Word: imelda
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...crisp, clear voice, Mrs. Marcos, 59, pleaded not guilty to charges of embezzlement and bank fraud involving the purchase of four Manhattan buildings with $103 million in Philippine government funds. Imelda's husband and alleged partner in crime, Ferdinand Marcos, did not appear. The deposed President, 71, said he was too ill to leave Honolulu, where the couple has lived since 1986. Eight other defendants accused in the scam, including Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, are abroad. If the Marcoses are found guilty of the main charges, they could face up to 20 years in prison...
...unusual dress, Imelda said later, was meant to show that she is a "Philippine patriot." It was also an implicit suggestion that she and her husband, longtime friends of the U.S., are now being persecuted by the government that agreed to give them asylum. The message was underscored by tobacco heiress Doris Duke, who stepped forward to post Mrs. Marcos' $5 million bail after Imelda's lawyers contended that the Marcoses had been living on "borrowed funds" since the Reagan Administration persuaded them to leave the Philippines. Why, Duke asked, "should America spend millions and millions of dollars prosecuting...
...Boesky, the gentility of a China Seas pirate. Wed this paragon to a bimbo on the make with the vanity of a Marie Antoinette and a shopping lust that would turn a Beverly Hills divorcee envy-green. Multiply by ten and you have, approximately, the portraits of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos that Sterling Seagrave paints in this merciless account of the Filipino dictator's rise and fall...
...Marcos Dynasty, which ends with Imelda and an ailing Ferdinand flying off to exile in Hawaii, falls into the morbid subbranch of literature that Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed pathography. As such, it is a book with notable flaws. Seagrave, whose previous works include a biography of China's legendary Soong sisters, writes with glum prosecutorial fury, treating as credible any rumor of lurid conduct -- Imelda's alleged lesbian orgies, for example -- that helps his cause. When venturing into broader areas, like Washington's postwar foreign policy in the Far East, the author lapses into a crude historical revisionism, rejecting...
Finally, Seagrave seems so concerned about building an indictment that he fails to answer the question of what really made Ferdinand and Imelda tick. What drove them to accumulate billions they could never have spent in three lifetimes? What possessed her to buy those infamous closetsful of unworn shoes? Still, the author does persuade us that his subjects, Ferdinand in particular, were paradigmatically venal. Lyndon Johnson, no mean connoisseur of cads, may serve as final witness. After one encounter with the self- glorifying Marcos, L.B.J. called in Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy and warned, "If you ever bring that...