IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

[Editor’s Note: This is the third of what will ultimately become a six-part post that is intended to answer the question “What the hell happened in the Philippines?” with three additional posts devoted to an investigation of 'The Troll'. These posts can also be found on my Facebook page, and it is recommended that they be read in sequence.]

It began like any other day. My girlfriend would be visiting in the afternoon for pizza and movies, joined by her clan who always looked forward to the break from their routine: mothers & fathers, aunts & uncles, brothers & sisters, cousins & neighbors – The Bayanihan Spirit was alive and well in my house.

One occasional visitor who lived down the street from the family was having a rough time of it: her mother had died in a government hospital of stomach cancer and her father abused her when he was not in jail. On this particular February day in 2018, as she was wandering around Fields Avenue, she was picked up and taken to Cullen’s home for girls, where she was threatened, coerced – and ultimately promised a thousand-dollar court award, which clinched the deal – into signing a pre-prepared statement written by former Preda gestapo Milet Flores Paguio that on one occasion while she was visiting with the family five years earlier I had molested her. 

Notwithstanding the fact that this offense was alleged to have occurred in late 2013, months before I had ever set foot in the country, Cullen filed three separate cases in two jurisdictions against my girlfriend for trafficking and me for child abuse (all for the same imaginary event), followed when these started to unravel by three more, with the ‘Date & Time of Commission’ changed to ‘sometime in the 17-month period between March 2015 and August 2016’.

“Sorry, fans – it appears that I may have gone after the wrong man and made a total mess of this one. Would you like to buy a mango?”

It was a classic Cullen con, and so far one operative – a corrupt low-level prosecutor named Mark Oliver Sison, who has been hustling foreigners for years and whose five sham cases against a Japanese tourist were thrown out in 2017 – has been disqualified from ours for ‘personal and financial bias’ and will be lucky to get a job at Jollibee by the time the priest has finished embarrassing him. 

Meanwhile, our first attorney at least had the wherewithal to consolidate Cullen’s frag grenade of cases into one before disappearing and becoming City Administrator, inspiring lawyer number two to bill me six times the normal rate for each hearing based on the number of cases there used to be.

Needless to say, this was all making it very difficult to keep up with the priest, who was zipping around the slums with a pocketful of pesos looking for anybody willing to testify against Bonnie and Clyde.

“You made me somebody

they’re gonna remember.”

– Clyde Barrow

The whole thing is regarded as a ‘scam case’ by the Philippine Justice Department for obvious reasons, but the ‘priest’ has local officials in his pocket, and Facebook as well as paid ‘reporters’ and internet trolls to malign me. The aforementioned inmate escaped captivity at Preda and was laying low when she submitted an Affidavit of Desistance to the court stating that she was forced into making these allegations against us, and sat for a lengthy video interview in which she, along with four other escapees, described their horror as captives.

Shortly after that video went viral on YouTube, however, the enraged priest and his rent-a-cops tracked her down, dragged her back to the indoctrination ward at Preda, surrounded the family home, and filed charges against them all for the crime of trying to free their daughter from his money-machine.

Fortunately,
money can’t buy

brains and those same

keystone cops gave

me 48 hours’ notice
back in July 2018 

that they were coming 

to take me away
 to one of Cullen’s
black sites,

allowing ample time

to pack a beach-bag

and exfiltrate to

Malapascua.

Getting the big donor payout requires publicity:

‘Foreigners are good media copy’ the kindhearted priest proclaimed in
an interview 20 years ago with the Philippine Daily Inquirer,

adding that ‘they are also isolated from their families

and very vulnerable’.

Given that the legal system in the Philippines has developed without any reference to
international norms, combined with the dark connections Cullen has made over many decades in the game and the low salaries that have allowed him to buy the necessary officials, I don’t know where all this will end, but am confident that lawyer number three will bring it home.

The Missionary from Hell is like a dog with a bone and needs the donations to keep rolling in from all the people he has conned – he received $400,000 from USAID Philippines alone following the setup that led to the 17-year sentence of 66-year-old retired Australian businessman Victor Fitzgerald and prompted the Bishop of the Diocese of Zambales and 27 other priests to sign a statement to the effect that “Cullen might have exceeded bounds” when he offered the alleged victims and their families $1,000 to sign statements implicating the accused and threatened them with incarceration if they didn’t.

Meanwhile, the elaborate ruse framing Hans Rudolf von Ballmoos that marked the priest’s foray into tabloid television probably brought in record donations despite the fact that the scam resulted in public apologies from German TV network Pro7 as well as the Philippine Justice Department and was dismissed for lack of merit when the alleged victim revealed that Cullen had given her $300 to state on camera that she was 15 when in fact she was 19 years old.

Another Pawn Is Sacrificed

For the Victor Fitzgerald scam, Cullen selected as his defendant a young girl named Gloria who lived with her mother, an illiterate laundry-woman, in a one-room bamboo shack set on stilts on a hillside near the Preda Foundation. According to a February 28, 2000 story by Ansbert Joaquin in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, “Gloria was kept hidden from her mother throughout the case and accompanied by a bodyguard when she was finally allowed to attend school, was coached by the priest and Preda staffers on what to say at court hearings, and forced to take ‘white colored tablets’ before every court appearance to relax her. She added that Cullen would instruct her to fix her eyes on him during hearings and say what he told her to say, and that the priest rewarded her with ice cream and clothes if she cooperated.” Just like the pawn in our story, however, Gloria escaped from Preda with two fellow inmates and ran to the Office of the Mayor of Olongapo three months after the case was filed where she recanted her statements, only to be returned when the priest had warrants issued for the twelve-year-old child’s arrest. When recaptured by Cullen’s goons, she was threatened with never being released from Preda, or her leg irons, if she failed to comply with the con and, when she was no longer needed, disposed of in a government-run shelter in which 64 residents were crammed into two bedrooms.

Cullen's recent claim that ‘in 2018 Preda legal officers working with the prosecutors won 18 convictions, and in 2019 we won 20 convictions,’ is yet another ploy to get donations and the priest had absolutely nothing to do with any of those convictions.

He doesn’t do real cases.

(To be continued.)

“When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.”

- William Blake

#ShayCullen #PredaFoundation