Part 5 Gold Warriors, How America Secretly Recovered Yamashita's Gold ... Pointing The Way ... Sanctifying the Gold

GOLD WARRIORS 

HOW AMERICA SECRETLY 

RECOVERED YAMASHITA’S GOLD 

By Sterling & Peggy Seagrave

CHAPTER ELEVEN 

POINTING THE WAY 

When Santy died in 1974, magazines and newspapers already were calling President Marcos the richest man in Asia, with holdings estimated from $10-billion to $100-billion. Curiously, the source of his wealth could not be explained. With a grin, Marcos told people he had found Yamashita’s Gold. They thought he was joking. But a number of people were shown around Marcos vaults stacked with gold bars, some with strange markings. Maybe it was not a joke. General John Singlaub, one of the original CIA Cold Warriors who knew all about Santy’s recoveries, added his assurance that “Marcos’s $12-billion fortune actually came from [Yamashita’s] treasure”. 

What greatly enlarged Ferdinand’s assets was the reappearance of Ben Valmores, the Filipino valet of Prince Takeda, present during the inventory and sealing of many Golden Lily vaults during the war. It was Ben that enabled a Marcos team to find and recover treasure from Teresa-2, from the sunken cruiser Nachi, and other sites. We last saw Ben in June 1945 at Tunnel-8, the underground complex near Bambang where 175 Japanese chief engineers were given a farewell drinking party before being buried alive. At midnight, when General Yamashita and Prince Takeda (‘Kimsu’) were leaving the cavern, and dynamite charges were about to be set off, the prince refused to leave Ben inside. Over Yamashita’s angry protests, he took Ben to the surface and led him to safety. Moments later, a huge explosion shook the ground. 

“Kimsu had promised my papa that he would bring me home when the war was over,” Ben told us. “So he would not let Yamashita leave me inside. When we were in front of my uncle’s house, Kimsu told me he was leaving that night to go back to Japan on a submarine. He gave me his sword, and his tunic. He said I must never change my character. Always obey my father. He thanked me for being loyal to him. Then he gave me his satchel of treasure maps and told me to bury it in a box in the ground, and one day he would come back for it.” 

The prince then vanished into the night. As instructed, Ben buried the satchel behind Uncle Lino’s house, inside a stout wooden box. General Yamashita surrendered to the U.S. Army three months later. 

Many years passed before Ben dug up the satchel. In the meantime the roads around Dulao and Bambang were full of American soldiers. Ben befriended them, and was given a job working in a field kitchen. He sold the GIs rusty Japanese swords and campaign medals. Once he hitched a carabao to an abandoned Japanese Army truck, one of many hidden in the forest near Indiana barrio, and pulled it to Dulao where he sold it to some GIs for $5. He sold fifteen trucks in all. In those days, you could get a full meal of rice and pork for only five cents. 

When the American soldiers had gone, and life in the Cagayan Valley returned to normal, Ben got out Takeda’s sword and white uniform. The tunic fit him well. On the left breast still was the embroidered red chrysanthemum. Ben wore it a few times till his father warned him that people might call him a traitor. After that he only wore it inside their house. The samurai sword he used at harvest time, to cut the ripened stalks of rice, until there was nothing left of the blade. He did not realize that it had been given to Prince Takeda by his grandfather, Emperor Meiji. Twenty years passed, but Prince Takeda did not come back. 

To provide for Ben’s future, the prince had buried two large steel trunks full of gold ingots. It had taken five carabao and fifteen soldiers to drag each trunk into the pit under a giant mango tree near Pingkian Bridge. Takeda had told him, when the war was over Ben must dig up the boxes, buy a large ranch, marry the pretty girl who had caught their eye in Dulao, and raise lots of children. But until the American soldiers left, Ben was afraid to go near the bridge. 

In 1949 a Manila attorney named Benitez, who knew Uncle Lino, came to Bambang. He said he was looking for the Filipino boy who had been with the Japanese at San Fernando during the war. Ben’s uncle said that was his nephew. He said Ben was ‘crazy’ — always wanting to dig for treasure. “Let’s go, Papa, let’s dig there, and there,” Lino mimicked. “He knows where they buried the treasure, but his father tells him not to mess with it because of the booby traps.” 

When Ben got home from working in the fields, he told Benitez that he knew nothing about treasure. Right in front of the attorney, Uncle Lino reminded Ben about the two steel trunks the prince had left for him. The attorney was excited and insisted that he and Ben go immediately to Pingkian to recover the trunks. Ben could keep one, the attorney the other. Early next morning they drove with a group of sturdy farm workers to the barrio by the Pingkian River. An old man was waiting for them, the headman of the barrio. Benitez pretended he was surprised to find the mayor waiting, and said: “You know, mayor, we have a really important business matter to discuss.” 

“Let’s go upstairs,” the mayor said. Ben was left downstairs with the other men to breakfast on cold boiled sweet potatoes. When the two conspirators returned, the headman told Ben, “You know, a civilian like you is not allowed to hold gold in his possession. That is why the partition of 50/50 is no good. Our government does not allow that. I will give you one bar, as your reward for pointing us to it.” 

Ben looked at Attorney Benitez, who nodded his head gravely. 

“Okay,” Ben said. “Let’s go now. You don’t have to give me anything. I just want to see what is in the boxes.” He took them to an acacia tree by the river, instead of to the mango tree. He watched them dig all day, quietly chuckling to himself. When the sun went down and they had found nothing, Ben said, “Maybe the Japs dug it up and put it somewhere else.” 

Benitez looked up at the tree and said, “You told me it was under a mango tree. This is an acacia tree.” 

“I thought it was a mango tree.” 

On their way back to Dulao, Ben told the attorney, “It’s a good thing I got to know you early, because you think you are smart enough to fool me.” When they got home, Ben told his Uncle Lino what the two men had tried to do. Benitez had a lot of explaining to do. Ben left them to it, and went outside to have a good laugh by himself. 

Afraid that the Pingkian mayor would capture and torture him, Ben did not go back for many years. The river was in NPA (New People’s Army) territory, and Ben did not want to be kidnapped by the Marxists. When he finally went back in 1999 with a friend, they discovered that a huge typhoon had caused flash floods that swept away the Pingkian Bridge and the entire embankment where the two trunks were buried. Even the big mango tree was gone. Each of the trunks had weighed over one ton, worth millions of dollars. Now they were on the bottom of the Pingkian River, buried in the muck. So much for the ranch. 

The pretty girl Kimsu fancied married somebody else. But Ben did marry and had children. When that first marriage ended, he married again and had two daughters, of whom he was very fond. 

Twenty years after the war, Ben was still a poor rice farmer. He owned a little house in Dulao, smack in the midst of hundreds of Japanese hiding places, but he never had much luck finding them. When he did, he always was cheated or robbed. On quiet evenings, he sat looking at the cool mountain valleys dotted with cone-shaped hills. The maps Kimsu had given him were still buried behind the house. Ben had dug up the satchel several times to look for a map simple enough to decipher himself. They made no sense to him, so he put the maps back and re-buried the satchel, only keeping out a compass and magnifying glass. 

Among treasure hunters it was common knowledge that such maps existed. There were three types: a white series showing the general location of each site; a red series like Ben had, coded with all the essential information needed to make a recovery if you understood the code; and a blue series of detailed engineering drawings in which all the information was presented in plain technical language. Some white series maps had been found in a church and were in circulation, but they did not give the coordinates needed to pinpoint a vault, or its depth. 

In 1953, seven young Japanese came to see Ben, offering money for ‘his’ maps. They were too young to have been in the war, but somehow they knew the maps had been left with Ben, and they knew Ben lived in Dulao. Perhaps they were friends of Prince Takeda’s children, or might have been the sons of the prince. They did not explain who they were. When Ben denied knowing anything about treasure maps and asked why they came to see him, they laughed, smiled and said, “We know you.” Then they went away and never came back. 

After the war, gold hunting became a cottage industry. Filipinos who claimed they knew where the Japanese hid gold were called Pointers. Every barrio had Pointers, gold junkies, con men, local priests or preachers, all with ‘secret maps’ and ‘eyewitness’ memory. For a substantial monthly retainer, they would take you to a secret site, and watch you dig. They had an uncanny sense of timing, and just before you were ready to give up, the Pointer would vanish to find another sucker. 

Ben had no interest in being a Pointer. He kept his oath to Kimsu. He only talked with his father about sites around Bambang. Ben’s visual memory was flawless. He remembered how he had gone with Kimsu to each of the sites, and how he watched while the prince walked around with the blue series engineering drawings, and did a final inventory before ordering the vault closed. The minute treasure hunters pressed Ben for details, he clammed up. 

He was by no means the only eyewitness – there were POWs who survived, Taiwanese slave laborers who escaped, Filipinos and a few Americans like John Ballinger who saw the Japanese hiding gold. A family that owned pastureland at the Indiana site were rumored to have made a recovery. They became VIPs in Bambang, put up a three-storey building in town, and went into business providing cable TV shows downloaded from three large satellite dishes. Ben was the only one present at all 175 ‘imperial’ sites, and he stayed poor. 

Once he dug up a small gold Buddha, four inches tall. He could have bought a small ranch, but he did not know its value and traded it for a radio. He was just twenty-two years old then. He remained a humble, good-natured man, affectionate to his wife and children, kind, and quick to laugh. 

Only in the mid-1960s, when Ferdinand Marcos began making onshore and offshore recovery deals with the Japanese, was official hostility relaxed, and Japanese began coming back to the Philippines in significant numbers to hunt for treasure. Small groups came to the Cagayan Valley every year. One team searched around the Bambang cemetery where Ben had watched Kimsu’s naked slave laborers dig deep pits and tunnels leading down to a very big circular vault rated as a 777 site – part of the complex that included Tunnel-8 and Tunnel-9. Ben did not recognize anyone in the group. One day they were gone. Villagers found a tree by the cemetery that had been cut down during the night with a chain saw, exposing the inside of the tree trunk. There they clearly saw where several gold bars had been hidden, leaving their impression in the wood as the tree grew around the bars. 

At the end of 1968, President Marcos sent a team to Tokyo to make a deal for more effective joint recoveries. The team included Lieutenant Colonel Florentino Villacrusis, a senior intelligence officer; Brigadier General Onofre T. Ramos, comptroller of the Philippine armed forces; and two other officers. Their mission was to acquire a set of Golden Lily treasure maps in return for a share to Japan of whatever Marcos recovered. If Tokyo did not cooperate, Marcos warned that he would close down Japanese companies all over the islands. 

In his first two years as president, Marcos had authorized offshore recoveries by a syndicate of Japanese and Korean gangsters, headed by Kodama and Machii Hisayuki, head of the Tosei-kai. Another partner was billionaire fixer Sasakawa Ryoichi, another of Kodama’s Sugamo Prison cellmates, who staged speedboat races, one of Japan’s favorite betting sports and a convenient way to launder money. His true wealth came from secret deals with President Sukarno and President Marcos to share in the recovery of war loot in Indonesia and the Philippines. “I was very close to Marcos,” Sasakawa told journalists, “long before he became president.” He pointed Marcos at several sites, including the sunken cruiser Nachi in Manila Bay, and in return was allowed to build cemeteries and memorials for Japanese war dead in the Philippines, on property that just happened to include Golden Lily sites. “I personally donated the biggest cultural hall in [the Philippines],” Sasakawa boasted, “as well as supplied the cement.” Forty thousand sacks, to be precise. 

When the Villacrusis team arrived in Tokyo in 1968, Kodama and Sasakawa told them that the head of Golden Lily, Prince Chichibu, had died of tuberculosis in the early 1950s. But they arranged for Villacrusis to have a private audience with another aristocrat who had worked for Prince Chichibu. According to members of the Villacrusis family, this was “a ranking Japanese officer who was a cousin of Emperor Hirohito”. This shadowy figure, high up in Japan’s intelligence services, told Ramos and Villacrusis that the Japanese had hidden over $100-billion worth of treasure in the Philippines and it would take ‘more than a century’ to recover it all. In his memorandum of the meeting, Villacrusis identified this Japanese aristocrat only as Lord Ichivara, which Villacrusis – with his Spanish language background – spelled phonetically as ‘Lord Ichibarra’. Many documents later recovered from the Presidential Security Command after Marcos lost power refer to secret contacts in Tokyo with ‘Lord Ichibarra’. 

From these documents, it is evident that Lord Ichivara was one of Prince Chichibu’s key men, hiding loot in Luzon during 1942-1945, a walking encyclopedia of Golden Lily. He appears to have been a senior intelligence officer working with Kodama and Prince Chichibu during the war. But all our efforts to identify Lord Ichivara have failed. It is a common Japanese name that can be spelled various ways. After the war, SCAP forced Japan to abandon its titled aristocracy, so the use of such a title in 1968 was anachronistic. He may not have been a prince, but a count or baron. Lord Ichivara may have been a pseudonym to keep the Filipinos from knowing who he really was. Or he could have become a ‘lord’ after the war, among those privately given honors by Emperor Hirohito in recognition of wartime service. We considered the possibility that Lord Ichivara was a pseudonym for Prince Takeda, but concluded that they were two different men. Ichivara’s willingness to conspire with President Marcos does not square with the personal loyalties of Prince Takeda. ‘Kimsu’ would have kept Marcos away from Ben Valmores, but Lord Ichivara steered him to Ben. 

One Japanese source told us Lord Ichivara might be the notorious Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, reviled for the Sook Ching massacres of ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, and for eating an Allied pilot’s liver. After Sook Ching, he was sent to Manila as troubleshooter with the rank of ‘Imperial Inspector General’. True to form, Tsuji became a key figure responsible for the Bataan Death March when he bypassed mild-mannered General Homma and urged field officers to murder Allied prisoners during the march. When he was in areas controlled by the Imperial Navy, Tsuji had the navy rank of captain. In areas controlled by the army, he changed uniforms and became a colonel. Although he made frequent trips to Tokyo by plane the next two years, and put in appearances at Guadalcanal and other battles, he is said to have spent most of 1943 and 1944 in Luzon working with Kodama and keeping an eye on Golden Lily treasure sites in and around Manila. Late in 1944, Tsuji moved to Burma and Siam, and was in Bangkok in August 1945 when Japan surrendered, eluding capture. 

Tsuji or not, Lord Ichivara arrived in Manila in mid-1942, wearing a naval uniform. Japanese ships were unloading plunder at the Manila docks, and it was then taken by truck convoy to Fort Bonifacio. Like Fort Santiago, Fort Bonifacio had a prison full of suspected spies and saboteurs. On a visit to Bonifacio, Ichivara came upon a prisoner hanging by his thumbs from a flagpole halyard, and made a wry remark in Japanese. To his surprise, the prisoner replied in fluent Japanese. Ichivara asked how he came to speak the language. The prisoner replied that his mother was Filipina but his father had been a Japanese officer attached to the embassy in Manila. 

“What is your name?” Ichivara asked. 

“Leopoldo Giga,” the man answered. His friends called him Pol, he added. 

“Giga is a Japanese name,” the navy captain said. In fact, a Major Giga was famous for helping assassinate the Manchurian warlord, Chang Tso-lin, in 1928. This, it turned out, was Pol Giga’s father. Major Giga had served as a Japanese intelligence officer all over East Asia. While stationed in Manila in the early 1920s, he had married a Filipino woman and had a son. The boy grew up speaking Japanese, English and Tagalog, but was left behind when his father went off to other postings in Shanghai and Mukden. In 1938, Major Giga himself was assassinated in Japan by agents sent by the murdered warlord’s son. 

Ichivara ordered soldiers to untie the prisoner and had Giga released into his custody. From then on he employed Giga as an interpreter and informant. To test Pol’s loyalty and cold-bloodedness, Ichivara had him put on a hood and review all the prisoners at Ft. Bonifacio. Giga and Ichivara sat at a table while the prisoners walked by, and the hooded Giga nodded whenever he spotted a man who he thought was secretly working for the Americans. All those men were executed immediately. The word for a traitor in Tagalog was ‘Makapili’, but the hood hid Giga’s identity. 

From then on, Pol Giga was Ichivara’s man in Luzon. It was Ichivara who worked with Japanese engineers to design four treasure vaults at Manila’s Fort Santiago, including the booby traps. Pol arranged for a Filipino electrician from Cavite to help wire the booby traps. 

When Ichivara moved his operations from Manila to the countryside, under army control, he changed into the uniform of a colonel and arranged for Giga to be given the rank of lieutenant in the Japanese 16th Army engineering corps. Giga said he was sent to Japan for six months to learn tunneling technology. But Giga proved to be such a chameleon, taking on whatever color suited the occasion, that his story changed constantly. 

In Tokyo twenty-five years later, in 1968, Lord Ichivara told Colonel Villacrusis that the best way to recover a full set of the Golden Lily treasure maps for President Marcos would be by finding Pol Giga. Then Villacrusis could have Giga track down Ben Valmores, the wartime valet of Prince Takeda. The prince, he explained, had left a whole set of maps with Ben at the end of the war, in the event that the submarine taking him back to Japan was sunk. He told Villacrusis that Giga was employed by the Colgate toothpaste factory in the Philippines. So it is evident that Ichivara had been in contact with Giga since the war. Ichivara said that Giga supplemented his Colgate income by serving as a translator, pointer and fixer for Japanese groups digging for gold. Giga hired cars, drill rigs, generators, and jackhammers, so the Japanese did not attract unwelcome attention. Villacrusis asked how would they know that Giga had found the right Ben Valmores? Lord Ichivara said they could put Ben on the telephone directly with Prince Takeda, and they could all listen to the conversation. If he were the right Ben Valmores, they would know immediately. 

On his return from Tokyo, Villacrusis immediately sent security men to find Giga at Colgate, and had him brought to the Presidential Security Command. Giga was scared, ready to do whatever was asked of him. Finding Ben Valmores, he said, would not be difficult. He had seen Ben many times during the war, accompanying his prince, who had been based most of the time in the barrio of San Fernando, outside Bambang, and Ben’s family had lived somewhere nearby. So Giga took time off from Colgate and caught a bus into the mountains. 

When Giga knocked on his door in Dulao early in January 1969, Ben Valmores had no idea who he was. Giga claimed that during the war he and Ben had spoken often at different Golden Lily sites, where Giga claimed he was personally involved in the inventories. Ben knew this was not true because only Prince Takeda did inventories, and he was certain he had never seen Giga before. Giga said he always had worn a Japanese uniform, so how could Ben remember him among all the other soldiers? Their relationship was strained from the beginning, because Ben sensed that Pol was a devious and unreliable character. Later, Ben discovered that Pol was telling everybody that he – Giga – had been the prince’s valet, and the prince had given the maps to him, not to Ben. Giga claimed to have buried the map satchel, then dug it up after the war, and that only he had the true copies. For a retainer of a thousand dollars a month, Giga would show people where to dig. (When our researcher tracked down Giga in 1986, he insisted that Ben had died the previous year; that both he and Ben were mestizo, half Filipino, half Japanese, which also was untrue. Then he recounted how he and Ben had “stolen the maps from General Yamashita’s headquarters in Baguio” in the closing weeks of the war. It was only later that we discovered that Giga had lied to keep us from talking to Ben.) 

Giga stayed in Dulao several weeks, trying to win Ben over. To fend him off, Ben pretended he spoke only Ilocano, but Giga switched to Japanese, saying he knew Ben had learned basic Japanese during the war. Giga said he came as an emissary from President Marcos who wanted Ben’s maps to make gold recoveries that would permanently lift Filipinos out of poverty. Ben doubted this, because the reputation of Ferdinand Marcos was evil, and Imelda’s million-dollar shopping sprees were making headlines. Finally, Giga dropped all pretence and said if Ben refused to turn over the maps, soldiers from the Presidential Security Command would take him and his whole family to Bilibad Prison, where they would be tortured, Ben’s daughters would be abused, and all of them killed. Ben still refused. 

He was frightened for his wife and children, but he had given his oath to Kimsu. Twenty-three years had passed since Prince Takeda had gone back to Japan. Ben had sworn to guard the maps for thirty years, so there were seven years to go. The prince had never returned, and had never contacted Ben. For all he knew, Kimsu was dead. Nevertheless, Ben had never revealed Kimsu’s real name to anyone. Not once had he mentioned the names of Prince Chichibu, Prince Mikasa, and Prince Asaka. Finally, Ben decided on a compromise to protect his family. 

Early one morning, he dug up the satchel again. First he set aside the blue series maps, which were the engineering drawings. He wrapped these in plastic, placed them in a strong box and immediately reburied them. Next he studied the red series maps. There were 175 red series maps in all. Ben set aside his three favorite sites for himself. These were the maps of Tunnel-8 and Tunnel-9, near Bambang, and Montalban east of Manila. The red series maps were on sheets of stout paper, heavily waxed after the drawings were finished. They provided a 3-dimensional view of the terrain. Movie audiences who watched Akira Kurosawa’s classic film, Seven Samurai, saw a similar map drawn by the samurai as they prepared to defend the village from bandits. Added to the stylized drawing was vital coded information — a Japanese flag flying to the right or left showed whether the map must be read the way it was or in a mirror; a clock-face with two or more hands provided information about compass orientation, depths and booby traps; other icons showed exactly what treasure was in which part of each site. Most important, the red series maps indicated the fulcrum point for each site. Without knowing the fulcrum point, you would never know the correct depth or bearings. (We reproduce several red series maps on our CDs.) Of the remaining 172 red series maps, Ben selected forty that he thought were minor, or very difficult. If he was pressed, and his family was in peril, he could give this bundle of forty to Giga to take to Marcos. 

A few days later, Colonel Villacrusis himself came to Ben’s house, banging on the door in the middle of the night, yelling: “Ben, Ben!” 

Ben let him in. Villacrusis said he was on a special mission for the president, to get the maps. Ben said he could not comply, because of his oath to Kimsu. Villacrusis said, “We will honor your words!” He would not take the maps by force. But Ben had to come with him to Manila to show the maps “only to the president — and then we will give them back to you”. Realizing he had no choice, Ben handed Villacrusis the map bundle of forty minor sites. Villacrusis was so fascinated that he did not ask to see the others. 

Thoroughly scared, Ben rode down from the mountains with Villacrusis in his chauffeured army staff car, carrying the maps in an old leather case. Instead of going to Malacanang Palace, they drove to the home of Brig. Gen. Onofrio Ramos, the army comptroller who had gone with Villacrusis to Tokyo, to see Kodama, Sasakawa and Lord Ichivara. In the general’s secure basement office, a group of overweight cigar-smoking cronies were waiting, including several Marcos cabinet ministers. Mrs. Ramos served drinks as the men lit cigars and talked. They were mightily pleased with themselves. The next question was whether to take Ben immediately to Malacanang Palace to meet Marcos. Mrs. Ramos butted in: “If I were you I would not surrender this Ben, because you already have the key. Why are you going to give this Ben to the president when you already have the key?“ 

Unable to make up their minds, and reluctant to admit that she was right, they climbed into their cars and drove to the private hideout of Defense Minister Ernesto Mata, in the heights of Antipolo, east of Manila. Villacrusis showed Mata the forty mysterious maps. Mata took the leather folder and rooted around inside it like a wart-hog. Mata was one of the bully-boys of the Marcos regime, with a lot of blood and drool on his hands. He examined several of the maps, comprehending nothing, then said to Ben: “You killed the person who owned these.” 

“No, sir, I didn’t kill for this.” 

“Then why is the portfolio in your hands?” 

“Because he leave it to me.” 

“No, you killed him.” 

Ben was very scared. He whispered to Villacrusis that he wanted to go home. Ben asked to have the maps back, as Villacrusis had promised, but they said President Marcos needed to see them. Villacrusis told Ben that after the president saw the maps they would be returned to Ben. 

Mata had direct lines to the switchboard at Malacanang Palace. Using the secure palace switchboard, they placed the long-anticipated phone call to Lord Ichivara in Tokyo. He had the call patched through to Prince Takeda at his ranch on the east side of Tokyo Bay. While the entire Marcos group listened in, the phone was handed to Ben. The next thing Ben heard was Kimsu’s voice, out of the past: “Benhameen.” Their conversation was short but emotionally charged. When Kimsu started speaking to him in simple Japanese, Ben told us he could tell from the sound of his voice that Kimsu was choked with emotion, probably weeping. Kimsu reminded him of his oath never to give the maps to anyone but an imperial prince, repeating the Mantra: “Benhameen, please, no Filipinos, no Americans, no Japanese, no Chinese, just wait for me.” Defense Minister Mata grabbed the phone away from Ben and put it in its cradle. It was to be Ben’s last direct contact with Kimsu. The Marcos men cheered, waved their cigars in the air, and began high-fiving. This was the right Ben. They decided not to take him to Marcos, now that (as Mrs. Ramos said) they had the key. After all their posturing, Villacrusis, Ramos and Mata never did show a single one of the red series maps to Marcos. 

When they left Mata’s hilltop hideaway, Villacrusis kept the bundle of forty maps to study, giving Ben the empty old leather folder. He also gave Ben some travel money. This was only one of many flashes of kindness Villacrusis displayed. He was not as ruthless as the others. He was content to have forty of the maps. If you could not understand forty, what was the point of having more? He knew he could get the rest from Ben any time he wished, because Ben was afraid for his wife and children. Thankful to be alive, Ben fled back to Bambang. 

In this clumsy, oafish, bullying manner began the big Marcos gold recoveries of the 1970s and early 1980s. Equipped for the first time with real Golden Lily maps, which none of them could understand, Marcos and his lieutenants thought it would be easy. They were wrong. 

Initially, Villacrusis was successful in excavating a site at Santa Mesa Rotunda, where he recovered a mixed variety of gold bars from various Asian countries, and a number of small solid gold Buddhas looted from temples and pagodas. Encouraged, President Marcos put together a special unit of army engineers and set them to work digging at a site in Laguna, where they uncovered several concrete vaults filled with gold bars. (See Chapter Fifteen.) Marcos’s first really big recovery as president was from a Golden Lily vault beneath the flagpole at Camp Aguinaldo. Next, Marcos sent his soldiers to the officers’ club at Fort Bonifacio – previously called Ft. McKinley – where he had them dig down to General MacArthur’s bomb shelter. There they discovered one end of the 35-miles of tunnels under Manila. After two years of exploring these tunnels, they found only one gold bar in the back of an abandoned army truck. The spur tunnels and treasure vaults hidden by Golden Lily were too well disguised. 

Lord Ichivara continued to be helpful. When the Marcos protégé Dr. Gil Gadi ran into trouble digging at Ft. Santiago, he turned to Lord Ichivara for expert advise. A memo to Marcos from Brigadier General Santiago Barangan reports: “Dr. Gadi says because of difficulties he encountered at the Ft. Santiago site, he wrote to Lord Ichibarra in Tokyo, and Lord Ichibarra told him to contact Pedro Lim from Laguna, who had worked with Colonel Yagura and Captain Yamaguchi, who were members of Lord Ichibarra’s team in the hiding of the war loot in Luzon. Pedro Lim then referred Dr. Gadi to Benjamin Irruquia, the Filipino electrical engineer who installed and rigged the explosives [booby traps] at Ft. Santiago for Lord Ichibarra.” 

For Ben, who knew where all the gold vaults were, life in Dulao and Bambang continued in its cyclic pattern of wet rice planting and harvest. The one exception was when Ben became friends with Roger Roxas, the Baguio locksmith who came to Bambang periodically to hunt for buried loot. Over the years Roxas and Ben became friends, and one day Ben agreed to give Roxas a Golden Lily map showing the location of the warren of tunnels behind the Baguio hospital. When Roxas discovered the Gold Buddha, he also found a magnificent gold model of the famous Cathedral of Reims, in France, and gave it to Ben as his share in the recovery. The cathedral was nearly half a meter tall, as big as a wedding cake, beautifully handcrafted, and correct in every detail of the original medieval church, except that in place of the big round stained glass window over the main entrance, the gold model had a finely-made clock. Nobody knew its provenance, except that it came from Vietnam. Such treasures have their own secret lives. But it was clearly the work of a master goldsmith, made for a wealthy patron of the Catholic Church in Hanoi, Hue, or Saigon. As a work of art at auction in London or New York, its value would doubtless exceed its gold content. When he saw what then happened to Roxas and the Gold Buddha, Ben re-buried the cathedral in a box in the yard of his house in Dulao. Later, when General Fabian Ver heard from Pol Giga that Ben had recovered a solid gold cathedral, Ver sent thugs to Ben’s house and threatened to terrorize his wife and children if Ben did not give it to them. Ben complied. Ten years later the only thing Ben still possessed, given to him by Kimsu, was a Japanese campaign medal, showing an airplane, carabao, thatch hut, coconut tree and paddy field. Everything else had been stolen, ‘confiscated’ or lost. “All they ever gave me,” Ben said about Marcos and his cronies, “was cigarettes.” Children were born, treasure hunters came and went, Ben remained poor. 

In 1972 Ben heard that a group of Japanese had arrived in Bambang, and were working with bulldozers and backhoes in the area where General Yamashita’s camp had been, more than half a mile from Kimsu’s camp at San Fernando. Ben laughed that they were digging in the wrong place. He was mistaken. When Ben had toured the underground complex with Kimsu, they had gone down through the Tunnel-8 entrance, which Ben thought was the only one. He did not know there was a separate entrance for Tunnel-9. In 1945, the connecting tunnels were blown up, but the main vaults, lined with steel reinforced concrete, were intact. 

These Japanese re-opened the Tunnel-9 entrance, leading down to Yamashita’s bomb-proof command center. In daylight hours they stayed out of sight below-ground. A neighboring farmer said that at night empty trucks arrived that left loaded before dawn. With Marcos making moves on other Golden Lily sites, Prince Takeda may have authorized the recovery of part of the Bambang complex. It is unlikely that they recovered all, because that would have involved re-opening the connecting tunnels to Tunnel-8 and the Cemetery site. 

We do know that Takeda personally returned to Manila two years later, in 1974, by which time the Tunnel-9 recovery was complete. 

Since leaving Ben and returning to Japan by submarine in June 1945, Takeda had been warmly received by his cousin Hirohito for having successfully completed his mission. He was then sent to Manchuria as chief financial officer of the Imperial Army there for the last months of the war. At war’s end, he was given the assignment of ensuring that the Kwantung Army in Manchuria complied with Hirohito’s order to surrender. After that, Takeda went home to his wife and children in Tokyo. When the peerage system was ended, Takeda forfeited his hereditary title and became simply Mister Takeda Tsuneyoshi. This brought an end to one of Japan’s great princely houses, Takeda-no-miya, founded in 1906 at the wish of the Meiji Emperor, Takeda’s grandfather. Like other former princes, to avoid having his properties seized by the Allies, Takeda sold his estates to the wealthy Tsutsumi family, to whom he remained closely allied for the rest of his life. He kept only one estate, a sprawling ranch in Chiba Prefecture on the eastern side of Tokyo Bay. Like other princes, he tried to become a businessman, starting the Takeda Knitting Machines Company, but it soon went under. When the Americans went home, Takeda quietly resumed his life as one of Japan’s top aristocrats. Money was never a problem. After all, he had helped enrich the entire Japanese establishment, a debt that could never be repaid. Tiring of the ugliness of Tokyo, he spent most of his time at his Chiba ranch, where he raised prized thoroughbred horses, one of the world’s most expensive hobbies. He became president of the Japan Olympic Committee in 1962, and was a member of the International Olympic Committee from 1967 to 1981. (His son continues this IOC tradition.) 

A profile of Takeda in the Japan Times in April 1964 concluded with these remarks: “If it were possible to sum up Takeda in a single word, the adjective for him would be ‘relaxed’. Completely free from self-consciousness and tension, he breathes genuine warmth and generous friendliness. A text by his desk urging adherence to truth, fairness, and goodwill in everyday actions suggests the principles by which he is guided… If you wanted to espouse the cause of royalty, you need look no further for the perfect model…” 

In 1974, Takeda flew to the Philippines when a Japanese straggler, Second Lieutenant Onoda Hiroo, was discovered hiding on 74-square-mile Lubang Island, 70 miles southwest of Manila Bay. Back in 1945, all but three Japanese soldiers on Lubang had been killed or surrendered during a four-day battle with the Americans. Onoda and two comrades fled into the jungle and for the next thirty years kept up sporadic guerrilla warfare. In the 1950s, leaflets were dropped telling them the war was over, but they thought it was a trick. Both of Onoda’s companions eventually died of tropical diseases, and Onoda himself was declared legally dead in Japan. Lubang villagers said otherwise. When a young Japanese named Suzuki Norio tracked Onoda down in the jungle in February 1974, he still carried his rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition, and several hand grenades. 

Onoda refused to surrender unless released from duty by his commanding officer. Ben heard all about Onoda from television news. He knew Onoda personally, having spent weeks on Lubang during the war with Prince Takeda, closing a treasure vault. Ben knew it was Takeda who had ordered Onoda to guard the site at Lubang, so only the prince himself could rescind the command. A few weeks later, a group of Japanese officials arrived in the Philippines to persuade Onoda to surrender. Attention was focused on Major Taniguchi Yoshima, who was presented to TV audiences as Onoda’s commanding officer. But among the Japanese delegation in the background Ben saw Prince Takeda’s unforgettable face and knew that he had come personally to release Onoda from his oath. A few days later, Onoda returned to Japan. (Claiming that he could not adjust to life in modern Japan, Onoda was then sent to Brazil, to a big Japanese-owned ranch in the Mata Grosso. There bodyguards made sure nobody came to quiz him about the Lubang treasures, until they were recovered.) 

The Lubang recovery was done by Sasakawa, under the guise of developing Lubang into a resort for wealthy Japanese tourists. Sasakawa said he was doing this ‘at the request of Marcos’. Eventually, when hotels and golf courses had been built, the resort was stocked with African wild game and exotic birds for rich Japanese hunters, who were provided with young male or female ‘private companions’ for sexual sport. At the same time, President Marcos made Sasakawa an honorary citizen of the Philippines, in recognition of his many donations to Imelda’s highly-publicized relief projects, and for his efforts to pave over residual ill-feeling about the war by establishing the Japan-Philippines Friendship Society. Nothing was said of Sasakawa sharing war loot with Marcos. 

Although Prince Takeda did not go back to see Ben after the war, he did send an emissary. In 1984, while Ben was living temporarily in Manila, a Japanese resembling a sumo wrestler got off the bus in Bambang one morning, lugging a heavy suitcase. It was Colonel Kasabuchi, one of Takeda’s staff officers during the war. Now an old man with white hair, he was suffering from the heat, wiping the sweat from his face with a soggy handkerchief. In a small town like Bambang there were no taxis, just motorized trikes. The only trike at the bus stop was owned by Rangho, who made his living hauling people and goods. Kasabuchi asked Rangho to take him to the barrio of San Fernando. When Rangho tried to help with the suitcase, Kasabuchi would not let it go. He held it on his lap all the way to San Fernando. He told Rangho he was looking for a man named Benhameen. Kasabuchi could not remember Ben’s last name. Nor could he remember which barrio Ben came from originally. He told Rangho that Ben had been a valet for a Japanese prince during the war, here at San Fernando. Kasabuchi had come all the way from Tokyo to bring Ben a gift from the prince. Several times, Rangho offered to carry the suitcase, but the colonel would not let him touch it. They spent the day riding around in the trike, trying to find anyone who knew Ben. If they had gone to the barrio of Dulao, only a kilometer and a half away, everyone would have known Ben and they could have told the colonel exactly where to find him in Manila. At the end of the day, when he and Rangho decided they had exhausted all the possibilities, Kasabuchi reluctantly got aboard the last bus to Manila, taking the suitcase of gifts with him. Ben stayed poor.

CHAPTER TWELVE 

SANCTIFYING THE GOLD 

Already a billionaire with his own tropical paradise, Marcos had a pathological streak – too much was never enough. He wanted everyone to know he was as rich as the Rothschilds, Saudis, and Oppenheimers. This would do him in. 

He knew the Japanese were ripping him off, steering him away from big vaults. Without their help, recovering the best Golden Lily sites was difficult. Even with true maps and an eyewitness like Ben Valmores, you could not just pick a spot and start digging. Ben could take you there, but he knew nothing of the underground configuration. Even above ground, Ben could not be precise; trees had toppled, rivers changed course, new construction obliterated landmarks. If you missed by a few inches, months were wasted. Marcos decided to bring in a famous psychic and a clever mining expert. The mining expert would reverse-engineer Ben’s maps, and the psychic could determine the precise position of the gold. Once their jobs were done, they could be eliminated. 

Marketing the gold was another headache. By 1974, it was legal for the first time since 1933 for private American citizens to purchase gold. Accordingly, world gold prices started to rise. This put Marcos in an enviable ‘long position’ with a lot of gold to sell – if he could get the gold into the market. But the bars he recovered were not standard in size, purity, or hallmark, and had no legalizing paper trail. Aside from blackmarket deals where anything goes, gold normally is traded in standard size, weight and purity acceptable to the London gold market. Legitimate gold bars must have recognized hallmarks and identification numbers. They must be accompanied by proof of ownership, called a statement of origin, with a paper trail showing the record of transportation, security, insurance, and so forth. Almost all the treasure stolen by Golden Lily did not meet London standard. It came from Asian countries where gold was of inconsistent purity, usually 22 karats or less, not only from banks and treasuries but from the hoards of Overseas Chinese tycoons, Malay Muslim datos, Buddhist sects, drug lords, triads, gangsters, ancient tombs, jewelry and artifacts. Ingots were all shapes and sizes, marked with odd signs and symbols, stamped or engraved in different languages. Each contained minerals and impurities, like a fingerprint, so an assay would reveal where it had been mined. At the end of World War II in Europe, the Allies got around this problem by re-smelting Nazi gold, erasing the fingerprint and any trace of ownership. 

In the past, Marcos had avoided this problem by marketing the gold he recovered through the Japanese, or the CIA. Both would take irregular ingots, but only at a deep discount. In effect, the CIA would pay Marcos a finder’s fee, as they had paid Santa Romana during his time as gatekeeper. Marcos tried blackmarket deals, swapping non-standard gold to Panama for cocaine, and to Thai druglords for heroin, but that created marketing headaches of another kind, when he had to find buyers for the narcotics. 

If he was going to bypass the CIA and the Japanese and sell his gold on the world market, it had to be physically altered – a process called sanctifying – to conform to London gold standard. A member of the Gold Cartel would only do this for him at a deep discount, so Marcos had to find a private individual who could sanctify the gold and add the right impurities to prove it was legitimate gold from Philippine mines. 

One possibility was a mining expert and metallurgist in Nevada named Robert Curtis. When Marcos attended a presidential conference at Cancun on the Gulf of Mexico, he discussed his gold problem with Costa Rica’s president, Jose Figueres. Costa Rica also had gold mines, so Figueras was well informed. He told Marcos that Robert Curtis had developed a process to extract more gold from previously mined ores, and also could change gold’s fingerprint to make it look as if it came from the Philippines. To track down Curtis, Marcos called in Norman Kirst, a hustler from Wisconsin who was doing him favors. 

Ferdinand already had made contact with a famous psychic, Olof Jonsson, a Swede who had become a naturalized American citizen and was living in Chicago. Jonsson had helped the American deep-sea treasure hunter Mel Fisher locate the wreck of a seventeenth century Spanish galleon that sank with New World gold worth $140-million. Jonsson also had been hired by the U.S. Government to conduct experiments in telepathy with astronauts during the Apollo moon missions. In his work with NASA, Jonsson met a U.S. Air Force colonel who asked him to come to the Philippines to check out a treasure site on Clark Air Base. While Jonsson was a guest at Clark, word got around, and Colonel Villacrusis came to see him. He told Jonsson that treasure hunting on Clark was strictly forbidden. But Jonsson could be of great service to President Marcos, treasure hunting off the base. 

Marcos always had imagined himself to be psychic, so when they met at Malacanang Palace he was deeply impressed by Jonsson. He told the psychic that his help was needed to find World War II treasure for the benefit of the Filipino people, to lift them out of poverty. He said he already knew many locations of hidden Japanese gold, but his men did not know exactly where to dig. Olof could be a great asset pinpointing the targets. Colonel Villacrusis was putting together an expert team, he said, called the Leber Group, for Rebel spelled backwards. Marcos wanted Olof to be a leading member of the Leber Group, and he would share generously in the rewards. Jonsson was charmed, and fascinated, and readily agreed. 

Meanwhile, late in 1974, Robert Curtis received the first of a number of calls from Norman Kirst, phoning from the Philippines. 

Curtis was the 44-year-old owner of a successful mining and refining business in Sparks, Nevada, near Reno. Starting out as a banker in San Francisco, he became fascinated by old silver and gold mines along the California-Nevada border. He acquired a number of these old mines, and built a factory in Sparks where he reprocessed the ore and developed new techniques to extract more gold, and other precious metals such as platinum and iridium. Most people did not know there was platinum to be mined in America, because the Gold Cartel discouraged hunting for platinum in order to control quantities and prices of the metal from its own mines in Africa. But Curtis independently developed processes to extract platinum from the ore he was recovering in the Sierras. This made him a modestly wealthy man. 

Norman Kirst asked Bob Curtis if he would fly out to Manila to discuss setting up a refinery for President Marcos. He explained that Marcos wanted Curtis to re-smelt gold bars, change the hallmarks to Philippine official numbers and stamps, and alter the chemical composition so the gold would appear to have come from Philippine mines. What was staggering to Curtis was the amount of gold mentioned. Kirst said Marcos was hoping to process at least 300 metric tons of gold a year for the next ten years, or some 3,000 metric tons, for starters. 

Thinking it over, Curtis did some homework. Historically, there was no way to account for so much gold coming from Philippine mines. In 1939 those mines produced their greatest quantity ever, one million troy ounces, or just over thirty-one metric tons. In the 1970s the Philippines were producing only 22 metric tons of gold each year. Because gold mine operations in the islands were sluggish and inefficient, it would be difficult to explain a sudden ten-fold jump in annual production. However, with a little patience, Marcos could slip small quantities into the market over a period of time. If the ingots were sanctified, he could sell them readily to private buyers. 

After turning Kirst down several times, Curtis changed his mind when he got a long letter from him on February 22, 1975, revealing that the real source of the gold was Japanese loot. Kirst said: “There is a buried treasure on [American] Embassy grounds, Clark Air Force Base, Subic Naval Base … there are exactly 34 locations of major importance and 138 locations of lesser importance. The Leber Group has retrieval plans for all 172 locations, but wish to only work on the 34 [major] locations, knowing that if they retrieve several of the 34 sites they will have done an excellent job.” (This figure of 172 sites became fixed because Marcos did not know Ben had set aside three maps for himself, of Tunnel-8, Tunnel-9, and Montalban.) 

“You will be taken to these sites, shown their original Japanese drawings.” 

“There is 777 billion Yen based on AU [gold] values in 1940… It is buried in Mosler vaults in tunnels… There is a 999 billion… There is an 888 billion Yen treasure…” On and on. Such numbers were nonsensical. The Marcos inner circle based these guesses on map markings with the yen sign followed by three digits and a long row of zeros. Without stopping to ask whether there might be a deceptive code involved, as in most other markings on the maps, they jumped to the conclusion that it meant a site held 777-billion yen worth of gold. Marcos was so excited he named his yacht the ‘777’. A more rational assumption would be that nobody knows how much treasure is in any of these sites. Some individual items are identified in the maps, such as gold Buddhas, or drums filled with gemstones, but values are not assigned. Whatever the current gold price, to find a single 75-kilo ingot would gratify all but the unhinged. For a multitude of reasons most treasure hunters, with or without maps, come up empty handed. Only a few succeeded, among them Marcos, thanks to Robert Curtis. 

Curtis recalls: “I was incredulous. I had every reason not to believe in the treasure.” He could not reconcile what Kirst said with accepted beliefs about total world gold production. Curtis was fascinated by the idea that there were big vaults of World War II treasure waiting to be reverse-engineered, with ingenuity and luck. He had to learn more before he decided what to do. He told Kirst he would fly to Manila for three days. 

When he arrived at the end of February 1975, Curtis was met by Kirst and introduced to Marcos aides and associates, including General Fabian Ver. They were so friendly he had no way of knowing that half of them, including Ver, were professional killers. That would come later. 

“In three or four days, I was convinced,” Curtis told us. He had intended to stay three days, but stayed a month. What convinced him was the overwhelming physical evidence he was shown. He saw rooms full of gold bars, at Malacanang Palace in Manila, and at other locations. In one room alone, he calculated that he had seen $60-million in gold bars. As a banker, and a metallurgist, he knew it was real. 

Marcos went out of his way to be a gracious host, and Curtis was impressed by his intelligence. Only later did he discover that Marcos was also ‘a very ruthless man’. At their first meeting, Marcos said he needed help because international law held that any identifiable World War II treasures recovered must go back to the countries from which they were taken. He told Curtis he had recovered an enormous amount of gold, and would have to forfeit it unless the gold could be disguised. 

On March 11-12, 1975, he took Curtis and other guests on a night cruise aboard the presidential yacht, a converted minesweeper. The ship took a hundred guests around Manila Bay while there was a banquet, followed by a dance. When the dance ended at midnight, the guests were dropped at the bay front, and the yacht cruised out into Manila Bay again with only the core members of the Leber Group and several foreign visitors. In addition to Robert Curtis, Olof Jonsson, and Norman Kirst, Curtis remembers ‘an aide to [former] President Nixon’ and ‘an aide to President Ford’ who took part in these secret meetings about the recovery of war loot. Nixon had resigned seven months earlier, succeeded by Ford. The Republican Party seemed likely to lose the 1976 presidential election because of the Watergate scandal. From the presence of the two aides, Curtis guessed that both Nixon and Ford somehow were participating in Marcos gold recoveries. Curtis wondered whether the two aides were government agents, or representing Nixon and Ford privately. 

Curtis and Marcos spent much of the night in deck chairs under the stars, talking about the problem of black gold. Marcos portrayed himself as the president of a pro-American democracy who was fighting the good fight to improve the lot of his people, and to be a good ally to Washington in the Cold War. He explained the difficulty he was having, getting rid of the gold. Curtis said he thought the best idea was for Marcos to set up his own gold bank in Manila, rather than be involved in the hazards of selling it to other gold banks. With his own gold bank, Marcos could keep the gold and just lend derivatives, profiting hugely. This did not interest Marcos because it did not fit his flashy self image as the world’s new Oppenheimer. Curtis asked him whether he had tried swapping the gold to Arab countries for oil, which he could then sell to Japan, ending up with clean money. Marcos liked the idea. 

In the morning the yacht anchored off the presidential summer palace at Mariveles in Bataan. Curtis, Jonsson, and Kirst were taken ashore to Marcos’s study where they saw the real Roxas Buddha. Curtis inspected the Buddha closely, satisfying himself that it was solid gold. There were nicks and scratches and tiny drill holes on the neck, making it obvious that it was not plated lead. Marcos showed how the head unscrewed. Even with help from Olof Jonsson, Curtis was unable to budge the massive weight. Next, Curtis was taken by General Ver to a large room in the basement, to examine rows and rows of gold bars. On their return, Marcos stood on the terrace and pointed to the hill behind the summer palace. He said he wanted Curtis to design underground vaults for that hill, each 80 feet wide and the length of a football field, where Marcos could store between 200,000 metric tons and 500,000 metric tons of bullion. He said the vaults he was using in Manila were already overflowing. 

Again Curtis was astonished by the quantities Marcos mentioned, many times the amount of refined gold commonly thought to be in existence. But he had seen enough to convince him that the myth of gold being scarce was just like the myth of diamonds being scarce – to keep prices high. 

On March 25, 1975, Curtis signed the Leber contract along with Olof Jonsson and others. They agreed “to pool their capabilities and resources together in order to search for, research, recover and retrieve …said treasure troves” in return for a share of the gold recovered “on Philippine land and waters”. 

As part of his participation, Curtis would provide two smelters from his Nevada factory. These would be shipped to Manila. One smelter would be installed at the National Development Co-op adjacent to Malacanang Palace, where it would be used to sanctify the gold to London standard, with appropriate hallmarks and numbers. The other smelter would be installed in a refinery to be built to Curtis’s specifications on land next to an eel farm in Bataan. There, large quantities of previously refined ores, and new ores, could be subjected to the more efficient extraction process that Curtis had developed. The increased yield of gold from this new process would provide a plausible explanation for the overall increase in gold being sold from the Philippines. Some of the Marcos gold would be downgraded to look like crude miner’s ingots, by adding silver and other metals to about 800 fineness. Miner’s bars did not need to be registered and hallmarked, so they could enter the market in a trickle, without raising suspicion. 

While Curtis was in Manila the first trip, Marcos put Olof Jonsson to the test. General Ver took Jonsson and Curtis on a coast guard PT boat to the sector of Manila Bay where the Japanese heavy cruiser Nachi was sunk on November 5, 1944, to see if Jonsson could find it. There is controversy about the Nachi and various stories of how (and where) she met her end. One version is that after being damaged in a collision, needing extensive repairs in Japan, she was loaded with 100 metric tons of Golden Lily bullion at Cavite on Manila Bay, and then as she steamed out was deliberately torpedoed in Manila Bay by a Japanese submarine lying in wait. Crewmembers who rose to the surface were machine-gunned by the sub’s crew. By this account, the Nachi was also towing a barge loaded with oil drums full of silver and gold coins, bound for Tokyo. A second torpedo hit the barge, which split in half, dumping the coins over a broad area of sand and mud bottom. Like other treasure ships intentionally scuttled by the Japanese, the Nachi went down in shallow water — about 100 feet. The official U.S. Navy report affirms that it was sunk in Manila Bay on November 5, 1944, but attributes the sinking to Allied aircraft. A Golden Lily map left with Ben Valmores showed the location of the hulk, and the precise nature of the treasure on board, but Marcos divers had not been able to find it in the murky water. Olof Jonsson was expected to find it with his psychic powers. 

Tension surrounded this effort to pinpoint the Nachi, because Japanese divers also were searching for it. Marcos earlier had granted permits to Japanese salvage companies, but he did not want them diving on the Nachi now. As a safeguard, he nationalized the Luzon Stevedore Company, which he knew was working for the Japanese. General Ver ordered coast guard patrol boats to watch for any sign of Japanese divers. 

As if Tokyo knew what was going on, Japan’s prime minister chose this very moment to pay an informal visit to Marcos, bringing with him a delegation of relatives of the Nachi crew, including the widow of the ship’s commander, Captain Kanooka Enpei. Saying they hoped to recover the human remains, the prime minister requested permission for Japanese salvage teams to search for bodies from the Nachi, and also to search for approximately four hundred other Japanese ships sunk in Philippine waters. Marcos refused. 

Also aboard the PT boat with Curtis and Jonsson were Ben Valmores and Pol Giga, plus a group of Filipino divers and Ver’s security men. Anchoring over the site indicated on Ben’s map, the divers spent hours searching fruitlessly in the murky water. Jonsson waited patiently till they gave up, then insisted that they move starboard several hundred yards. The divers went down again and surfaced in minutes to shout that Jonsson had found the Nachi. As proof, they brought up the ship’s bell. They attached floating buoys to the bow and stern of the hulk. 

When they all returned to the site the following afternoon, the marker buoys were gone. Currents might have broken the lines, but it was too late in the day to relocate the ship. On the third day, Jonsson again found the Nachi, new buoys were securely attached, and Ver promised to leave a patrol boat to guard against intruders. But three days later when they returned to begin the physical recovery, the buoys again were gone. Something was fishy. Curtis hinted that Ver’s own men had removed them. Ver claimed that his patrol boat had been obliged to leave the scene to escort the presidential yacht. 

Actually, Curtis was getting his first taste of the real Ferdinand Marcos. Now that he knew exactly where the Nachi was, Marcos had no intention of sharing the recovery with anyone. He told Curtis and Jonsson to forget the ship and turn their attention instead to the most promising on-shore treasure sites. 

According to several sources in the Marcos circle, he did recover the Nachi gold. The Leber Group’s Amelito Mutuc, a former ambassador to the United States, told Curtis that the gold Marcos recovered from the Nachi was worth $6-billion in 1975, when gold was selling at $65 an ounce. This figure was confirmed to us by another Marcos source. 

At the end of March, Curtis flew back to Nevada to wind up pressing business and to ship his smelting equipment to the Philippines. He had already decided, after studying some of the maps, that he could make a fairly quick recovery at Manila’s Fort Santiago, then turn to a major site called Teresa-2, just southeast of Manila. According to Ben’s Golden Lily map, Teresa-2 contained over $8-billion in gold bars in the back of a number of Japanese Army trucks that had been driven into one of the tunnels, plus three large solid gold Buddhas, and many oil drums filled with loose diamonds. Teresa-2 was only one part of a multi-tier complex. Once they were inside Teresa-2 they could penetrate the others. 

Curtis had several employees in Nevada with engineering backgrounds. He planned to take them with him to Manila to assist in opening the treasure sites. This would cost him a lot up front for salaries, transportation, and the overseas living expenses. He had to foot the bill for shipping his two 6-ton smelters to the Philippines. He also would lose income otherwise generated by his Nevada operations. Marcos refused to pay the expenses of any Leber Group partners, so Curtis had to pay for everything out of his own pocket. From the Marcos point of view, Curtis was being given the chance of a lifetime — a sure thing for which Curtis should be prepared to sacrifice everything. Now he was hooked, Curtis wanted things to go smoothly. He had a lot of money tied up in his mines and in his Sparks factory and equipment, which he did not want to disturb. He would have to get a loan to cover expenses in the Philippines until he started pulling gold bars out of the ground. Since this venture was both extraordinary and secret, he could hardly approach a bank. So he contacted the John Birch Society. He knew its inner circle were heavily involved in precious metals. Several years earlier, they had approached Curtis. 

“When the Hunt Brothers were trying to corner the world’s silver production in the early 1970s,” Curtis told us, “they sent Colonel Herbert F. Buchholtz to me… later came Jerry Adams… Robert Welch, founder of the Birch Society; Congressman Larry McDonald, and Jay and Dan Agnew, and Floyd Paxton.” 

The Birch Society was started in 1958 by a group of wealthy businessmen and far right politicians convinced that every closet in America contained communists, Jews, wetbacks, Afro-Americans, liberals and homosexuals. The Birchers also were dedicated gold and silver bugs. They had a longstanding grudge against U.S. presidents, starting with FDR, who had intervened to make private ownership of gold in America a crime, with penalties of heavy fines, confiscation and imprisonment. 

They also believed that Nixon had sold the United States down the river twice — first by taking America off the gold standard, second by his recognition of Red China. On the other hand, Nixon’s actions made it possible for the first time since 1933 for Americans to purchase and own gold legally. So Nixon opened up avenues for the Birch leadership to acquire gold overseas, and sneak it into America through the back door of Canada, where it added to the Society’s fund for anti-communist activities. Like other ultra-conservative groups in America, and individuals like General Lansdale – one of their own – who had been forced out of the CIA and Pentagon by liberals, the Birchers had a long-term strategy to create their own right-wing vigilante force. Not something crude like Hitler’s Brown Shirts or Gestapo. More like a private FBI, assisted by elite private military forces. This would cost money, hence the need for large amounts of privately held gold. 

Although he was a conservative, and a patriot, Curtis was not a Bircher. But he shared their fascination with precious metals. Once he joined the Marcos gold hunt, Curtis told the Birch Society board confidentially about the hidden Japanese loot. He described his role in the Leber Group, and his participation with Marcos in sanctifying the gold, and in finding discreet channels to market it. 

Curtis did not realize that the inner circle of the Birch leadership already knew about the Santa Romana recoveries, and the role of Robert B. Anderson and John J. McCloy in setting up the Black Eagle Trust. They also knew about the roles of Generals MacArthur, Whitney and Willoughby in the M-Fund, and all the financial manipulations in postwar Tokyo. They knew this because one of the founding members of the Birch Society was Colonel Laurence Bunker, a humorless fellow who had succeeded General Bonner Fellers on MacArthur’s personal staff in Tokyo. Bunker became MacArthur’s chief aide and spokesman in Tokyo from 1946-1951 – the years of witch-hunting in Japan that made the McCarthy witch-hunts in America look bland. 

The Birch Society money men who arranged the loan for Curtis were Washington State senator Floyd Paxton and his son Jerry, who ran Kwik Lok Corporation, makers of the ubiquitous plastic clips used to close plastic bags in supermarkets. Another participant, Curtis said, was Jerry Adams of Atlanta, head of the Great American Silver Corporation, a precious metals company associated with the Hunt brothers. Curtis said he was informed by Congressman McDonald and Robert Welch that the loan for Curtis to work with Marcos had been ‘cleared’ by them personally. They told Curtis he was to deal directly with multi-millionaire Samuel Jay Agnew, who sat on the national council of the Birch Society. 

They agreed to give Curtis three loans totaling $375,000 to cover his expenses in the Philippines. These loans were unsecured except for a promise from Curtis of 22.2 percent of his Leber share, and a 10 percent share in his Bataan refinery near the eel farm. 

Buoyed by his success in getting financial support from the Birchers, and confident that he could easily pay it back in a few months with recovered gold, Curtis returned to the Philippines in the middle of April 1975. He was counting on making a quick recovery at Ft. Santiago, so it was only a matter of weeks or months before he would be a very rich man. He took his partner John MacAllaster and John’s wife Marcella, engineer Wes Chapman, and psychic Olof Jonsson. In a burst of generosity, Curtis bought first class plane tickets not only for his own people, but also for Jonsson. 

During their reunion in Manila that April, Curtis told Marcos that he wanted to start by recovering the Mosler safes from the air vent at Fort Santiago, a straightforward recovery. This would allow him to pay off the Birch Society and get his own company back into production in Nevada. 

Marcos did not care if Curtis ever paid back the Birch loan. If Fort Santiago was going to be so easy, why should he let Curtis do it? 

Marcos lied to Curtis that Fort Santiago would require a special permit because it was a historic site, and told Curtis to choose a site outside Metro-Manila. He pressed Curtis again to engineer the two underground vaults behind the summer palace at Mariveles. Curtis gave that job to Wes Chapman, who did engineering drawings for two tunnels, each 80 feet wide by 300-feet long. Both tunnels were built, and visitors – one a full-time CIA officer – later attested that they were packed with gold. 

Curtis was disappointed that he could not do the quick recovery at Ft. Santiago, but he was excited about working on Teresa-2, or another target. Col. Villacrusis took him to checkout forty treasure sites, with Ben Valmores and Pol Giga in tow, to determine which would be their first target. Each night he returned to the Philippine Village Hotel, a four-star hotel near Manila airport, where he shared a penthouse with John and Marcella MacAllaster, Wes Chapman, and Olof Jonsson. 

When he was not visiting sites with Ben, Curtis spent most of his time in the penthouse studying the maps, finding the fulcrum points and trying to crack the codes. Each time he wanted to study a particular site, Ben traveled the long distance back to Bambang, where he retrieved the desired map and brought it to Manila. Eventually, Ben got tired of making the trip, and brought all the rest of the maps to Curtis, except the three he always kept for himself. It was a fateful decision. 

The Leber Group now had a number of specialists studying the maps with Curtis, including Japanese language experts. Each map contained a drawing of at least one clock face, sometimes two or three. Some clocks had no hands, others had up to four hands. The numbers on each clock were sometimes conventional, sometimes in odd sequences, sometimes reversed. In all cases, markings between the numbers on the clocks were always different. Each map was a riddle. 

With so many field trips during the day, Curtis had less and less time to linger over the maps, and no way to be sure they would not be taken away from him. So he photographed all 172 — taking first Polaroid, then 35 mm color shots. Because of his mania for record keeping, Curtis was accumulating piles of papers, photos, and tape recordings. He worried that the cleaning ladies might dispose of them. One day Marcella MacAllaster came back from a shopping trip with a three-tier lazy susan, hand carved from Filipino hardwoods. Curtis went to the same shop to send one to his wife in Nevada. As he watched the clerks packing old newspapers into the shipping crate, to pad the lazy susan, he asked if he could substitute his own paperwork. It would save him the expense of sending a separate package. He hurried back to the hotel and returned with three boxes of documents, notes, audio tapes, and photographs, including the photos he had taken of Ben’s maps. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision that would save his life, and that of John MacAllaster. 

Next day, Curtis recommended to Marcos that they tackle Teresa-2. According to Ben’s maps, this was a 777 site, a big one. An army team sent by Marcos had already tried and failed to excavate Teresa-1. Both Teresa-1 and Teresa-2 were by an army base at a barrio called Teresa, a sleepy provincial town in Rizal, southeast of Manila. Here was an elaborate tunnel complex carved out of a limestone hill shaped like a sugarloaf, holding billions of dollars’ worth of gold, platinum, diamonds, and three solid-gold Buddhas. Teresa was dug in 1943 by some 2,000 American, Australian, Dutch and Filipino prisoners of war. When the Japanese Army took over the existing military base, all local Filipino residents were moved away, and a prison camp was built. Just outside Teresa stood the peculiar sugarloaf, which was a calcium karst formation sticking up over 200 feet. This limestone was a fine-grained, dark grey rock, which Filipinos cut into building bricks they call adobe. Because the stone was strong but easy to cut, tunneling was possible without shoring or concrete reinforcement. Japanese engineers developed a plan for several tiers of tunnels in the sugarloaf and beneath it. There would be five layers in all (Teresa-1 through Teresa-5). The top layer resembled a stick figure with curved tunnels like carabao horns at either end. The left-hand horns were Teresa-1, the right-hand horns Teresa-2. Other layers were beneath that. To ventilate the tunnels during construction, the map showed that six vertical air shafts were dug. Curtis hoped to locate one of the larger vents as a point of entry. 

During the war, there were six excavation teams here, each with 200 POWs, working around the clock from different starting points. The men wore only loin clothes and dog-tags, and were sustained only by bowls of thin rice gruel. Those who collapsed and died were replaced. There was no shortage of slaves. 

When the tunneling was complete, five of the six tunnels were sealed twenty feet inside each mouth, using a special mixture of porcelain clay, fine sand, crushed rock and cement. An officer from Ishikawa prefecture in northern Honshu — a region famous for its ceramic industries — was in charge of blocking the entrances. One secret of Ishikawa ceramics was clay from North China. When it was mixed with marine sand, cement and crushed local rock, it did not shrink as it cured, and became exceptionally hard. It could be colored to blend with the local limestone, leaving no visible trace of an opening. When these plugs had cured, the remaining twenty feet of each entrance were backfilled with dirt, planted with shrubs, bamboo, and papaya. Papaya trees grow fast, so the patches soon were indistinguishable from adjacent terrain. 

Meanwhile, convoys of Japanese Army trucks made their way to Teresa from Manila Bay warehouses, carrying gold bullion, oil drums of gems, and the three solid gold Buddhas — one three feet tall, one eight feet tall, and one thirteen feet tall. According to plan the treasure was dispersed in various parts of the complex. In Teresa 1 and 2 there were six locations for the gold bars. Two smaller lots of gold were placed in pits dug in the floor, like the pit discovered by Roger Roxas. Other spaces were filled with drums of mixed gems or diamonds. Over many days, bronze boxes of gold were carried into the tunnels and placed in designated locations. All these areas were then backfilled with dirt carried in wicker baskets by the POWs. Next the two smaller gold Buddhas were pushed into the tunnels using a bulldozer. Each Buddha was shoved into position on top of a slab of plate steel, resting on top of a 1,000- pound bomb that had its nose sticking out one side. Once the trigger mechanism was primed, the bomb would explode if anybody disturbed the Buddha. The third Buddha, thirteen feet tall, was so heavy that two bulldozers had to be used to get it into the tunnel, one pulling while another pushed. When the Buddha was in place, the bulldozer that had pulled could not leave. So the Japanese removed its engine, putting two boxes of gold bars in its place, then drained the fuel tank, and filled it with loose gems. When this was done, a final convoy of trucks arrived at Teresa. 

These 23 trucks were driven straight into the remaining space in the carabao horns. The tires were deflated and the vehicles, weighted down with gold, sank to their hubs. A Shinto priest came to bless the treasure. All POWs were ordered into the tunnels, on the pretext that they were to unload the trucks. When all 1,200 were inside, bulldozers began shoving earth over the last entrance. As the POWs realized they were to be buried alive, they started yelling and running for the entrance. Machine guns already positioned at each entrance shot them down. Once the first ranks died, others half-dead from starvation and overwork did not have the strength to get past the bodies blocking their way, or to climb over the mound of dirt already shoved in by the bulldozers. They kept yelling and clawing at the barricade of dirt and bodies as they were entombed. 

This entrance was then sealed with the special ceramic cement, booby-trapped with 1,000-pound bombs and small glass vials of cyanide. Finally, the Japanese closed the three airshafts over Teresa-1 and the three over Teresa-2. In each group, two vents measured only two feet in diameter, while the third shaft measured eight feet in diameter, ventilating a deeper tunnel. The small vents were filled with soil, rubble, and rocks. The eight-foot-wide vents were filled layer-by-layer, with dirt, rocks, charcoal, bamboo, broken glass, and human bones – mostly skulls and hands. (As punishment, the Japanese chopped off hands first, and then the head, in front of all the other prisoners.) The red series treasure map included exact details about the fill in the main air shafts, because this was to be the point of access for the team that would return from Japan someday to recover the treasure. The last touch was to replant the top of the hill and its surroundings, so villagers would detect no changes when they returned. 

Curtis had a hunch that he and Ben Valmores could find one of the big airshafts, which could make recovery easy. Visiting the site with Ben and Pol in April 1975, Curtis discovered local men quarrying limestone blocks from the top of the hill. He asked General Ver to have them removed with the excuse that the army was going to take soil samples here for a military installation. A few squatters were evicted from their shacks. Curtis, Ben and Pol soon found the main airshaft, because the fill had settled somewhat, leaving a circular depression. Marcos arranged for the Age Construction Company (pronounced Ah-gay) to do the excavation, and they began digging into the airshaft. Just as the map indicated, they encountered layers of human bones, bamboo, broken glass and charcoal. At thirty-one meters depth they hit a porcelain-cement barrier. When they jackhammered through it, everyone smelled a terrible stench and began vomiting. The workers broke out in sores and rashes and had to be hospitalized. Some believed the escaping gases came from the putrefaction of over a thousand bodies sealed with the treasure. Curtis thought it might be methane gas, or poison from canisters dropped into the shaft before it was sealed. Whatever the source, it included gases of decay, for within days the mouth of the air shaft was surrounded by large ugly flowers, called Death Flowers. 

Once the shaft aired out, digging resumed down to thirty-six meters. There the diggers found a large round stone 60 inches in diameter with a six-inch hole bored in its middle. It was a millstone, another of the symbols shown on Ben’s treasure map, proving the legitimacy of the maps in his possession. After five weeks, on June 8, 1975, the diggers jackhammered through another thick porcelain-cement layer and broke into the vault containing the trucks loaded with gold. Olof Jonsson climbed down and had a look, then climbed frantically out in a state of wild alarm. He told Curtis that he had an intense sense of the spirits of all the men buried alive there — he even felt fingers clutching at him. After that Olof would not go back inside. 

Curtis climbed down himself, and began collecting dog-tags to notify next of kin, but Ver’s men demanded he turn them over. 

Had Curtis been psychic like Jonsson, he would have been alarmed by this behavior, and by new demands suddenly laid on him by the John Birch Society. Out of the blue, the Agnews suddenly demanded additional security for the loan. Over the phone, Curtis offered them the titles to his heavy equipment in Nevada. He was obliged to sign a new document, giving the Birch Society exclusive rights to market up to $20-billion worth of any gold recoveries he engineered for Marcos. Curtis was told the Birchers would do this through an offshore company in the Bahamas called Commonwealth Packaging Ltd., owned by Kwik Lok. Marcos gold would be sold in Nassau, which is a major center for gold trading. The proceeds would be deposited in the Nassau branch of the Royal Bank of Canada. Then, using accounts controlled by senior members of the Birch Society, the money would be credited to the Royal Bank of Canada branch in Kelowna, British Columbia, east of Vancouver. There it would be deposited to an account controlled by one of the key financial experts of the Birch Society, who would retrieve the money and smuggle it across the border personally. Curtis said the Birchers boasted to him about smuggling very large sums into the United States in this fashion. 

Curtis should have been suspicious, because these new demands signaled that something was happening behind the curtains, while he was occupied with Teresa-2. 

Recovery was near. Well in advance, Curtis had sent Marcos a memo about security precautions, and how treasure recovered from Teresa-2 should be removed. As it came out of the tunnels, he proposed that it should be inventoried by five men, including Curtis, Villacrusis, and Ver’s deputy, Colonel Mario Lachica. Then it should be placed in numbered containers. Curtis suggested that the loose jewels be stored in the National Defense Command. Artifacts could be sent to a bonded warehouse along with foreign currency and all paper money that was no longer in circulation. 

“The heavy inventory [gold bullion] would best be stored at or near the laundering facility so that military escorts will not be necessary to move the material to and from the laundering equipment.” Marcos had told Curtis that when the three Buddhas were recovered, they must be cut into pieces and resmelted. Otherwise, they might be identified. 

At 4 a.m. on the morning of July 5, 1975, Curtis was awakened at the penthouse suite in the Philippine Village Hotel by a phone call from one of the security guards at Teresa-2. A job foreman had just stopped all digging because the diggers had hit a truck fender and the nose of a 1,000-pound bomb. By prior agreement, if they came upon a bomb, Curtis was to remove all construction workers, and contact a Colonel Gemora who would arrange for a bomb removal squad to be rushed to the site. Excited by news of the truck fender, Curtis and MacAllaster drove to the army base to wake Gemora, who tried to reach General Ver but failed to get through. They all drove to Quezon City to alert General Cannu, who located Ver by phone. Ver told Curtis he would take care of everything, and that Curtis and MacAllaster should go back to their hotel. He would send a car for them later, to have a victory meeting with President Marcos. 

When Curtis and MacAllaster returned to the penthouse they found Olof Jonsson in the sitting room with bags packed, deeply worried. Olof told them he sensed they were in mortal danger and must leave the Philippines immediately. Although Olof had a very gentle nature, there was nothing weak or eccentric about him. Curtis had never seen him so agitated: “You could actually sense his fear, as he spoke to us.” He and MacAllaster tried to calm Olof, saying they were about to become very rich, but Olof was adamant. He was leaving the Philippines as fast as he could get to the nearby airport. 

Curtis reminded him that with martial law in effect, there was no way he could get the necessary exit permit and still make that day’s flight to Hawaii. Olof was not dissuaded. He left immediately for the airport. 

“I still do not know how Olof made that airplane.” Curtis told us. “The flight was delayed for three hours. When I asked him later if he had influenced that delay with his psychic powers, Olof would only smile.” 

Curtis and MacAllaster remained elated. They knew they had hit the fender of one of the twentythree military trucks loaded with gold bars. They were going to be very rich. 

“We thought we were all going to celebrate at Malacanang Palace with the President,” Curtis said. It seemed a shame that Olof would miss the festivities. 

That afternoon, as promised, a car came to pick up Curtis and MacAllaster. Instead of taking them to Malacanang Palace, it took them to the American war cemetery at Ft. Bonifacio. Colonel Lachica was waiting for them, sitting in a jeep with Major Olivas. He was holding a .45 caliber automatic, Olivas a .38 caliber revolver. Lachica ordered Curtis out of the car and took him into a patch of rhododendron. Olivas led MacAllaster to another cluster of rhododendron. Behind the bushes, Lachica motioned for Curtis to look down — there was a freshly dug grave three feet deep. Curtis realized it was his. Lachica put his .45 behind Curtis’s right ear and said: “I am sorry Bob, but I have been ordered to do this. This is nothing personal.” Curtis began to talk fast: “I can’t stop you from pulling that trigger Mario, but if you do, I am sure you will be laying in a hole right next to me very soon. Kill me and Marcos won’t have the treasure maps.” 

Lachica thought it was bluff, but he was uncertain. He called Olivas, and they walked back to the jeep to radio Ver. While they waited for instructions, Ver sent men to ransack the penthouse suite and the conference room next door, which had been used by Curtis and his team. Marcella MacAllaster watched, terrified. The searchers confiscated every piece of paper, every picture, every drawing, every roll of film. These were taken to the palace and examined, but the red series maps were not among them. When it was clear the maps were missing, Marcos told Ver to postpone the executions. 

At the cemetery, Lachica said: “President Marcos and the general want to meet with you for dinner in a few days to make amends and in the meantime I am to return you to your hotel.” Curtis simply replied, “Good.” 

By then it was after sunset. When Lachica and Olivas dropped them at the hotel, Lachica said, “President Marcos and General Ver are very sorry about this incident. It has all been a serious misunderstanding.” 

Curtis did not know until later that the misunderstanding had to do with a man named Primitivo Mijares. 

Mijares had been Imelda Marcos’s press secretary for many years. An intelligent man, he knew more than most people what was really going on in the Philippines, and about the torture and murders taking place in security chambers at Malacanang Palace called the Black Room. He had finally been sickened, and was convinced by anti-Marcos partisans to speak out. Like Roxas, Mijares would suffer terribly for his courage. Seeking the biggest stage available, Mijares had flown to the United States, where it was arranged for him to testify before a committee of the U.S. Congress holding hearings about the Marcos regime. There were already strong indications that U.S. aid to the Philippines could be drastically cut if Marcos did not mend his ways. When Mijares gave his testimony on Capitol Hill a diplomatic storm broke. At the same moment, columnist Jack Anderson reported on July 4 and 5, 1975, that Marcos was hunting Japanese war loot with the help of several Americans. 

Marcos suspected that Bob Curtis had leaked this information to Jack Anderson, so he decided to have Curtis and MacAllister murdered the moment treasure was found at Teresa-2. 

At the penthouse the night of July 5, 1975, Curtis knew only what Lachica had told him: That there had been a leak to Jack Anderson’s column, and Curtis and MacAllaster were blamed for it. They had narrowly escaped having their heads blown off. He now understood Olof’s terrible premonition. Marcos would not hesitate to have them killed once he regained possession of the maps. 

In fact, the maps were there in the penthouse the whole time, and Curtis was astonished that Ver’s men did not find them during their search. 

Weeks earlier, Curtis had been confronted by the problem of what to do with the 172 waxed maps while he was away working at Teresa-2. Each map was priceless and irreplaceable. Yet there were maids cleaning these rooms each day. Looking around the conference room, he noticed that there was a plumber’s panel under the sink in the wet bar. On the spur of the moment, Curtis unscrewed the panel and saw that the maps would fit neatly inside. From then on he kept the original maps there around the clock, only taking out the ones that currently interested him. 

Now, after his near-death experience in the American cemetery, Curtis realized that Ver soon would have a more thorough search made of their rooms. He took the maps out of their hiding place and roused John MacAllaster. 

“Forget the treasure,” he told MacAllaster, “let’s save our lives.” The only way to do that, Curtis explained, was to destroy the maps. If the maps were found, they would be murdered. So long as Marcos and Ver were unable to find them, they would assume that Curtis had hidden them, and avoid doing anything to risk losing the maps. Curtis explained to MacAllaster that he had photographs of the maps, showing all details, and had sent these already to Nevada. He knew they had arrived safely with the lazy susan. So the original maps no longer were absolutely necessary. MacAllaster agreed. The problem was how to destroy them. He suggested burying them. Curtis said they were being watched closely, so there was no way to get out of the hotel with a bundle, buy a shovel, and find some inconspicuous place to bury them. Better to destroy them right there in the hotel. Because the maps were heavily coated with wax, they couldn’t tear them up and flush them down the toilet. The best solution was to burn them. On the balcony of the conference room was a small hibachi used by hotel caterers to grill cocktail snacks. 

At three in the morning, Curtis and MacAllaster dragged heavy bedspreads out onto the conference room balcony and draped them over the railings. That blocked any view of the balcony from watchers in the hotel gardens far below. Lighting the hibachi, they burned all 172 maps, one by one. It took over an hour. 

Once the maps were destroyed, they still needed an exit visa to get out of the Philippines. That had to come directly from Ver or Marcos. 

Curtis sent an encrypted telex to Jim Duclos, a trusted aide in Nevada. Duclos was instructed to telex back in clear that Curtis was needed for an urgent board meeting of his company. He also asked Duclos to contact a friend, Nevada Governor D. N. O’Callaghan, who was on the board of The Las Vegas Sun newspaper. Curtis did not dare use phones in the hotel, certain they were monitored. When the clear telex arrived at the hotel from Nevada, Curtis called Colonel Lachica at the palace and read him the message. He told Lachica that MacAllaster had suffered a heart attack because of the stress caused by the incident in the cemetery, so MacAllaster must also return immediately to the United States for medical attention. 

Although Ver and Marcos certainly realized that these were only contrived excuses, they were stymied by not knowing how to recover the maps. Marcos was so alarmed by the Jack Anderson columns, and so worried that the U.S. Congress would cut his foreign aid, that he had to keep a low profile till this blew over. If he wanted to go after Curtis and MacAllaster in America, he could do so easily, or simply send a hit team. He decided to play for time, and told Ver to okay their departure. 

Curtis and the MacAllisters received their exit permits at the hotel immediately. They booked reservations on the next United Airlines flight. While they waited they worried that Ver might try to plant drugs in their luggage, so they left everything behind except small carry-on bags. At the airport they were in a nervous sweat, expecting to be grabbed by security men. 

“We finally boarded the plane,” Curtis said, “and taxied down the runway. I was beginning to think we had pulled it off, when the pilot eased back on the throttle and announced that we were returning to the gate. We were in first class. I whispered to MacAllaster that we might be in trouble. We were. The door opened and two colonels in uniform entered. The stewardess called me to the cabin door. I went. The colonel in charge was talking on a portable radio. He told me that he had been ordered to search me and my carry-on bag. I was certain they would plant something on me such as drugs, money or gold and then claim we were trying to exit with contraband. I raised holy hell, screaming I am an American, on an American airplane and that I had gone through all of the airport security. I refused to submit to a search and said in a loud voice that I would consider that an illegal international act. The colonel got on the radio and spoke to someone in Tagalog. Whoever it was, he was outranked and kept saying ‘sir’ in English. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he said ‘You may take your seat.’ After about five minutes the door was again closed, and we started taxiing down the runway again. We were safe, for the time being…” 

Villacrusis never took the precaution of photographing or photocopying the maps. To protect himself after Curtis fled, Villacrusis drew fourteen maps from memory, which he passed off successfully as red series originals that he had kept aside. The only red series map Marcos had ever seen was one shown him by Curtis, so the ruse worked. Marcos put the Villacrusis reproductions in his office vault at Malacanang Palace, where they were found after he was removed from power. 

From one of Ver’s officers, Colonel Orlando Dulay, Curtis learned later that Marcos proceeded with the Teresa-2 recovery, but only recovered the gold bullion from the army trucks. He then ordered the main air duct closed. He did not recover the oil drums of diamonds and loose gemstones, nor did he try to recover the three solid gold Buddhas. According to Dulay, the gold was trucked from Teresa to a private home owned by Marcos in the town of San Juan where it was assayed and inventoried. Dulay said the gold bullion in the trucks totaled 22,000 metric tons, while a member of the Marcos family who helped inventory the gold bullion said it was 20,000 metric tons. In either case, they said this put the value of the gold in mid-1975 at around $8-billion, give or take a few million in change. Add this $8billion in gold from Teresa-2 to the $6-billion in gold from the Nachi and in a matter of six months Marcos had been enriched by around $14-billion, thanks chiefly to the efforts of Olof Jonsson, Robert Curtis, and Ben Valmores. But during the next five years gold prices shot up to over $800 an ounce, making the Marcos hoard worth about fifteen times as much. Why, then, did Marcos not pay Curtis and the others their share in the Leber Group recoveries, to keep them silent and to ensure their cooperation for future recoveries? The short answer is that Marcos was pathologically greedy, and would rather kill you than pay you. The bad press he was getting in America was making him anxious, and he had to kill, destroy, or bankrupt somebody just to ease his discomfort. 

Although Curtis was still alive, his problems had only begun. When his plane took off from Manila International Airport, he thought he was safe. But when he reached Nevada he discovered that Marcos already had double-crossed him – before he hit the truck fender at Teresa-2. Curtis told us that while he was working on Teresa-2, the Gold Cartel had approached Marcos with a Mafia-type offer – “either kill Curtis and let the Cartel do the business of [gold] distribution, or he [Marcos] would be in trouble”. By Gold Cartel, he meant the alliance of prime banks, gold processing companies, and national treasuries (including the Federal Reserve and Bank of England) that dominate the official world gold market. While it is impossible to document what Curtis said in this instance, it is supported by subsequent events. His smelters and gold-sanctifying function in Manila were taken over by a member of the Cartel called Johnson-Mathey Chemicals, part of Johnson-Mathey Bank (JMB), one of England’s gold banks. A few years later, after a number of scandals provoked by what brokers in the City of London called ‘Marcos Black Eagle deals’, JMB collapsed and was absorbed by the Bank of England. 

Marcos also sent Ambassador Mutuc to San Francisco, to start the process of destroying everything Curtis was involved in. Curtis told us, “Mutuc contacted all of my managers and stockholders, and had a meeting in San Francisco where he told them I wasn’t coming back. [Mutuc] made them very large cash offers, to destroy my company and file civil suits. Most of them bought the package and Marcos made some of the key people very rich… As a result I was hit with a Civil Suit, Grand Jury, and Indictment. They literally destroyed my five plants [in the United States]. – Bulldozed down a wall, stole all my equipment, precious metal, and emptied out our bank accounts. We owned every piece of equipment free and clear, including trucks, drills, earthmovers, etc. They were all stolen and, since the safes had the titles, they sold them. We were forced into bankruptcy… We had no money for a trial defense and in fact were destitute. Not much threat to Marcos or the Gold Cartel.” 

Jay Agnew of the John Birch Society took Curtis to court to recover the money loaned to him through Commonwealth Packaging. Curtis was unable to repay because Marcos now had bankrupted him, with Birch Society help. A Marcos family source told us that before they sued Curtis, the Birchers already had made a deal with Marcos to market the $20-billion in gold they originally intended to get through Curtis, so the Birch board of directors achieved all that they originally sought. The Agnew lawsuits against Curtis, we were told, were a price demanded by Marcos to clinch the deal. 

“A bullet in the head would have been easier, quicker, and less painful,” Curtis said. 

The FBI, which previously took no interest in Curtis, now ordered an investigation. The Bureau did not seek to indict the Agnews for their part in the scheme, which was to sell the black gold in the Bahamas and smuggle the proceeds into America by way of Canada. Instead, Curtis and MacAllaster were indicted for discussing the details by cable or telephone, based on evidence provided by the Birchers. Their trial was to begin on August 14, 1978, but Curtis and MacAllaster were broke. They also believed their public defender was not up to the job. At a hearing, Curtis pleaded no contest, and was placed on probation for five years.

Fighting back, Curtis sent his full story and all his evidence (over three hundred hours of taped phone conversations and two thousand pages of documents) to Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, head of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee. Laxalt’s office told Curtis nothing could be done, and passed copies of all his material to the Birch Society. Years later, Curtis discovered Laxalt was one of the main links between President Marcos and the White House, and one of the chief reasons why so many Marcos cronies had second homes in Nevada. 

Curtis now had no alternative but to go public. He contacted editor Hank Greenspun of The Las Vegas Sun, and columnist Jack Anderson. They broke the story in articles that began running in April 1978. Steve Psinakis, a Filipino exile in California, published a 24-part series in the Philippine News that June, adding more to the anti-Marcos outcry. Marcos responded by calling Yamashita’s Gold a hoax. But from these articles, Marcos learned that Curtis had burned the red series maps, and was the only one with copies. 

Through an intermediary, Curtis offered to return the copies to Marcos one by one, in exchange for installments of the money owed to him under the Leber agreement. In October 1980, Marcos replied, offering to buy back all the maps by sending Curtis $5-billion in gold, as full payment of his Leber share. The gold would be flown directly from Manila to the airport at Reno, Nevada. By state law, Nevada is a free port, so gold and other imports can be brought in without taxes. That October, the loaded planes took off from Manila. Halfway across the Pacific, Marcos abruptly diverted them to Zurich. According to Philippine ambassador Trinidad Alconcel, who cleared the flight in Washington, Marcos was warned by his future son-in-law Gregory Araneta, by General Ver, and by his friend Adnan Khashoggi, that he was making a big mistake. If he paid the $5-billion, Curtis would have proof that he was telling the truth all along.

next 155

THE PALADINS

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