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‘Cash-Flow Problem’ in Hawaii Refuge : ‘Needy’ Marcoses Aided by Friends’ Gifts

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Times Staff Writer

In the peeling offices of the Phil-American Travel Agency, on a shabby side street of a shabby neighborhood near this city’s airport, Jose (Joe) Lazo and a cluster of Filipino matrons gathered last Tuesday to help a friend who had fallen on hard times.

Beneath an outsized poster of a beaming Ferdinand E. Marcos and President Reagan on the White House lawn, someone had dumped a 100-pound sack of Hikari U.S. No. 1 rice. A fat brown bag of squash had been propped against it.

Before the evening was out, a hefty bundle of goods--food, utensils, even money--would be delivered to a couple across town, Lazo said, easing what by anyone’s measure has been a spring of reversals.

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“Families donated them to the Marcoses,” Lazo said. “And tonight I am bringing them a microwave oven . . . and they will be donated a washing machine and a dryer this weekend.”

Squash and a microwave seem an ironic tribute for a couple accused by the Philippines’ new leaders of stealing billions from their countrymen and squandering it or investing it in mansions, jewelry and Manhattan real estate.

Even more ironic are indications that the Marcoses genuinely seem to need the gifts.

If the world has cast them as villains in a real-life episode of television’s “Dynasty,” some observers contend, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’ Hawaiian exile has proven to be more in the down-at-the-heels style of “The Waltons.” Almost two months after they fled Manila’s opulent Malacanang Palace, the Marcoses appear to those observers to have a Spartan life--painfully short of the cash they are alleged to have stolen, and perhaps even shorter on allies.

By one account, the reputed billionaires have run up close to $1 million in unpaid bills for security work, legal defenses, medical treatment and other essentials of exile, with the total rising daily.

Marcos is said to have promised creditors that he would raise the money from friends or have it wired in from elsewhere. But all such efforts are said to have failed.

“I am carefully avoiding saying that he doesn’t have assets,” said one associate who refused to be identified, “or that he won’t have access to assets at some time. . . . But based on the evidence I see, the guy’s got a cash-flow problem.”

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Enmeshed in the world’s most litigious legal system, and facing what one associate called “palpable hostility” from the Reagan Administration, the former president and his wife also are said to have discovered that their “safe haven” is not the lonely splendor it was purported to be.

Refuge a Political Prison

In that view, the Marcoses’ Hawaiian refuge has become an unpleasant political prison from which there is no easy escape.

“I think they’ve discovered what everyone in political life who has a controversy discovers,” said one frequent associate of Marcos, who asked for anonymity. “When you’re in power, you’ve got a lot of friends. And when you’re out of power, all of a sudden nobody’s in sight.”

“Nobody expected this, including and especially, one President Reagan, I’m sure,” said another regular Marcos visitor, who refused to be named. “The problems appear real.”

The word appear was not used carelessly. There is abundant circumstantial evidence that the Marcoses could tap pools of wealth if they chose. Some money and jewels undoubtedly were aboard the Air Force jet that flew the couple and their 89-person entourage here from Manila in February; a second jet’s contents of jewels, currency and other riches were seized by U.S. Customs.

In any case, with a throng of lawyers tracking every cent they spend, the Marcoses have reason to play the role of poverty-stricken exiles.

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Poverty Seen as Act

Administration officials seem certain that the couple’s poverty is an act, and they are reliably reported to have conveyed that belief to Marcos when his Secret Service guard was withdrawn last Monday.

Marcos had protested that he lacked money to hire replacements, but private guards have since turned up at his home--paid, it is said, with $10,000 supposedly raised by Lazo and others.

A State Department official snorted at the idea that the Marcoses are poor. “The only money problem with Ferdinand Marcos,” he said flatly, “is that he doesn’t want to touch his assets in the U.S. because they’ll get frozen.”

“Marcos is not penniless. He is receiving cash from his cronies,” contended Tomas (Buddy) Gomez, a Honolulu importer-exporter and part-time investigator for the Commission on Good Government set up by the Philippines’ new president, Corazon Aquino. “He is putting up a show, because if he has no money, how can he be accused of financing a comeback in the Philippines?”

But if the Marcoses’ poverty is an act, they are sticking to the script.

Dark Suit, Green Dress

In their few public appearances, the two repeatedly have worn the same attire--Marcos a dark three-piece suit and his wife a green knee-length outfit that she calls her “only good dress.”

And the beachfront home that the couple has occupied since leaving Hickam Air Force Base on March 17, although it is for sale at an asking price of $1.5 million, is a four-bedroom bungalow and an adjacent one-bedroom cottage that sit barely 20 feet from Honolulu’s busiest and noisiest freeway. The driveway is blocked by a beige-on-brown van. A hedge and a concrete-block wall separate the property from neighbors, ever-present protesters and scooter-riding, camera-toting sightseers.

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Inside, visitors say, about 15 servants and advisers make up a sort of court-in-exile, living in the sun room and sleeping on daybeds and on mattresses thrown on the floor.

“There are generals and colonels sleeping on cots. You should see how they are packed in,” said Lazo, president of a Honolulu group called Friends of Marcos. “If one sneezes, they all catch cold.”

While most visitors are turned away, friendly Filipinos often are allowed past the van, frequently carrying tins of baked goods or other gifts.

Marcos Called Stoical

Marcos is reported to have accepted his new, lesser status stoically. Lazo said that the former president spends much time working on a book and reading “lots of international law.” He also spends considerable time on the telephone talking to “the boys” in Manila--lawyers and business friends who were close during his 20-year rule.

Others have reported that Marcos keeps an erratic schedule, sometimes staying up most of the night reading or pondering legal and financial problems.

By the couple’s own account, those problems show few signs of ebbing. Marcos told ABC News this month that he has some money, but “cannot even pay our doctors’ bills” because his assets have been frozen by legal and governmental orders.

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He flatly denied allegations that the family money is “ill-gotten gains” from his Philippine reign or that government money was spent on such purchases as Imelda Marcos’ extensive assortment of shoes--an assortment whose size and value he says has been grossly exaggerated. In fact, he said, his wife’s well-publicized $500,000 shopping sprees are “fabricated.”

Imelda Marcos agrees. “People think we have hidden wealth. We just depend on the Filipino community here for our day-to-day needs,” she told a Manila radio station early this month in a telephone interview. “If we had hidden wealth, we would not be doing this because it is so shameful.”

Cried During Interview

She burst into tears during that interview, and her husband and friends say she cries frequently over their Hawaii plight. But “there is nowhere else to go,” Marcos said in the Manila interview.

Marcos’ legal problems appear similarly daunting. According to an accounting by The Times, Marcos faces at least 14 lawsuits in the United States alone, which seek upward of $30 billion in damages or other compensation.

Many of the lawsuits appear frivolous. But others do not, and all must be defended at a cost one expert said could eventually approach $1 million a month. The Washington law firm of Anderson, Hibey, Nauheim and Blair sent a partner to Honolulu this month to coordinate the Marcos defense; the former law firm of Hawaii Gov. George Ariyoshi is Marcos’ local counsel, and firms around the country have been hired to fight legal brush fires in Texas, New York, Washington and elsewhere.

Reagan, who once wined and dined Marcos at the White House, has not been the bulwark against such troubles that Marcos or his advisers apparently expected several weeks ago.

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Far from the “dignified” exile he was offered as an inducement to leave Manila, these advisers say, Marcos has seen his private papers seized by U.S. Customs officials and released to Philippine investigators and the media before he was able to view them.

Holdings Were Frozen

Courts in New York and New Jersey have frozen real estate holdings that Marcos still denies owning. And the Philippines and Switzerland have frozen all assets in their jurisdictions of the Marcoses, their relatives and friends.

Reagan Administration officials who four years ago praised Marcos as a defender of Asian democracy now offer neither aid nor comfort, some Marcos aides complain.

“They haven’t done a thing,” one associate snapped. “They’ve played games. What they did with the documents was absolutely shameful.”

Justice Department officials insist that Marcos never was promised special immunity from private lawsuits and have even hinted that he could be criminally prosecuted should investigators uncover a serious violation of American law.

Marcos was virtually ordered out of a red-tiled duplex at Honolulu’s Hickam Air Force Base after three weeks, associates said, because his presence hindered use of the officers club, barber shop and swimming pool.

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Many critics are convinced--though they so far lack conclusive evidence--that the former presidential couple could do better.

Two Hawaii Homes

“Ask them why they didn’t stay in one of their two Hawaii houses,” the State Department official asked sarcastically. Before his ouster, the Marcoses frequently visited two sprawling, secluded homes in suburban Makiki Heights on a lush volcanic peak that offers both security and a fine view of downtown Honolulu and the Pacific.

The homes, dubbed the “party house” and the “sleeping house,” are registered to a Panama corporation with a Manila address. But they were bought in 1977 and 1980 by two Marcos “cronies,” banana king Antonio Floirendo and Philippine supermarket magnate Bienvenido Tantoco.

Documents released by a congressional panel last month show that one of the Marcoses’ daughters, Maria Imelda (Imee) Manotoc, claimed one of the residences as home as recently as last summer. That walled house appears now to be vacant.

Marcos’ critics also contend that money should be no more than a minor worry, for Marcos still has a collection of wealthy friends with liquid assets.

Gomez argues that whether Marcos is wealthy or poor in his Hawaiian exile is irrelevant. “It is now a known fact that Marcos is a world master at corporate stickups,” he said. “Marcos is a moral issue. After uncovering all this skulduggery, anyone who clings to him must have questionable moral value.”

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Lazo disagrees. “All we are asking is that President Marcos be treated kindly,” he said. “We must not forget that at one time, Marcos was America’s greatest ally, and the greatest fighter against communism in all Asia.”

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