Gold, Dictators, and the Trump Connection That’s Been Hiding in Plain Sight

I can't stop thinking about the Philippines. I've been fascinated by the country for years now. It started with Filipino co-workers and my curiosity about their stories. Then I was reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and the Philippines was right there in the middle of it - World War II, buried gold, data havens, all of it. The more I learned, the more I realized this is a country with a history that doesn't even feel real.

In 1971, a locksmith finds a tunnel full of gold. He tries to report it to the authorities. Armed men come at 2:30 in the morning and take everything. He's arrested, tortured, imprisoned for two years. Twenty-five years later, after the president who ordered it has fled into exile, the locksmith sues in a Hawaii court. He dies before the verdict. So does the president. But in 1996, a jury awards $22 billion - the largest civil judgment in U.S. history at the time.

And today, that president's son is running the Philippines.

But you can't understand any of this without understanding what happened on January 24, 1971, when Rogelio Roxas found something that shouldn't exist.

The Locksmith and the Tunnel

Rogelio Roxas was a former soldier working as a locksmith in Baguio City. In 1961, he claimed he met a man whose father had served in the Japanese army during World War II. The man gave him a map. Then someone else - claiming to have been General Yamashita's interpreter - told him where to dig.

This wasn't unusual. In the Philippines, everyone knows about Yamashita's Gold. During World War II, Japan systematically looted Asia - gold from banks, treasures from temples, jewelry, artifacts, everything valuable and portable. By 1945, General Tomoyuki Yamashita - the "Tiger of Malaya" - was commanding Japanese forces in the Philippines as American forces closed in. According to legend, Yamashita buried all that stolen wealth throughout the islands. Tunnels in mountains. Sealed caves. Chambers under old Spanish churches. Then the war ended. Yamashita was captured, tried, and hanged in 1946. The treasure's locations died with him.

But Filipinos never stopped believing it was there. Somewhere. Waiting.

Roxas spent years searching. In 1970, he obtained a treasure hunting permit from Judge Pio Marcos - a relative of President Ferdinand Marcos - who informed him that under Philippine law, thirty percent of any discovered treasure would go to the government.

For seven months, Roxas and his team dug on state land near Baguio General Hospital, working "24 hours a day" according to court documents. They broke into a system of underground tunnels. Inside they found Japanese radios, bayonets, rifles, human skeletal remains in Japanese army uniforms.

Then they found a ten-foot thick concrete enclosure in the tunnel floor.

On January 24, 1971, they broke through.

Behind the concrete was a golden Buddha statue. Three feet tall, weighing about a metric ton. The head was removable. Inside the hollow statue were handfuls of uncut diamonds.

And behind the Buddha was a chamber. Filled with wooden boxes. Stacked five to six feet high, across an area six feet wide and thirty feet long. Each box approximately the size of a case of beer.

Roxas opened one box. Inside were twenty-four gold bars, each about an inch by two-and-a-half inches.

He didn't open the others. He took the Buddha, the opened box of gold bars, some samurai swords and artifacts. He sealed the tunnel. His plan to sell the Buddha to fund the operation to retrieve the rest.

Over the following weeks, he sold seven of the gold bars quietly. He tried twice to officially report the find to Judge Pio Marcos. He couldn't reach him.

He showed the Buddha to prospective buyers. At least two of them tested the metal. According to Roxas, both confirmed it was solid gold, at least 22 carats. He even posed with it for a newspaper photographer.

Then, at 2:30 AM on April 5, 1971, armed men came to his home in Aurora Hill, Baguio.

They wore military uniforms. They showed a search warrant - signed by Judge Pio Marcos. They beat Roxas's brother with their rifles. They terrorized the family. They took the Buddha statue. They took the diamonds. They took the seventeen remaining gold bars. They took his wife's coin collection. They took his children's piggy banks.

They took everything.

Who Was Ferdinand Marcos?

To understand what happened next, you need to understand who Ferdinand Marcos was.

He was a lawyer before he entered politics. Brilliant, ambitious, ruthless. He'd fabricated much of his war record - claimed to be the most decorated Filipino soldier of World War II, which turned out to be largely invented. But he was smart enough and connected enough that it didn't matter.

He married Imelda Romualdez in 1954 - a beauty queen from a political family. Together they built a partnership that would loot a nation.

Marcos became President of the Philippines in 1965. He was charismatic, spoke about progress and development, positioned himself as the man who could modernize the country. And somewhere between being a lawyer with no particular wealth and the end of his presidency, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos started accumulating one of the largest fortunes in the world which no one could explain.

No family inheritance accounted for it. No legitimate business empire existed. Yet they lived like royalty.

On April 19, 1971, the Philippine military deposited a Buddha statue with the Baguio City Court, claiming it was what they'd taken from Roxas. But Roxas insisted it was a fake - not the solid gold statue with the removable head full of diamonds.

A Philippine Senate committee launched an investigation in April 1971. Roxas came out of hiding on May 4 to testify publicly. He described the discovery, the raid, the threats. He accused the armed men of acting under President Marcos's orders.

On May 18, 1971 - two weeks after his testimony - three men in civilian clothes grabbed Roxas off the street in Cabanatuan City. According to his later testimony, they took him to a house. They beat him. They tortured him. They wanted two things: for him to shut up, and for him to tell them where the rest of the treasure was in that sealed tunnel.

Roxas was imprisoned for two years.

If Marcos found even part of Yamashita's Gold - and the evidence suggests he found at least some - it would help explain the scale of their wealth. The Marcos family systematically looted the Philippine government for years, siphoning off foreign aid, skimming from public projects, taking kickbacks on every major deal. But even accounting for all that theft, the sheer magnitude of what they accumulated - the billions in Swiss accounts, the Manhattan real estate, Imelda's jewelry collection that required cataloging, the 3,000 pairs of shoes - suggests something more. Yamashita's Gold could be the missing piece. A massive windfall that supercharged an already kleptocratic operation.

The Dictator

On September 21, 1972 - less than a year after Roxas was imprisoned - Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law.

He claimed the country was descending into chaos. Communist insurgents, Muslim separatists, student protests - the Philippines needed a strong hand to restore order. The constitution was suspended. Congress was dissolved. The military ruled the streets.

Marcos became a dictator.

And if you've stolen the greatest treasure in Asia, you need absolute control to keep it. Control over the military. Control over the courts. Control over anyone who might ask uncomfortable questions about midnight excavations, missing treasure hunters, sealed tunnels, or where a politician got billions of dollars.

The Marcos years became defined by excess and brutality in equal measure. Imelda flew to New York for shopping trips where she'd buy out entire stores. She commissioned massive construction projects - a film center, a cultural center, buildings that looked impressive but often collapsed because funds were siphoned off. She collected art, jewels, property across the globe.

Meanwhile, political opponents disappeared. Activists were tortured. Journalists who asked too many questions were silenced. The Marcos regime's human rights abuses were systematic and well-documented - over 3,000 killed, 35,000 tortured, 70,000 imprisoned during martial law.

And the money kept flowing out of the Philippines. Estimates of what the Marcos family stole range from $5 billion to $10 billion, possibly much more. No one knows for sure because it was hidden in shell companies, Swiss accounts, real estate deals, and friendly banks across the world.

For fourteen years, Marcos ruled as dictator. The Philippines stagnated while the Marcos family enriched themselves. By the mid-1980s, the economy was collapsing. People were done.

The Fall

In February 1986, the People Power Revolution erupted. Millions of Filipinos took to the streets. The military split. Key commanders defected. Marcos's grip failed.

On February 25, 1986, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos fled the country. The U.S. military evacuated them to Hawaii. When people entered Malacañang Palace - the presidential residence - they found Imelda's infamous shoe collection, rooms full of jewelry, evidence of systematic looting.

Rogelio Roxas saw his opening.

The Lawsuit

In March 1988, Roxas filed a lawsuit in Hawaii state court against Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. The charges: theft, conversion of property, false imprisonment, battery, human rights violations.

Roxas had signed over his rights to the treasure to the Golden Buddha Corporation in exchange for stock. They joined the suit. The claim was simple: Marcos had stolen the treasure Roxas found, had him arrested and tortured, and imprisoned him for two years.

Both principals died before the trial concluded. Ferdinand Marcos died in Hawaii in September 1989. Rogelio Roxas died on May 25, 1993 - officially cardiac arrest. He died at a friend's home in Manila, on the day that he was supposed to testify in Honolulu. No autopsy was performed. Rumors still circulate in Honolulu legal circles about what really happened.

But Roxas had given deposition testimony before his death. It was admitted as evidence. Imelda Marcos, as personal representative of Ferdinand's estate, was substituted as the defendant.

In 1996, a Hawaii jury heard the case. They deliberated for less than five hours.

The verdict: They found for the Roxas estate and the Golden Buddha Corporation. The judgment was $22 billion in compensatory damages - at the time, the largest civil judgment in U.S. history. With interest, it grew to over $40 billion.

The court concluded that Roxas had found treasure. The court concluded that Ferdinand Marcos had stolen it. The court found sufficient evidence of a conspiracy involving Ferdinand Marcos, Judge Pio Marcos, military officers, and others to deprive Roxas of his treasure, arrest him, and torture him.

A Marcos family attorney called it "Monopoly money" and "noncollectible." Everything in the Marcos estate was tied up by the Philippine government and multiple claims. There was no accessible money to pay.

In 1998, the Hawaii Supreme Court reviewed the case. They reversed the $22 billion award for the chamber full of gold bars - that was too speculative, they said, since there was no evidence of the exact quantity or quality of what remained in the sealed tunnel that Roxas never retrieved.

But they upheld the core findings. They affirmed that Ferdinand Marcos had stolen the golden Buddha statue and seventeen gold bars. They affirmed the human rights abuses. They ordered a new hearing to determine damages for just the proven items.

After more years of legal wrangling, the final judgments came down:

• The Golden Buddha Corporation: approximately $13.3 million against Imelda Marcos "to the extent of her interest in the Marcos estate"
• The Roxas estate: $6 million for human rights abuses

The Marcos family has paid only a fraction of even these reduced amounts. As of recent reports, Imelda has paid just over $1 million total.

The Return

Ferdinand Marcos died in exile in Hawaii in 1989. That should have been the end.

But Imelda Marcos didn't stay gone.

She couldn't return immediately - she was too toxic, too associated with the dictatorship and the looting. So she began the slow work of rehabilitation. The Marcos family started rewriting history. Martial law became "the golden years" in their telling. The documented theft and brutality became "propaganda by enemies."

In 1991, Imelda returned to the Philippines. In 1992, she ran for president. She lost badly. But she kept at it.

In 1995, she was elected to the House of Representatives, representing Leyte - her home province. She served in Congress until 2010. All the while, she was rebuilding the family name, normalizing their presence in politics, making people forget or minimize what had happened.

Her children followed the same path. Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. served as congressman, then governor, then senator. He ran for vice president in 2016 and lost by a narrow margin - then contested the results for years, keeping his name in the news, maintaining relevance.

In 2022, Bongbong Marcos won the presidency.

Think about that. The son of the dictator who a U.S. court found guilty of stealing treasure, torturing citizens, and systematic human rights abuses - he's now President of the Philippines.

And there's a photo from 1991 - Trump seated at a birthday party in New York with his then-wife Marla Maples and Imelda Marcos. This was during the Marcos family's exile, ten months before Imelda would return to the Philippines to face graft charges. But there they are, socializing at the Helmsley Hotel like old friends.

When Trump first spoke with Bongbong after his election in 2022, his opening line was "How's Imelda?" He sent his regards to the former first lady, asked about the family. Trump has known the Marcoses for decades - crossed paths with them in the New York social scene of the '80s and '90s when he was a rising businessman and they were international symbols of corrupt excess.

But I think it went deeper than just social connections. Look at what the Marcoses represented to someone like Trump: a couple who didn't just have wealth - they had power. Real power. Ferdinand could declare martial law. He could make people disappear. He controlled the military, the courts, the media. He didn't have to negotiate with banks or worry about lawsuits or fear accountability because he was the law. And the wealth - if you believe the treasure story - wasn't tied up in real estate deals that could go bad. It was just there. Billions that came from nowhere official, that no one could properly audit or question.

For Trump in the 1980s - always performing wealth he didn't quite have, always leveraging borrowed money, always one bad deal away from exposure - the Marcos model must have looked like the ultimate aspiration. Absolute power combined with unexplainable wealth. No oversight. No accountability. Just take what you want and dare anyone to stop you.

The Marcoses were international pariahs after 1986, symbols of kleptocracy and brutality. Thirty-six years later, their son is president. And Trump is back in power too. The strongman aesthetic the Marcoses pioneered - the shamelessness, the rewriting of history while people who remember the truth are still alive, the treatment of the state as personal property - it's not just back in fashion. It won.

Bongbong's vice president is Sara Duterte - daughter of Rodrigo Duterte, whose drug war killed thousands. Trump praised Duterte too, told him he was doing things "the right way." Two dynasties with documented brutality, running the Philippines together.

The billions that Ferdinand and Imelda stole were never fully recovered. The judgment was never paid. The treasure - if there was more of it in that sealed tunnel - was never accounted for. And the family that should have been permanently disgraced is back in power.

That's the story. A locksmith finds legendary buried treasure. A dictator steals it. The dictator flees into exile. A court rules the theft happened and orders billions in damages. The family never pays, comes back, and wins the presidency.

And somewhere in the Philippines, someone is still digging. They have a map, or they think they do. They've identified a suspicious site near an old Japanese position. They believe they're going to find Yamashita's Gold.

Maybe they will. And maybe they'll be smarter than Rogelio Roxas.

Or maybe they'll learn the same lesson he did: in the Philippines, finding the treasure is the easy part. Keeping it is impossible.