It was 2011. Sergio Syjuco had just landed at the airport in Los Angeles, waiting for his luggage to roll out on the conveyor belt, when, out of nowhere, red dots of laser beams started appearing on his chest. A heartbeat later, teams of SWAT descended on him, and with a swift blow to his head, Sergio was knocked out and dragged from the public in handcuffs.
The next thing he knew, he was being detained for allegedly smuggling military-grade weapons into the United States of America.
“I could’ve plea-bargained this case. The first deal was 18 months. But I didn’t do the crime. I could’ve done the easy route but I chose to fight. I went to trial. And the conviction rate in the US is 98.7% like Japan. And when you lose you get the highest sentence. But I took the risk because I didn’t do it. I didn’t import guns to the US,” Syjuco tells Esquire.
Syjuco would spend the next five and a half years in prison fighting for his case, escaping gang fights, and learning to appreciate life as an inmate in one of America’s toughest prisons.
This is the story of how an ex-convict rebuilt his life and ventually became founder and CEO of a design firms that builds luxury homes.
A shady FBI agent appears.
When Syjuco was taken down at the L.A. airport, it looked like he was some kind of a terrorist. He was 23.
“The truth is that I’ve always been fascinated with firearms, exotic firearms. During that time, there was a gray market for exotic firearms and I was involved with a group of collectors and we would trade them. It started off as something like that.”
Then, a lot of people within that circle started calling him because they wanted more exotic weapons. One time, his schoolmate called and told Syjuco he had a friend who wanted to meet him.
“He says his friend wants some really high-powered weapons. I asked him who his friend was, but he told me he was a foreigner.”
"So my friend calls me and tells me, 'Yogi, I have this Korean guy who wants to meet you and wants to know what you can give him,” and I acquiesced and I met this guy.
Sergio can clearly remember the face of the guy and the lies he was fed.
“He was Korean but they claimed to be from Santiago, Chile. So I spoke to him in Spanish but they started laughing because they said they don’t speak Spanish in Chile.
At that point, Syjuco already knew there was something wrong.
“I took Spanish classes in Canada and I had classmates from Santiago, Chile who told me most Chileans spoke Spanish but not English.”
‘This guy doesn’t look like a collector at all.’
What he didn't realize was that the Korean guy was an FBI agent who was reportedly looking for people to lure and entrap.
“He wanted the most high-powered guns. He wanted something like missile launchers, grenades, he wanted C4, claymore mines, anti-tank rockets. He wanted things that they’re sending to Ukraine right now!” Syjuco tells Esquire Philippines.
"So I told my friend, “What the fuck is he gonna do with all this hardware?” My friend said he really doesn’t know.
I said, “This guy doesn’t look like a collector at all because collectors don’t collect RPGs, they don’t collect grenades, they don’t collect C4, they don’t collect bombs.”
Sergio was 23, young, and stupid.
“And you can also add ‘greedy’ to that,” he says.
Despite having powerful gut feelings about the Korean guy’s motives, he still dealt with him.
“He gave me a list of top-grade military weapons that he wanted: one RPG, C4, stinger launchers, surface-to-air missile launchers.
These were written on a small piece of paper. And then the guy gave Syjuco a cigarette carton box filled with cash worth about P12 million.
“I was young, I was tempted, it was wrong, but I took the money and in four days, I was able to come up with everything on that list. I was very resourceful at that time.”
Syjuco and the Korean man met up in Makati.
“I loaded the hardware into his car, we shook hands, and that’s it. He said thank you very much for helping him, and I don’t hear from him for another eight months.”
Then one day, Syjuco received a call from the Korean man, thanking him again and telling him they were very happy with the quality of the weapons he delivered to them.
“Why don’t we meet in Las Vegas and watch Pacquiao’s match? You’ll meet my Mexican boss,” his Korean contact told him over the phone.
Syjuco already thought there was something fishy about the whole thing, but he still said yes.
“A month later, the Korean guy suddenly shows up in the Philippines and gave me tickets to the Pacquiao fight!”
The man told Syjuco to see him in L.A. for the first meetup with his Mexican boss, and then they would go to Las Vegas.
“He also gave me first-class tickets on a PAL flight,” recalls Syjuco.
‘There were suddenly red laser dots on my chest.’
Syjuco had a heavy feeling in his heart and told his friends he was not comfortable with the trip. After all, the Korean and his Mexican boss were the clients, so why were Syjuco and his friends the ones being treated?
But all of his friends were all very excited to go, tour California and go to Vegas on all-paid-for first-class tickets.
“I went. I boarded the plane despite my gut feeling telling me there was something deeply wrong about this.”
Everything went smoothly as Syjuco and his friends landed in Los Angeles.
“After we cleared immigration and while we were waiting for my bags at the counter, there were suddenly red dots on my chest.”
He thought, “What the fuck is this?”
The next events happened in very quick succession: SWAT teams descended on Sergio, knocked him down, and everything went black.
‘The next five and a half years were the worst times of my life.’
After that airport scene that seemed to have come straight out of an action film, Syjuco described the next five and a half years as the worst times of his life.
"It was really hard. I didn’t go to jail right away. I fought my case, I went to trial. I was in detention for two years. My first day in detention was like jumping into a cesspool."
But it also changed him significantly.
“I’ve grown to be very resilient, independent, and resourceful. I had no one there, no family. I was very young to be in a maximum-security prison, I was a first-timer—and there were repeat offenders there.
"A lot of inmates took care of me there, I won’t discount that. A lot of inmates and guards felt for me when they heard my story and saw the evidence from my trial.
"Nevertheless, I became very independent, I became conservative, and I matured a lot there. I’ve developed trust issues also."
The hardest thing to accept is the guilty verdict.
Although Sergio had endured extremely excruciating things in prison, the hardest thing he found impossible to accept was his guilty verdict.
"We went to trial like in the movies: There’s a jury, there are lawyers, there’s a judge, and they’re looking at you. We prepared for that for two long years."
"My American lawyers worked so hard," he says. "They traveled to the Philippines to gather evidence and to interview people, and all the stress my father and mother went through, and then we went to trial for one month.
“When we lost, it really hit me so hard. After all the hard work, the prayers, we get a guilty verdict because the jury got confused.”
According to Syjuco, the prosecutor told the jury that ‘even though he did not import or export the guns to the United States, he still did sell them. If no sale was made, no importation will be done.
“That’s like saying if my mother did not give birth to me, then no importation would be done!”
“But the jury believed that line of reasoning, which was totally, legally wrong,” Sergio says with an indignant expression.
“That was the hardest part for me, accepting that guilty verdict. I almost committed suicide.”
Silence…
We asked Sergio about prison bullies and whether he had encounters with them.
“Yes, of course! A lot. You have to man up even if you don’t want to. I have several scars on my back.”
Sergio pauses and hesitates.
“It was hard.”
