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Thursday,
August 08, 2002
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Wakee Salud eludes NBI in masiao raid
By Allan I. Varquez
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BIG-TIME boxing promoter Rex “Wakee” Salud eluded the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) during a raid in his house on Balagtas St., Cebu City for his alleged masiao operations in the Visayas and Mindanao.
The 11 a.m. raid last Monday followed a tip that Salud’s masiao coordinators would usually come to his house around that time, to go over tally sheets faxed by their colleagues in the provinces and cities in Visayas and Mindanao.
But NBI agent Rene Mandawe blamed information leak for their failure to catch Salud or any of his coordinators.
“It seems somebody leaked information, but I can’t see who,” he said in Tagalog during a phone interview.
The raid yielded two computers, P5,900 cash, and several faxed copies of tally sheets from the cities of Ormoc, Cagayan de Oro and Dumaguete.
The NBI was unable to get inside Salud’s house because his mother refused to open the steel gate despite their showing her a court-issued search warrant.
They decided to force their way in by destroying the house’s back door made of lumber.
NBI spokesman Lito Magno agreed with Mandawe that someone could have tipped off Salud that a group from the bureau was going to search his house.
Last June, a masiao coordinator who was arrested in Sitio Pilit, Barangay Cabancalan, Mandaue City allegedly named, during interrogation, the boxing promoter as his financier.
But when reporters asked him about this, he declined to answer. He also refused to substantiate this in writing.
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