Fiorello in Manila

Waving to the crowd, shaking hands, kissing his friends, ebullient Arsenic Lacson, 47, marched bouncily into city hall last week to take the oath of office as mayor of Manila (pop. 2,000,000). He was the first Manila mayor ever elected to a third term. As usual, dark glasses were perched on his broken nose, but, instead of his customary open shirt, Lacson was soberly clad in a blue suit and maroon tie. In a 35-minute speech he promised Manila land-reclamation projects, bigger parks, new farmers' markets and bus terminals. Typically, he could not resist taking a crack at the Philippines' President

Carlos Garcia: while the national government has an $8,000,000 deficit, Manila has a $2,000,000 surplus.

Edited Disk. Tough, trenchant and tenacious, Arsenio Lacson reminds many Americans of Manhattan's rambunctious Fiorello La Guardia, who also served three terms. Like La Guardia, Lacson cleaned up a corrupt administration and a wide-open city; he fired 600 incompetent job holders. Night after night, Lacson patrols Manila in a black police car, returns from time to time to a corner table at the Bay View or Filipinas hotels, where he listens to complaints and requests, or talks profusely on a plugged-in telephone, punctuating his conversations with shots of whisky and four-letter expletives. Sunday nights, Lacson is heard by Manilans on a half-hour radio program (prerecorded to edit out his blue words) in which he speaks his mind on subjects ranging from midwives to the military defense of Southeast Asia.

Born on the island of Negros of part-Chinese ancestry (his last name is a cor ruption of the Fukien dialect and means "sixth son"), Lacson has been an amateur boxer, soccer player, anti-Japanese guerrilla, lawyer, professor and newspaper columnist. During the war he fought in the battles for Manila and Baguio, and was cited by the U.S. Sixth Army "for gallantry under fire." When Japan's touring Premier Nobusuke Kishi asked him if he had learned Japanese during the war, Lacson snapped, "I was too busy shooting at Japanese to learn any." Of Americans, he says: "They live in fear of Communism, B.O., halitosis, pink toothbrush and their own unpopularity."

Enemy Scavengers. Currently, Lacson rails against "the abuses, excesses, rascality, rapacity and filth of the Garcia administration." Lacson describes politics as "a way to see the world through a garbage can," and he has made enemies among those who scavenge there. Driving home one night, Lacson was nearly killed by a burst of carbine fire. He has twice disarmed gunmen who attacked him and is fatalistically prepared to end either as President of the Philippines or victim of an assassin. "My father was murdered," says Lacson, "and my grandfather was killed by slipping on a cake of soap. I may go either way."

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