In the 60s and 70s, millionaire playboy and man of the world Rene Knecht was unanimously considered the most desirable man in Manila. But when he started picking fights with some very powerful people, his life went into a vicious tailspin of brutal court battles, gradual impoverishment, and hard jail time. Jose Mari Ugarte checks up on the 70-year-old Knecht and recounts the swinging highs and desolate lows of a genuine Philippine character

Rene Knecht as photographed by Juan Caguicla, June 2007

If Rene Knecht had hit rock bottom, like so many people said he had, you couldn’t tell by the way he first spoke to me—with the sophisticated and slightly effeminate Spanglish drawl of an old money mestizo gentleman. And, as in any ice-breaking, cross-generational confrontation between two Spaniards in Manila, he attempted to make a connection by asking me who my parents were. Of course, he knew them well, and launched into the ensuing four-hour conversation by telling me how sweet the santols were in my grandparents’ old house in San Juan, and how my maternal grandfather was a samurai baron from Japan.

“You know when the Spaniards first came to the Philippines,” he announced with the velvety voice of a wise old hipster, “they called it Islas Ladronas . . . because in most countries it’s the men who keep a harem—but here it was the women. They used to swim over to the Spanish Galleons, steal nails and hide ‘em in their body parts—that’s historically recorded. . . . Oma, the Japanese commander had a querida who had four Nescafe jars full of solitaryo diamonds given to her by women who didn’t want their sons, husbands, or boyfriends killed by the Japs. . . .”

Our talk meandered like a babbling brook from one story to another, and each one was either quirky, strange, amusing, or sad—none were dull—and, as I listened, I began to clearly understand what people I had spoken to meant when they repeatedly said, “You should do a story on Rene Knecht. He’s had a very interesting life, a genuinely weird riches to rags cautionary tale involving guns, broads, drugs, gold, and all the other props that set the stage for a primetime drama about a glamorous life gone awry.” Listening to him talk was like listening to an audio book or a special Discovery Channel documentary about the bald-faced absurdity of living in a zoo like Manila, because, after the first half-hour or so of energized banter, it was obvious he possessed a wealth of experience—from sailing trimarans off the coast of the Cote d’Azur to being supposedly poisoned in the greasy mess hall of an Antipolo jail house. “This guy’s a real character,” I heard Mauro Prieto say at a recent dinner party Rene attended. He would hopsctotch through seven different topics without skipping a beat, and the more he spoke, the more twisted his sense of humor would turn, dishing out sleazy historical gossip from pre-war Manila about old sex-crazed Spanish families and referring to certain women of influence as “that china chongga de kubeta.” By the end of our conversation, I had heard many strange things, including the theory that all families in the Philippines with names that began with “De la” came from priests who fornicated (he is a Dela Riva), and how to properly say, “Suck my cock” in Fookien Chinese. It was impossible to remember everything he said, so I asked if I could come to his house and pick his brain. “Sure,” he said. “Come over tomorrow and I’ll poison your mind.”

“You should do a story on Rene Knecht. He’s had a very interesting life, a genuinely weird riches to rags cautionary tale involving guns, broads, drugs, and gold.”

Seventy-year-old Rene Knecht, who for almost three decades was the envied toast of Manila’s social elite, now lives literally on the fringes of society, on the industrial edge of Fort Bonifacio in a forgotten village full of dead-end streets, where the first U.S. Cavalry Troop was stationed in the early 1900s. Signs are missing, so I have to call him for directions and he leads me to an unglamorous little townhouse at the far end of a street with an empty garage and a rusty padlocked gate. He stands outside waiting for me in the shade of a guava tree, tall and rickety, like an old scarecrow wearing a long-sleeved YSL dress shirt with an elegant insignia on its breast pocket, Colony Blue Bermuda shorts, and polished calfskin Italian loafers with no socks. He looks like a matinee idol gone sour, with a full head of flowing white hair over a face that looks like it’s seen better days—which it has. Glorious days, in fact, filled with lusty women, polo ponies, and yacht parties—and it seems that his wardrobe is one of the very few things that keep him anchored to that decadent past.

But there are other things. As we shake hands, he tells me I look like my mother and lets me through the gate where I shrug off Bougainvillea thorns and notice some artifacts from a charmed former life: those Borneo jars of all sizes that were ubiquitous in Forbes Park palaces, scattered and cracked along the small front walkway with mad roosters perched on their rims and screaming at me as we enter the house. They sound like they desperately want to rip my nuts off, but I know they are just being hospitable—as are the dozen or so stray cats wandering around the house. The closest one to me looks blind, and starts tiptoeing across an old fax machine and hissing at the chickens.

Inside, the house is a bodega of unpacked boxes, festooned with designer dress shirts, and crudely furnished with old Louis VI chairs and a handful of solid kamagong tables disappearing under mountains of paperwork. Arranged randomly on top of a large work desk smothered with all sorts of readable junk are old framed photographs of Rene looking like every woman’s fantasy—bare-chested on a cigarette boat, in a tuxedo at the grand opening of one of his hotels. The suffering house is a symbol of his life: The Golden Boy of Manila, whose personal style and elegance was unmatched by anybody in Philippine society during the sixties and seventies, has since then been drowning to death in a money pit of embattled court cases, disputed land titles, and other savage legal wars that have all but demoralized him completely.

“I knew Yamashita. 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 the compound.”

He lives with friends he made in jail. “They sleep in the master bedroom upstairs—I sleep over there.” He points to an Elmwood opium bench against the wall with no cushion. In front of it is a round cocktail table also flooded with faxes, letters, receipts, newspaper clippings, search warrants, lab reports, court orders, and other grim reminders of his struggles with the law. “Because I’ve already been broken into twice and I don’t want anybody shooting me through the window,” he explains. There is a distinct sense of paranoia in the air, especially when I glance over at another messy table and find a bulletproof vest lying on top of it. “In the meantime I’m raising chickens as a hobby,” he says. “I have seven chickens outside and five chicks in here. The cats are accidental. I never really liked cats. They just sort of wandered in—PUSPUSPUSPUSPUS!” Good God, I thought, as my heart skipped a beat, startled by his sudden feeding call. “My manicurist in Pasay said, ‘Masuerte yung pusa na may limang kulay.’ So now one of them just had babies again and two of them are limang kulay—so maybe my luck’s about to change.”

Rosemary Lopez, Maurice Arcache, and Ditas Lanuza at a party in Rene’s house in 1962.

Blind optimism may be the only weapon left in Rene’s arsenal. He’s been fighting the law since the late sixties, and since then has been slowly backing himself into a nearly hopeless corner. With an almost Palestinian zeal, Rene’s fight has always been about land, but has spawned into many different battles with varying degrees of ugliness and consequence, and his stubborn refusal to compromise and play by the rules has turned him into a dangerous enemy of the state. His life for the past 20 years can be summed up as a vindictive quest to take back the land that was once his, regain the fortune and glory he once basked in, and take down the members of the establishment that, in his view, deserve to be punished. Without ever mincing his words, he’s picked fights with everyone from the Zobels and Lopezes, mayors Pablo Cuneta and Jojo Binay, bank presidents and cabinet secretaries to every Philippine president since Ferdinand Marcos—who he once called “an uncouth barbarian who lives by the rule of the jungle” in a letter he sent to the I.M.F., the president himself, and all the members of his cabinet. He’s never backed down once, regardless of whether he was right or wrong, and for it his life has spiraled desperately from the lavish heaven it once was to the living hell it has degraded into—or, to quote the title of his autobiography in progress, into “The Gardens of Satan.”

The strange and terrible story of Rene Knecht’s life began in San Pedro, Makati in 1936, as an only child to Cristina Dela Riva, a mestiza, and Frederic Knecht, a Swiss national whose family had owned the famously luxurious Grand Hotel in Paris. Frederic left France on a romantic Gauguin-inspired expedition to Tahiti, but somehow ended up in Manila, where he quickly made money as a dealmaker in the commodities market. During the sugar boom of 1919, when “the barons and hacenderos drove around in cars with bumpers made of silver and gold,” Frederic had become wealthy enough to travel around the world and bring back many of the treasured objets d’arts Rene would eventually inherit, such as Japanese incense burners and round samisen players. One day he chanced upon the land he bought in Pasay at a steep three pesos per square meter, and built the family compound that would later later become a sprawling monument to everything Rene ever believed in or fought for.

The Second World War peaked and branded a searing memory in Rene’s consciousness. “I’ll never forget,” he says ruefully, “it was a Sunday, February the 11th. We hadn’t seen the sky in four days because they were burning Manila. My father’s office building was destroyed except for a big bodega full of rum that was made by the Spaniards with thick walls. They were trying to break open the door, but it had three or four locks. That’s how he got his business going again; he made a fortune selling the rum to the Americans who wanted to get drunk and fuck around. That’s how the Elizaldes became rich as well—Tanduay wasn’t burned.”

Rene at age 10

After the war, Rene went back to the American school which was in a Quonset hut in the seafront compound, in the old Polo Club in Pasay. According to Rene, different members of the Zobel family were elected to the board until the U.S. government bought the seafront from them for a million-plus and the new Polo Club was built. “Pablo Antonio was the architect, and it opened in 1950. The day of its inauguration, a Swiss boy of eleven died. He dove into the shallow end of the pool, and hit his head on the tiles. Six months later, his mother committed suicide,” Rene remembers. “They were living in the Bel-Air apartments near Luneta, and she jumped out the window.”

A jungled and peaceful estate near the boulevard and bay, the Knecht compound had an area of 8,102 square meters, and encompassed a beautiful main house and seven good-sized bungalows that were rented out mostly to Swiss expats. The houses were old Filipino homes from the thirties made of akle-wood , narra, and thick black ipil, surrounded by sliding capiz-shell windows. Each was built over a sort of basement garage or silong where the tenants would park their cars and store junk. The Knecht’s house was 15 meters long, and was particularly lavish with Machuca-tiled bedrooms and narra floors that were covered almost wall-to-wall with Persian and Chinese carpets. “I liked to walk around barefoot,” he says in a voice and manner that makes me wonder how Peter O’Toole would sound like if he grew up in Manila.

Speakers were also perched on Indian mango branches so you could hear music playing in the gardens, if I remember correctly, having visited the compound a couple of times in the early eighties when my parents’ friends, TIME magazine photographer Sandro Tucci and his girlfriend Candy Lehman lived there in a house surrounded by white makopa, tamarind, and champaca trees. “Raffy Prieto was renting the house where Louie Ysmael and his gang used to party,” recalls Rene, “and my mother ended up suing Raffy and throwing them out because of all the wild parties they were having. They tried talking to me and I said, ‘Look, I’ve got nothing to do with this. The income of the compound goes to my mother.”

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