Everything came to a boiling head when 14 N.B.I. officers raided Rene’s house in Antipolo and arrested him. The charge was possession of a controlled substance, but Rene firmly believes he was framed by the politicians he publicly feuded with, and that one of his bodyguards was paid to plant a packet of shabu under his bed. (Later on, the crime lab report concluded that the samples found under his bed did not contain methamphetamine.) “I heard through a cook I had that the one who planted the shabu got a nail in his eye. I don’t know how it happened.” Some people who knew Rene seem to think he ended up in jail because he opened his doors to everyone—including drug addicts who were wanted by the law.

“I was poisoned in Camp Crame and lost all my bottom teeth. They took me to the hospital and found arsenic in my blood.”

He was locked up in the Antipolo jail for 45 days, from September 4 to October 19, but was able to spend most of his time in the patio of a sympathetic general he had met in prison and who was able to convince the warden to give him custody. But there were many nights he spent handcuffed inside the jail cell with his godson, the son of Lee Aguinaldo, who was the alleged drug addict living in Rene’s house with his daughter at the time they were arrested. “The jail in Antipolo was worse than Bilibid. It was horrible. You’re in a room with 80 people and you can’t even move—luckily for me, I did most of my time in the patio. They say it’s the second worst prison next to Parañaque. I wrote Gloria three letters, and she answered the last one but never did anything.” Rene lost about a pound a day eating lugao, but “once or twice a week, somebody would come with a chicken or something, but you would have to share it. Maurice Arcache came with a pizza, and I handed out slices to everybody. Bettina Lopez, the wife of Serge Osmeña came to visit me. Marilou Prieto came prancing in one day clutching two bottles of wine to her chest. Hahaha! She’s crazy! She’s in her own world, that woman, but I love her to death.”

From Antipolo he was transferred to Camp Crame, where he was detained until February 2004 under suspicion of plotting an assassination. “I was poisoned in Crame and lost all my bottom teeth.” He grins and taps them and says, “These are all fake. One day I just collapsed, stood up, and collapsed a second time. They took me to the hospital in a van and found arsenic in my blood. My teeth started falling off like popcorn. . . . The sleeping conditions were not bad though. The first two months I had to sleep on the floor, but after that they gave me a cot. I wasn’t with other inmates. There was one guy in Crame who had a very big titi—which is unusual in the Philippines—and he would walk around stark naked and show it off after the guards fell asleep. Now, I don’t know what he was trying to prove.”

There was no food in Crame, but the inmates had 500 pesos a week. Friends would send Rene ham, and, his cook who was working with the Osmeñas at the time, would send him three or four kilos of chicken adobo. “Even in the other jails where we had no ref, chicken adobo with a lot of vinegar would last three days.” His friends would send him three or four thousand pesos a week, depending on whether they could sell any of his paintings or other things. As cash gifts, he received a total of about 400,000 pesos, and some of that money was used to pay his lawyers. “The Swiss embassy helped me out a lot also. They kept coming to see me and they brought me food, but they never gave me any money for lawyers.” According to Rene, the President’s sister, Elizabeth Keon, interceded to have him released, so instead of staying there for a year, he stayed for 52 days. 

Rene at the grand opening of the Tower Hotel in the late sixties.

On February 27 Rene was transferred to the Teresa jail. “The first afternoon I was inside, we were around 80 people in the room and one guy walks up to me and tells me in English to take off my shirt, so I did. Then he tells me to take off my pants, so I did and thought this is it. He takes my clothes and starts feeling through the linings—It turns out he was looking for shabu. So now I’m standing there—stark naked—and one guy sitting over here whips out his cock and starts jerking it towards me. I thought I was going to get raped by 80 guys.” After half an hour, the warden arrives with a court order for Rene to be transferred to any hospital, because, by this time, he was suffering from scabs all over and his body was covered in ointment. “You know in the mornings when you have an erection? The pain was just horrible because it stretches the wounds and hurts you to death.” Rene was transferred to the top floor and stayed there from February 27 to April 30 because there were no escorts available to take him to a hospital. “Four judges denied me bail. The fifth one was related to Chavit Singson, who I know from my Baguio days, and he saw that there was no evidence—so then I got bail and my case was dismissed in May of last year. It was the most horrible experience of my life.”

“How he survived prison is really beyond me,” says Marilou. “God only knows what they did to him there.” She looks up with an expression of baffled concern, and says, “Well he’s big and tall and has a very strong character—it was already formed when his parents sent him to strict schools in Switzerland. He’s angry but not miserably depressed. He’s a man, a strong man with a lot of integrity. He knows what’s right and what’s wrong, and he has a lot of strength.”

While Rene languished in jail, his estate was plundered. Safety boxes were opened and accounts were closed both here and in the States. “So then I had no more money to pay the lawyers. Josine Elizalde helped me sell some of my paintings. They sold some of my antique jars—I used to have a few hundred of those. Minnie Osmeña and some other ladies also raised money for me. In fact, I still have to pay all that back.” During the entire time Rene was incarcerated, he claims he was robbed of roughly a billion pesos worth of paintings, antiques, and jewelry. “I had a Corot painting worth maybe half a million dollars that was stolen along with all my Lunas and Amorsolos. My designer clothes and shoes were taken with all my Georgian silver. All my cars and stock certificates were stolen. They took seven watches from me in Antipolo. That’s why I don’t wear a watch—they’re all gone! I had sixty gold coins that were my mother’s, and only two were left. All my studs, cufflinks, chains, everything! And I had guards who were paid eighteen thousand pesos a month each to watch the house, so they were the ones who did it. Big Score.”

“He had all of these talents, and then all of a sudden—everything happened,” laments Marilou. “People who see him and talk to him now will find an embittered man. But, I mean, it’s understandable. If I was jailed for over a year and everything was taken away from me—my house, my buildings, my shares of stock—I don’t know how I would react either.”

Even though Rene’s life has taken every wrong turn imaginable, he claims he would readily fight the same fight all over again. “It’s not an experience I treasure with me, but I don’t regret it. I lost everything but I’m not going to give up. No way. I’ve never compromised on anything, that’s why I’m referred to as the biggest threat to the establishment. I’m very controversial, but at least I’m still alive.”

From once living as a golden boy in the summits of high society, Rene has slowly over the years disappeared into obscurity, shutting himself out from his friends and holing up in his hermit’s house where Jerome, his bulletproof vest, is always an arm’s length away. “He’s in the poor house,” continues Marilou, “but he still wears his linen shirts, his slacks, his moccasins. When Giovanni Sanna left and I had nobody to take my clothes to, he gave me the number of his tailor in Hong Kong. He’s impeccably dressed to this day.”

From left: Pamen Roxas Elizalde, Patxi Elizalde, Ditas Lanuza, and Carlos Dela Precilla—a painter who died in a car accident.

Despite all the problems the pitchfork of fate has tossed into his bonfire of a life, Rene refuses to lose hope—even if some might see it as maintaining delusions of grandeur. In the middle of the interview he gets a call from Ralph, his “man in Singapore,” who is apparently yacht-shopping for Rene at a local boat show. I take note of snippets from their conversation: “Seventy feet? No that’s too small . . . there are many islands in the Philippines, so I plan to sail around them . . . hundred forty feet? Now that’s a big one. . . .” After he gets off the phone he says, “I’m going to spend some of the money I collect because I can’t take it with me. I told Ralph to look for a Dutch-built boat because they have the best resale value. There’s a yacht for sale that belongs to this guy who owns the Subaru dealership in Fort Lauderdale. He’s selling it for thirty-five million dollars. It’s the fastest in the world—seventeen knots. But unless I collect what they owe me, forget it. The government owes me so much money, hijo de puta.”

But, for Rene, the fact remains that there is still a possibility—however dismal or slim it might seem—of bouncing back into the good life. According to him, most of his court cases were won a long time ago, but nobody respects the decisions. “They’re sore losers,” he says, “so they keep giving me new hassles.” In what appears to be the last ace in his sleeve in this brutal legal battle to be compensated for all the land he lost in the various cases, Rene hired a famous lawyer from the States who won a case against Iran and charges a thousand dollars an hour. “I had to sell more land to pay him. If this doesn’t work, then nothing will. It will keep dragging me and dragging me and dragging me until I die. . . .” He ponders a moment, then says, “I tell you, the biggest mistake I ever made was coming back to the Philippines from Europe. I never should have come back to this super cock-sucking town. Biggest mistake of my life—because it’s all bullshit here. All I can tell you is this: You say you have a three-month-old baby girl?” He looks at me with a strange fire in his eye. “Well, she and all the other children being born today will have a better life if I succeed in what I am trying to do. Believe me.”

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