Honor among thieves

QWERTYMAN

- JOSE DALISAY

fraternity brother — even older than I am and a longtime emigrant — asked in our group chat, "Didn't we have corruption before? Why all this outrage now?" So I had to bring him up to speed. "It's the scale, brother. We're talking billions, possibly even trillions, of public funds being pocketed by contractors who don't deliver the goods and put people's lives at risk, in cahoots with politicians they've bought or are related to."

I told him the story of Rudy Cuenca, the self-confessed Marcos crony and boss of the Construction and Development Corporation of the Philippines, which built some of the largest infrastructure projects under martial law, including the North and South Expressways and San Juanico Bridge, and made Rudy a very rich man.

I happened to co-write Cuenca's biography (Builder of Bridges: The Rudy Cuenca Story, Anvil Publishing, 2010), after initially refusing to do so. "Why should I write your book," I told him at our first meeting, "when your boss put me in prison?"

"I have stories to tell," he said, and did he. It wasn't the money — which ironically was a pittance — but the curiosity that got me on board. And just to show it wasn't a hack job on my part, the book became a finalist for the National Book Awards for that year.

Rudy — who died two years ago — wasn't an engineer and didn't even finish college, but he learned the ropes of contracting doing small bridge projects under the watchful eye of US Army engineers who had him redo the job at a loss if it was substandard. Because American reparations money was involved, the Americans made sure it was well spent.