A few years ago, a water service provider wanted to get a municipal contract to supply water to a small Mindanao town. Before the town’s Sangguniang Bayan could even approve the contract, there was much to wine and dine for. That included grease money for the mayor and the vice mayor, as well as the members of the SB. For the last, they were provided an all-expenses paid trip to a vacation destination.
To not go through padrinos in transacting with the Philippine government is an impossibility. The street lingo is “whom you know.” You turn to someone high up in government to get approval or blessing. The richer you are, the more capable of paying the officials with bribe money. Our government system is anti-poor.
That is exactly what happened to how E-sabong got approved. The proponent was a filthy rich gambling lord, Charlie “Atong” Ang, whose reputation did not exactly have squeaky-clean precedents. In fact, the opposite was true.
Who were Atong Ang’s padrinos in government? The history of E-sabong will show who they were.
The House of Representatives approved the total legalization of E-sabong on December 9, 2020. Who was the Speaker of the House? It was Alan Peter Cayetano. He was no political opposition leader. On the contrary, he was a close Rodrigo Duterte devotee to the point of servility (he once bowed in obeisance before Duterte). Congressmen approved on 2nd reading House Bill 8065 providing for the imposition of taxes on off-site betting activities of locally licensed gamers.
That was almost a year after the Wuhan Virus pandemic from the Peoples’ Republic of China had reached the Philippines on January 30, 2020. E-sabong was just perfect for social distancing. There was no need to travel to a physical fighting pit. The betting can be placed right from one’s cell phone. The popular appeal was instantly widespread — E-sabong had a low minimum bet threshold of only P100. By December 2021, there were an estimated five million players.
A study conducted showed that E-sabong players gambled on the game between 3-5 hours per day. It was addictive. Many staked their life’s savings. Not a few were in debt. A woman sold away her infant child to pay for the mounting debts.
Right from the start, Atong Ang accounted for 95% of the games being played. One can just imagine his dominance of the industry.
The online cockfighting companies granted licenses by the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) in early 2021 were Ang’s Lucky 8 Star Quest (Pitmasters Live), Jade Entertainment and Gaming Technologies (Jade Sabong), Newin Cockers Alliance Gaming (NCA), Philippine Cockfighting International (Platinum Cockers Club), Golden Buzzer (BAGWISAN), and Visayan Cockers Club.
A spokesperson from Visayan Cockers Club explains the leap to cyberspace: “We do live video streaming coverage from our arena studios transmitted via a dedicated, secure broadband connection. Then we direct the coverage to a website hosted on cloud servers. Inside the cloud servers is the proprietary game programming made by highly skilled developers. As for online marketing, we employ mobile technology making the platform very easy, convenient and fun to play.”
The infrastructure needed to operate was digitally sophisticated. By the time Ang applied for PAGCOR license, this was already in place: private streaming platforms, pay-per-view channels, fintech wallets that enabled 24/7 betting.
PAGCOR’s licensing gave E-sabong a layer of legitimacy. Who was PAGCOR’s chairman and CEO? It was Andrea Domingo. PAGCOR is under the Office of the President. Who gave the order to PAGCOR? No one else could have ordered Domingo but the president. Then another cabinet department, the DILG, cascaded E-sabong’s compliance down to the local government level. City and municipal mayors issued local permits; that is if they did not turn a blind eye. Barangay captains were also involved by appointing tanods who served as lookouts, enforcers and collectors.
In short, Rodrigo Duterte turned government into one national gambling machinery by making E-sabong a state-enabled enterprise. By 2021, the system spanned 14 regions of the country.
And then came the ghastly news of the missing sabungeros (cockfighters). Where were they? Where they could have gone? This was April 2021. The first sabungeros reported missing were Michael Bautista of Santa Cruz, Laguna and Ricardo Lasco of San Pablo city. Both of them came from Atong Ang’s Manila Arena cockpit. By August 2021, the number of missing sabungeros had reached 34.
A cockpit in Santa Cruz, Laguna alone had 23 reported missing sabungeros.
Atong Ang then moved quickly to secure a 25-year franchise for his Lucky 8 Star Quest Inc. He wanted more than the license to operate from PAGCOR. And so on July 19, 2021, House Bill 09834 was filed in the House. Who was the Speaker? It was the Duterte family friend Lord Allan Velasco of Marinduque.
The three principal authors were Joey Salceda of Albay, Sharon Garin of the partylist Owa Mangunguma, and Conrado Estrella III of the partylist Abono. Despite reports of the missing sabungeros, the bill was read on August 3, 2021 and substituted by House Bill 10199. Thereafter the number of principal authors increased to 28.
The bill was passed on 2nd reading on September 13, 2021, less than a month after its 1st reading. On that same day, it was approved on 3rd reading. The speed was amazing. Was it greased by huge bribes from Ang? Nothing else could explain the unprecedented speed with which it passed.
Alas, the Senate was engrossed in the hearings of the missing sabungeros. There, Ang reached a dead end. On March 2022, Senate leaders declared the Ang franchise bill dead.
And then came the barrage of criticisms against E-sabong that did not move Rodrigo Duterte a bit. On that same month of March 2022, he announced that he had no plans to ban E-sabong. He said it netted his government P640 million a month. One such claim he made was that P100 million of E-sabong profits was being given to the Philippine General Hospital each month to support its operations. For the sake of public interest, PGH must confirm if this was true.
Was it because Duterte was the principal godfather of E-sabong? Was it because he was indebted to Atong Ang for possible bribes? The air of rejection against the gambling he had legalized was permeating public opinion. It left a trail of deaths and debts. E-sabong became the story of how a presidency branding itself as a crime buster enabled a syndicate to operate under the guise of official government blessing.
On March 17, 2022, Duterte gaslighted, as is usual for him. In a speech in Palo, Leyte, he announced: “Let the police solve the problem. It’s not the fault of management. It is the fault of evil men doing something wrong.” That is like saying he already had the investigation solved: Atong Ang was innocent.
Back in the Senate hearings, Ang fought back. He accused his rival operators of waging a “trial by publicity” against him. How can that be possible if his Lucky 8 Star Quest dominated 95% of the industry? The rest were simply Lilliputs. In the Senate, he bared that his biggest rivals were Bong Pineda of Pampanga, Congressman Arnie Teves of Negros Oriental, Agbiag partylist congressman Patrick Antonio, Mayor Elan Nagaño of San Leonardo, Nueva Ecija, and a police general he said surnamed Cascolan. Yet all the missing sabungeros were last seen alive in the three cockpit arenas he operated.
Meanwhile, the chatty Duterte hemmed and hawed. In a joint AFP-PNP command conference in Malacañang on April 6, 2021, he said was willing to forego the billions of pesos of E-sabong revenues if authorities can link illegal activities to it. But he deliberately omitted discussing the elephant in the room – the missing sabungeros. Not a word was said about it. That was not by accident.
His worn out line was: “I will make sure before I go I will stop it if is true. But I will be sacrificing the billions that we would have earned. So it’s a police work. Magtrabaho kayo (You do your job). Solve the crime, kahit sino man yan (Whoever is behind it).” This was the man who in 2020, at the height of the Wuhan Virus pandemic, had P8.28 billion in surveillance funds. In the 2021 budget, he had P16.4 billion for anti-insurgency and P9.5 billion for intelligence funds. And he was clueless about Atong Ang and the missing sabungeros? Balderdash.
If Duterte was indeed bribed by Ang, that placed him in a position he could not extricate himself from. He simply could not ban E-sabong out of debt of gratitude. Choreography had to be carefully crafted. The Department of the Interior and Local Government ran an online survey from April 19 to April 20, 2022, with 62% of respondents favoring a complete government ban of E-sabong. Those who believed a tighter regulation was needed recorded 34%, while a meager 4% supported E-sabong.
How could such a survey with 8,463 respondents run for only 2 days? Was it a bogus survey designed to give the president a graceful exit from his support of Ang?
DILG secretary Eduardo Año personally delivered the results of the survey to the president. Duterte officially banned E-sabong on May 3, 2022 using the survey as a basis, not the case of the missing sabungeros.
Two weeks later, it was reported on May 19, 2022 that six betting websites were still operating. Duterte was being dodged. Was it because his ban was just a paper ban? Almost a year later, in April 2023, it was reported that suspended congressman Arnie Teves continued his E-sabong operations in Central Visayas. He even threatened law enforcers getting in his way.
Many netizens have been pointing out that Duterte may have, in fact, known that the bodies of the missing sabungeros were burned after they were killed. The day before he announced the ban, Duterte said in San Fernando, Pampanga:
“Saan na yung nawala (Where are the missing ones?)? What is my suspicion? Sinunog yung mga katawan non (Their bodies were burned). May mga pulis na sabit kasi identified sila (There were policemen involved who are now identified).
The godfather of Atong Ang and E-sabong knew all along. He was only pretending not to know. Because Atong Ang’s largesse was priceless. And because of that he was in on the crime.
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.
