ever did. While we were doing all sorts of things he was there sitting pretty in his linen suits and quoting Oscar Wilde. What he would do was laugh and laugh and laugh. You know, this uproarious laugh of his when we were together with the whole gang. While we were all smashed out of our minds, Rene would be making his famous avocado with milk and honey shake. That combination was delicious with crushed ice! Rene claims he’s never even seen shabu, but grass was legal in those days in most European countries.”

Contrary to what people might think, Marilou asserts that Rene has a very conservative side to him (he’s been called everything from an occasional swinger to a certified pervert). “He has good morals and values. He was old-fashioned and believed a lady should act and behave a certain way. I guess that’s why he never married.”

In fact, he was a playboy long before the term was officially coined, and every woman in Manila wanted him. Soon after he bought the Tower Hotel in the summer of ’69, he began a much talked about affair with Barbara Bouchet, the busty Bond girl in the original Casino Royale, and who more recently had a role in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. “She was beautiful,” he says with a nostalgic gaze in his eye. “I met her when she was making a movie here, and I had a friend who was having an affair years earlier with the director of the movie.” Many of the girls Rene went out with wanted to marry, but for some reason he never did. “I guess he valued his freedom,” Marilou theorizes. “He loved life, the whole thing about it, because he had the best of it. So he relished the traveling, the good conversations with friends, the partying with all sorts of people. He wanted to make the most out of all the good things in life, and he really enjoyed everything—good food, art, music, books, films. Even dogs—at one time he had fourteen whippets running around the house. He didn’t hold back.” The only woman he appeared to have genuinely fallen in love with was his next-door neighbor in Pasay, Pamen Roxas. “I think he really wanted to marry her, but she found him too handsome.” Rene’s problems arrived before true love and children ever could, and, like in every libertine’s life story, there were rumors of homosexuality. “I heard he was bisexual, but I never saw him with a boyfriend—he had a lot of girlfriends.”

Rene playing polo at the Manila Polo Club in the sixties.

Inspired by the famous 400 Club in London, Rene opened the Velvet Slum in 1978, the first discotheque in Manila with a Cerwin-Vega sound system. “It’s the sound manufacturing company that invented the earth-shaker for the movie Earthquake, which came out in ’76,” says Rene. “You could turn up the volume and glass would brake. We were on the 2nd floor of the Tower Hotel and the guests in the rooms in the 8th floor couldn’t sleep!” For it’s time, the Slum was the only place to go, but the killing of a Chinese student there caused it to shut down prematurely after a year.

The Tower Hotel was also the venue for many risqué fashion shows that Marilou helped organize. “Rene was the forerunner of lingerie shows long before Mondragon started doing them,” she says. From there he went on to own the Gaiety Palace, which was an old theater that he transformed into a lunch and dining place with Moulin Rouge-inspired shows. The restaurant was beautifully decorated with palms, and the tables were draped in white tablecloths and surrounded by colonial-style wicker wing chairs. “He had all these wonderful ideas, but could never make anything of them because the law was always after him. I don’t know why. I guess because he never gave in, he never compromised on anything. He believed too much in his own integrity, so no matter how much he was put in prison, he never gave up fighting for what he believed was right. Governments had made many different offers for his properties, but, if he didn’t feel the price was fair, he would consistently refuse. He goes around with a bulletproof vest because he thinks somebody’s going to shoot him.”

Butch Gabermann, Jacqueline Badur, Mariana Parsons, Alain Miailhe, John Scott Oldfield.

According to a letter Rene’s mother, Cristina Bradley, wrote to Texas congressman Lamar Smith in September of 1997, problems began when Marcos tried to acquire a corporation they controlled, Rose Packing Company, Inc.—then the largest food cannery operating in the Philippines—through the services of his “cronies” at the Philippine Commercial & International Bank (P.C.I.B.) and by blocking loans Rosepack had taken from the Philippine National Bank (P.N.B.). When Rene, who was the president of the corporation, tried to relocate Rosepack to Valenzuela, Bulacan, P.C.I.B. filed a complaint against him, claiming he was intending to dispose of the original property in fraud of their creditors, in this case—P.C.I.B. Rene says that “by January 11th, 1968, there was a writ of execution on the compound property stating that we owed a million and a half—900,000 pesos of which I had already guaranteed.” This, in connection with Rene’s belief that Marcos was after the mythical Yamashita treasure buried in his compound’s property, began the war of suits and countersuits between Rene and various banks and government agencies over the fate of the compound and several other properties. “They used Rosepack as a vehicle to put a writ of execution on the compound, even though the two are not related in any way. They just wanted that land, whether it was for the gold or whether they wanted to extend EDSA over it. Perhaps both.”

In the summer of ‘69 he began a much talked about affair with a busty bond girl from the original Casino Royale.

It was decided by the Philippine government that EDSA would be extended about one kilometer to Roxas Boulevard. The road was intended to go through Fisher Avenue since the fifties when the plan for the development of Metro Manila was conceived by U.S. consultants. Bradley’s letter says that “the plan for the EDSA extension was changed out of the blue to veer north instead of south in order that the motels [of Pasay], which are fronts for prostitution and vice, would be spared.” All affected property owners were instructed to vacate within 15 days. Seventy percent of the Knecht compound was supposed to be demolished. Not agreeing with this, Rene mobilized all the affected property owners—including the Roxases, the Dela Ramas, and the Elizaldes—and sent a petition to President Marcos, which he endorsed to the Ministry of Human Settlements. After lengthy hearings, the Ministry decided that the EDSA extension should revert to the original plan. But, according to the letter, a Presidential Decree was issued ordering the road through Plan 2. “They took all our land. The road is seventy percent and the bars are the rest. We’ve never been paid, but now they say it’s going to happen after seventeen years. Meanwhile I’ve had no income for five years, I’m living in a house the size of a compact car, and most of my art collection is gone. My mother died with these court cases because corruption had to prevail. But I don’t care if I die, I will never stop, even though I don’t know if we’ll succeed because the law is bullshit—and all this bullshit has basically consumed my life.”

Rene, Rosarito Caro Agustines, Joey Escaler.

Rene lost many valuable things in his lifelong ordeal, but his sense of humor wasn’t one of them. “Someone told me: you may have lost a lot of property but you haven’t lost your hair. I said, ‘That’s right. I’d rather lose my property than lose my hair.’” But it wasn’t always a series of failures—The Knechts won the Rosepack case in 1971 in the Court of Appeals, then it went to the Supreme Court and stayed there until 1988 before becoming final a year later, after which they filed a new case in Pasig.

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