They fascinate me because they've been witness to so much history. As places that provide transient accommodations and as points of rendezvous they inevitably serve as vital crossroads for interesting people and produce stories that are often more interesting than most.
The original Manila Hilton was put up in 1968 and in the ensuing 50 years before a fire engulfed it in 2018, served as the setting for many tales of the sort I personally find interesting.
When Muhammad Ali visited Manila in 1975 to fight Joe Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila, he stayed at the original Manila Hilton. At that time he was still very much married to wife Belinda Boyd, but had already met, and was apparently totally smitten with, future wife Veronica Porche. So on his trip to Manila he left Belinda stateside, and took Porche. By her own account, Belinda had an idea what was going on, and was, surprisingly, even willing to go along, up to a certain extent. The limits of her longsuffering however, were apparently exceeded when Ali took Veronica to a reception in his honor held at Malacanang Palace, and with the international press present, allowed everyone, including First Couple President and Mrs. Marcos, to assume that Porche was his wife.
So Belinda hopped on the next plane and flew to Manila. By most accounts she "swept regally" into the Hilton, headed straight to Ali's suite, and proved once and for all that even the greatest of heavyweight boxing champions was no match for the fury of a woman scorned.
Even more fascinating for me is the story that supposedly, for years, a suite at the old Manila Hilton was home to one Severino Garcia Diaz "Santy" Sta. Romana, a man so mysterious that the only way for me to tell you about him is to tell you what I have come to believe about him. I hope that serves as a sufficient disclaimer that the story I am about to tell you is probably partially true, partially false, and partially unverifiable. It is merely a composite of different things I have read about Sta. Romana, and cobbled together with the glue of what makes the most sense to me.
"Santy" Sta. Romana was a Filipino who supposedly controlled a staggering amount of wealth all over the world. I purposely used the word "controlled" because no one knew exactly who the real beneficial owners of that wealth was - whether it was actually Santy or some other parties - but he was nominal account holder of an incredible amount of wealth in many forms - ranging from cash to stocks to gold bullion and gold certificates. In their book "Gold Warriors", Sterling and Peggy Seagrave quotes Tarciana Rodriguez, a Filipina accountant and cousin of Santy's mistress, who served as something of an executive assistant to Santy for years: "It was in my mind then that he must be somebody because, to be billeted in a five-star hotel in the 70s was an indication of a... VIP, especially he was only a Filipino. In my going to and fro to his hotel accommodation, what amazed me so much, there were many people of different nationalities who often visited him... Bankers, Brokers, Business associates... he was a very famous personality especially to all the Banks concerned throughout the world." Both Rodriguez and her cousin Luz Sambrano, Sta. Romana's mistress, also spoke of transactions in tantalizing amounts - a $43M deposit in the Manila branch of the First National City Bank, a $500M wire transfer to HSBC Hong Kong, 20,000 metric tons of gold in UBS Geneva, transactions in amounts that sound incredible but with details that provided a ring of authenticity.
Personally, I find all of this to be plausible, because Sta. Romana emerged from the second world war an intelligence operative. As a spook he probably served multiple masters, but primarily Bill Donovan's Office of Strategic Services. He was, in fact, likely the most prominent Filipino operative of the OSS and all the OSS's future iterations and mutations. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, one of the OSS's primary objectives was bound to be the discovery of where the Japanese war loot was, and this Japanese war loot from World War II was legendary in its size:
As the Japanese Imperial Amy had swept through Asia in their march towards regional domination, it was well-known that they had accumulated vast treasures every step of the way. Much of this war loot had found its way to the Philippines to be catalogued, inventoried, and readied for eventual transport back to Japan. But as Japan started to lose the war to the Allied Forces and made plans for a retreat, the decision was made to bury the loot for later retrieval. It is, to me, only logical that the OSS surely made it their top priority after the Japanese surrender to discover where this loot was. Furthermore, it makes perfect sense to me that any part of the treasure OSS operatives did find was not officially transmitted to the US government but kept as a slush fund for intelligence operations. Intelligence organizations operate in, at least partial, secrecy and cannot constantly be justifying requests for funding to Congress. It is only to be expected that they would want alternate sources of funding that they have full control over, to be used in what they deem to be the patriotic task of fighting imperialism and communism and thus preserving the American way of life.
As a top operative of the OSS in the Philippines, Sta. Romana would have participated in every step of the process: from extracting information from Japanese military officers by whatever means necessary, to digging up war loot, to setting up safekeeping arrangements. Since, as I have speculated, any recoveries would have been set aside as an unofficial slush fund so critical to black operations, it was even highly likely that Sta. Romana was assigned to be something of a placeholder of sorts, a dummy in short, for wealth recovered by the OSS. It makes a lot of sense, Sta. Romana was not an American, not answerable to the US government, much less the US Congress, and as someone who had fought in a World War side by side with OSS Warriors, was someone they felt they could trust. Hence, his shadowy life, times, and evident control over much wealth.
By the way, it is also quite clear that Sta. Romana had dealings with Ferdinand Marcos, but that is a part of this story so complex I choose not to go there, except to say, in much simplified outline form, that there are some who firmly believe that Marcos learned about Japanese war loot from Sta. Romana, got his hands on some of it, became a very rich man even before he became President of the Republic of the Philippines, and continued to dig up buried treasure long after he became President. Marcos' hoard supposedly grew so large that if all of his overseas deposits were ever turned over to the Filipino people, we would be able to pay off all of our external debt with much left over. For precisely that reason, the developed countries cannot ever allow the Marcos Gold to ever be returned to the Philippines, because it would totally mess up the global financial system as we know it today. Now you know why, apart from mentioning this "theory" floating out there, I refuse to really dwell on this part of the story, it makes me sound too much like a crackpot. 😁
It's enough for me to believe that Santy Sta. Romana was a living person, that so few know his name in spite of the outsized role he played in Philippine history as an operative for the OSS/CIA complex, and that he used to stay at the old Manila Hilton and walk the surrounding streets. It reminds me that old Hotels stand in perfect, if silent, witness to so much history.
The old Manila Hilton during its glory days:
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The new Hilton, located at the Resorts World Hotel and Entertainment Complex:
