Trial Veils Role of Philippine Revolution Hero

SAN FRANCISCO —  As jurors begin weighing the fate of a bearded Greek-American businessman today, they have only the barest outline of why high-ranking Philippine officials traveled 10,000 miles to testify in his defense.

The trial scarcely told the story of 57-year-old Steven Psinakis, as the judge presiding over it refused to let his courtroom become a stage on which to retell the atrocities committed under Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship.

But the story of Psinakis’ role in the movement to bring about Marcos’ downfall has all the elements of a cloak-and-dagger thriller, heavy on corruption, heroism, betrayal and suspense.

It is a story largely veiled in the sketchy, four-page indictment that charges Psinakis with participating in a plot to ship explosives to the Philippines.

His defense turns on his contention that Marcos’ foreign agents sought to silence one of the dictator’s most relentless opponents by planting incriminating evidence--a detonation cord--in the garbage outside Psinakis’ San Francisco home.

Psinakis denies being part of any conspiracy to smuggle explosives. But he freely admits that during the martial law years, he was deeply enmeshed in the revolution that riveted world attention and toppled Marcos in 1986.

And that involvement, he says, earned him the enmity of Marcos’ agents.

Psinakis, for example, tells of a night in 1979 when he was driving in downtown San Francisco and two men in a Cadillac pulled alongside his car. One of the men thrust a gun with a silencer at his head, demanded that Psinakis cease his anti-Marcos activities and told him that he would not be warned again.

In 1969, he had married into one of the wealthiest families in Asia, and he became an activist when Marcos tried to crush the family by appropriating its wealth and imprisoning one member who was publishing a paper critical of the government.

But prosecutors denied that Psinakis’ involvement in this drama was relevant to the charges against him.

“The issue in this case is not whether some people in the Philippines think Mr. Psinakis is a hero or not,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Charles B. Burch in his closing argument Monday, as Psinakis’ supporters filled U.S. District Judge Robert Schnacke’s courtroom. Another 30 supporters stood in the hallway.

Burch said it was a clear case made simple by wiretapped phone conversations in which Psinakis talks in code about explosives.

The evidence, the government argues, proves Psinakis took part in a 1981 plot to transport detonation cord from St. Louis to San Francisco on a Greyhound bus and failed to obtain proper permits. If he is found guilty, he faces up to 15 years in prison.

Diplomatic Retribution

The explosives were destined for the Philippines, Burch says.

Officials in Manila are threatening diplomatic retribution if Psinakis is convicted. Sen. Agapito (Butz) Aquino, President Corazon Aquino’s brother-in-law, vowed to seek to close U.S. military bases in the Philippines if Psinakis is convicted.

“It confuses Philippine-American relations,” Foreign Affairs Secretary Raul Manglapus said, after calling Psinakis a hero of the revolution in his testimony.

In the United States, Psinakis was one of the three most visible leaders in the anti-Marcos movement, along with Manglapus and Sen. Benigno Aquino, Corazon Aquino’s late husband who became the revolution’s martyr when he was assassinated in 1983.

“This was a guy deeply committed to democracy in the Philippines, and he resented the fact that this government was coddling a corrupt dictator,” Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.) said after testifying on Psinakis’ behalf at the trial in San Francisco.

Investigated Marcos’ Holdings

In the 1980s, Psinakis spent much of his time lobbying on behalf of the Movement for a Free Philippines, a group led by Manglapus, the Aquinos and others who now control the Philippines.

He also wrote about and investigated holdings of Marcos and his cronies in the United States, and he gave much of what he found to Solarz’s subcommittee on East Asian Affairs, which used that evidence in its investigations of Marcos.

Not one to falsely downplay his role in it all, Psinakis chronicled many of his exploits in a 1981 book entitled “Two Terrorists Meet,” a polemic against the Marcos regime in which he recounted a 5 1/2-hour meeting with Imelda Marcos in her suite at the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan in 1980.

In the 1960s, Psinakis was largely apolitical. He was a young engineer who worked for the Manila Electric Co., a utility owned by Eugenio Lopez, said to have been the richest man in Asia. In those years, Psinakis would hang out in the nightspots and casinos with Lopez’s son, Eugenio (Geny) Jr.

Waltzed With Imelda

Meanwhile, Marcos won election as president on a platform that included a promise to end corruption. Lopez’s media empire endorsed Marcos. Presentacion (Presy) Lopez, Lopez’s daughter, was part of Imelda’s social circle in the pre-martial law era. Psinakis tells of society functions in which he waltzed with Imelda.

In 1969, when Marcos won a second term, Psinakis married Presy, objections of the patriarch notwithstanding. Feeling less than welcome in his father-in-law’s homeland, Psinakis and his wife left for Greece.

While they lived on the Aegean, things worsened in Manila. Geny Lopez, then publisher of the Manila Chronicle, editorialized against Marcos in 1971. In September, 1972, Marcos imposed martial law. A month later, Geny was in prison, allegedly because of a plot to kill Marcos, though he was not tried.

Then the extortion began.

The elder Lopez remained in San Francisco when martial law was declared. Over a period of two years, Imelda’s brother, Kokoy Romualdez, visited Lopez and coaxed him into signing over holdings worth more than $100 million, with the promise that his son would be freed. By 1974, Marcos had appropriated most of Lopez’s holdings in the Philippines.

Geny Lopez, his father dying of cancer, went on a hunger strike and asked to see Psinakis. Lopez declared that he was willing to die if political prisoners were not released. He urged that Psinakis take up the cause.

“I was very taken that he had sent for me, not directly a member of his family, that he felt I was best qualified to represent this cause to the outside world,” Psinakis said in a San Francisco Focus magazine article last year.

Psinakis returned to San Francisco an activist. In addition to lobbying, and a column for the leading opposition newspaper, the Philippine News, published in a San Francisco suburb, he practiced a bit of derring-do.

Psinakis devised a plan to free Geny Lopez. Lopez’s sons smuggled tools into the prison. On Sept. 30, 1977, Lopez and fellow prisoner Sergio Osmena cut some fencing and slipped away from the prison to a waiting car, which drove them to an airstrip.

Death Threats

A twin-engine Cessna piloted by a man who flew for the Israelis in the Six-Day War took them to Hong Kong. The Carter Administration helped win Lopez and Osmena political asylum.

Such exploits placed Psinakis in the fore of the anti-Marcos movement. Mrs. Psinakis testified about being tailed, of receiving death threats directed at their three children and of their children being covertly photographed.

“Several times I answered the phone and I could tell that the voice . . . was Asian and (he) told me, ‘If you don’t tell your husband to stop doing what he is doing we’ll get you. We will get your children,’ ” she testified.

Romeo Arguelles, former consul general in San Francisco who in the last days of the Marcos regime dramatically renounced the dictator, testified that he routinely reported back to Manila on anti-Marcos forces, “foremost among them Psinakis.” Two Philippine National Intelligence and Security Authority agents working out of the consulate also monitored Psinakis and other dissidents.

In 1979, an organization known as the Light a Fire Movement began detonating bombs to destroy Marcos’ holdings. Police arrested dozens of suspected terrorists. Some gave statements that Psinakis and other Filipino exiles, including Benigno Aquino, supplied the money, training and directions for the attacks.

Psinakis tells of being warned by Aquino in 1980 that Imelda Marcos had told him that if the opposition persisted, “The Reagan Administration will go after us here, especially you. They have evidence on your activities.”

In his book, Psinakis quotes Benigno Aquino’s recounting of a conversation with Mrs. Marcos. Aquino, the book says, said Mrs. Marcos claimed that President-elect Reagan had promised to help ferret out terrorists who were working in the United States to destabilize the Philippine government.

Although Psinakis has denied controlling guerrillas, he acknowledges having contact with “freedom fighters,” quoting one of them in his book on the techniques they used to smuggle explosives into the Philippines.

Calls Tapped

Psinakis also received phone calls from Arturo Taca, a St. Louis doctor, in October, 1981, that were wiretapped and played for the jury. In one call, he tells Taca to “place the order for 10,000.” The prosecution contends he was asking that Taca order 10,000 feet of 60-grain detonation cord.

The timing of the indictment, returned under seal in December, 1986, is something of puzzle. Charges might have been brought in 1983 against seven men, including Psinakis. But the indictment was put on hold after Sen. Aquino was assassinated that year, court records say.

As it was, the pared-down indictment naming only Psinakis and Charles Avila was returned just days before the statute of limitations was to expire. Avila, who remains in the Philippines, has been elected mayor of a town on the island of Leyte. He has no plans to return to the U.S..

After Marcos’ fall, the Lopez family pressed claims to regain ownership of the company through Philippine courts. The clan has now regained control much of what was taken away. Geny Lopez runs a new Manila Chronicle.

Moved Back to Philippines

Psinakis returned to Manila. He and his wife moved into in two-story home with a swimming pool. He became senior vice-president of First Philippine Holding, the conglomerate that the Lopez family controlled before Marcos.

In July, 1987, Psinakis arrived in San Francisco, hoping to meet executives at Bechtel Co. to arrange help constructing a power plant and to find export markets for shrimp, another of the company’s projects. He was arrested at San Francisco International Airport.