“To keep the business going, policemen who recycle confiscated drugs need to themselves remain in circulation. This is where the accusations against the Philippine National Police’s highest official come in.

In horology and watchmaking perhaps the lesser known Swiss watches have a special place among collectors and connoisseurs. Limited in number, they are rarer and can thus be more expensive. One such is the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Chronograph. This retails for $52,900. An Audemars Piguet equipped with a tourbillion, a micro-engineered mechanism that enables greater accuracy, can reach as high as $137,000.

Those who collect such luxury timepieces keep them in velvet-lined leather cases with built-in winding mechanisms. Perhaps because they are so expensive, these symbols of wealth are worn only on special occasions. One such occasion might be a congressional hearing investigating corrupt policemen implicated in the illegal drug trade that proliferated in the previous administration.

But it isn’t only policemen attending congressional hearings who proudly brandish these watches. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor and former governor of California, wears one. Some of the more notable owners of the Piguet line were the Shah of Iran and Juan Carlos I, the King of Spain. One was ousted, the other, beset with scandals including one involving a mistress, was forced to abdicate.

During the congressional hearings to investigate the recycling of illegal drugs by corrupt policemen during the term of Benigno Aquino III and under the supervision of Aquino’s Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) secretary, the curious appearance of a Piguet on a policeman’s wrist not only caused a stir but effectively validated the fears of a profitable criminal hierarchy behind the proliferation of illegal drugs under Aquino’s incumbency.

If a police colonel can afford a Piguet, pray tell what can a ranking general higher up in Aquino’s pecking order buy with money earned from recycling drugs? While the luxury watch was not the focal point of an inquiry that started with the illegal release of heinous crime convicts, such jewelry and other ostentatious displays of wealth signify the kind of ill-gotten riches those in the pecking order can earn.

In less than a month, the highest police official in the country under Rodrigo Duterte will be totally out of the organization he had clambered up and eventually led when Duterte inherited him from Aquino’s totem pole. The Chief Executive appointed him as top cop to head among others the President’s advocacy for peace and order as well as the campaign against the drug menace that escalated under Aquino.

Controversies involving him and complicit others in the police hierarchy under the DILG have however surfaced to the top like a bloated cadaver thrown at the bottom of a lake. The trust vested upon him is now one of the ironies surrounding Duterte’s impossible crusade to cleanse the hierarchy of criminality.

As Duterte would now need to appoint someone untarnished and perhaps more competent, albeit picked from the branches of a poisoned tree, allow us to take our bearings and referencing Aquino’s pecking order from jail guards to policemen all the way to Cabinet secretaries, review how Aquino’s choice cuts had aggressively turned his government into a narco-state.

Let’s start at the top. The drugs debate entered the public discourse when we discovered two of Aquino’s most trusted had illegally written into a statute a profit-making “get-out-of-jail” provision for heinous crime convicts and drug traffickers in exchange for millions. It made good business sense especially where one reigned as the highest level drug trafficker. Both were ambitious and their ambitions cost money. The provision would also recycle drug lords back into the system and an unsuspecting society thus perpetuating the illegal drug trade as a going concern.

To backstop high level criminality, down the pecking order, strategically positioned policemen were recycling confiscated drugs and reintroduced these back in circulation. It was a profit-making commercial enterprise viable under the same DILG official behind the recycling of drug lords.

Analyze the 2013 illegal drugs hierarchy under Aquino. To keep the business going, policemen who recycle confiscated drugs need to themselves remain in circulation. This is where the accusations against the Philippine National Police’s highest official come in.

Back to the top of the heap, the pecking has come full circle. Fortunately, to his credit, Aquino’s DILG secretary wears an old battery-operated plastic watch.