SECRETARY Llamas—never mind his first name, this man is history before he is current events—was back from Switzerland last week. As he continues to evade questions on the incident, his voice sounds increasingly beyond the grave.

Llamas was late to explain a week after a brand-new vehicle issued to him was crashed and smashed, spilling out evidence of a crime in plain view. I stress that to show that his lawyer cannot plead illegally obtained inadmissible evidence for lack of a warrant.

And, indeed, why not crash and smash the government vehicle, that way you get another brand-new one.

Sadly, an ABS-CBN camera crew was on the scene faster than MMDA and Llamas “sweepers” who swept up the evidence but not before it was videotaped for approximately 32 million viewers of ABS-CBN news along with a young man covering his face and lying on the car floor, trying to melt into the carpet. Llamas denied the young man was his son.

But there it was, plain for all to see, an AK47 and other weapons, none of them licensed to anyone in the car, as Llamas clarified when he claimed, without any proof the Palace could have easily backdated, that all the guns were licensed to him with permits to carry. Llamas effectively admitted that his men do not have licenses to own or permits to carry pertaining to them, which are criminal offenses.

Then, in a Palace press corps conference, he added—perhaps to prove a clean conscience and also shove it in our faces—that he owns even more communist high- powered guns than the AK47 that was seized from the MMDA by Llamas’s sweepers and taken, along with the men in the car, into their custody rather than left to the police who were slow coming to the scene of the crime.

All the guns, the ones at the scene of the accident, along with the others he claims to possess, total an armory of communist weaponry that are all licensed to him, Llamas said, and for which he has permits to carry. He has more arms than Shiva.

At the press conference, Llamas expressed the desire to put the whole thing behind and move on because, anyway, he had already sacked his men.

Now no one asked Llamas to sack his men. That is a lot of sacking. What he should have done without anyone asking him, under a President who claims no one is above the law as he will prove starting only with the previous administration, was leave the guns found and videotaped at the scene and his men where the police should have taken them all. To jail. There to await charges and be used as evidence in a court of criminal law.

Llamas said, anyway, there is an ongoing investigation—by his office.

The investigation should be conducted by the police. Llamas and his boss are well advised to keep their noses out of it as I am doing now.

Llamas’s men should be facing what any of us would surely be by this time, if we were as stupid as he and his boss and their friends are with this thing they have about guns: the inescapable penalty for illegal possession of firearms for which Robin Padilla, covered with presidential permits to possess and carry, nonetheless did time.

Still Llamas said that he needs all those guns to protect him from being killed by GMA. He had observed a van full of men repeatedly round his residence—does he live in a covered wagon or does he own the entire block?—some socialist—for seven hours. How did they eat, where did they urinate or defecate? That van was a rolling toilet.

But Llamas is just lying, for two reasons.

No one wants to take out someone who is doing a pretty good job taking himself out. I even got his name wrong. I called him Ricky. He is not prominent in the persecution of the Arroyos and attained only a fleeting fame when he promised in vain to produce Garcillano as a witness against GMA.

Yet all is not lost. Justice Secretary de Lima can still save Llamas’s men if they promise to testify against GMA for election fraud.