If swinders were profiled, I bet we’d find smooth-talking, fancy-car-driving, high-connected characters.

 

But not knowledgeable enough about cars, I’d be hard to impress by the prop. Apart from not having that kind of money for a car that costs about as much as a condominium unit and drops by 20 percent in value once driven out of the store, I can’t be bothered with it. As it is, I’m still recovering from the cost of a new set of tires for our eight-year-old pedestrian Innova.

 

I still remember the Pajero Lady. For some years, she managed, precisely propped by car, tongue and connection, to insert herself in homes in exclusive villages and come away with loot. She was out of prison longer than in, and most likely out again now, because of connections in, as the most resounding rumor has it, the military.

 

She was described as someone who could easily intimidate housemaids because she looked just like the type the señora would associate herself with. On the other hand, the pricey Pajero alone did it with gate guards.

 

Dazzled, intimidated

 

Indeed, there’s something about expensive cars that tend to intimidate guards. How often has my husband, our own Innova unnecessarily stalled in the queue, called the attention of guards to fancy-car drivers lingering at drop-and-collect points in Greenbelt, themselves possibly afraid to lose their jobs if they let their bosses wait like the lesser mortals.

 

Actually, it’s not just guards and help who are intimidated or dazzled or impressed. Only the other night, at a drugstore in Forbes, where presumably more expensive cars occupy per square meter of real estate than anywhere else, people at the counter went suddenly astir, momentarily forgetting about us customers. It was a white car revving up to back out of the carpark, and one of the salesgirls, not risking being thought ignorant, announced the brand—Ferrari.

 

Do you yet wonder why fancy cars are integral to the modus operandi of swindlers? My friend Bea was in an even worse disadvantage; she knew her swindler socially, her own fancy prop a Mercedes Benz. She sold her a property with a fake title, and was even more incredulous to discover she was not the only victim but only one in a long list.

 

Dismal situation

 

But the most critical prop is connection, no doubt.

 

Recently I caught a television report about Filipinos in the US being swindled out of their life’s savings and retirement money by two other immigrant compatriots. The FBI has stepped in, and I can’t imagine how the swindlers can get out of it.

 

My confidence in, and vicarious satisfaction with, the US justice system come from “Law and Order,” “CSI,” “Judge Judy,” and such television shows. It’s not a perfect system, to be sure, but, as much as the shows showcase its efficiency, they also concede corrupt judges, unscrupulous lawyers and rotten cops.

 

Still, our own situation compares dismally on all counts—crime-tracking equipment, skills, and police and judicial professionalism. I’d have been happy enough with a good account of the last.

 

Asked if she still believed we could get justice in our courts, a young lawyer replied consolingly, “Oo naman,” although admitting at the same time that she had had her demoralizing moments.

 

When there’s corruption in the judiciary, she said, no amount of good lawyering, evidence or testimony is much help. She sounded most frustrated about securing crime scenes, preserving evidence and the lack of a database for validating suspicions and evidence.

 

It must be so tough that one high-profile lawyer has been heard to say, “If you can help it, don’t go to court!”

 

Trumped-up charges

 

As it happens, while we don’t go around looking for a court fight, we have been dragged into one, and we feel that if we shirked we wouldn’t be able to look at each other or indeed ourselves: It would constitute encouraging a fraudster, a swindler precisely, and more, who has been encouraged enough.

 

Our fraudster is typical enough. She drives a branded car, a BMW, a rather older model; she speaks a language adapted from law texts; and she has easy access to police escorts. In addition, she wears a branded watch, one that, fake or not, looks dazzling enough.

 

But as much as none of it would have worked on us, she only flashed those props at us, after the fact. She got to us through the recommendation of someone we knew.

 

She has beaten us to court, as if justice were a game in which who files first wins, trumped-up charges notwithstanding.