IF THERE’S A WILL, there's a way.” This very familiar proverb was once again proven true when the National Bureau of Investigation caught up last Oct. 29 with Alvin Flores, the head of a daring and notorious band of armed robbers, at a resort in Compostela, Cebu.

Flores, of course, was the head of the dreaded group named after him and tagged by police authorities as behind the brazen Oct. 18 midday raid on a Rolex watch store in upscale Greenbelt 5, Makati City, which erupted into a deadly firefight. His group was also blamed for the botched robbery in December last year of a warehouse in Parañaque, which left 16 people dead, including a 7-year-old girl.

According to reports, NBI agents had picked up Flores’ trail in Antipolo, Rizal, and from there, they tracked him to Bulacan, then to Pampanga, and then to Liloan and Mandaue in Cebu before pinning him down in Compostela. A shootout left the gang leader and three of his cohorts dead. Another companion was arrested. In the follow-up operations, authorities took into custody two more members of the group.

NBI director Nestor Mantaring said that the successful operation against the Alvin Flores Group was made possible because of information sharing with the Philippine National Police. According to Sr. Supt. Joselito Savares, chief of the counterintelligence branch of the National Capital Region Police Office, this year alone the Alvin Flores Group, as the lead group, pulled off at least 14 armed robberies: 11 in Metro Manila and three in Pampanga, Laguna and Cavite. Other sources say it was responsible for 26 to 28 heists since last year, and for more than 40 since 2000, the year it reportedly pulled off its first armed robbery.

“They had guts,” said Ruel Lasala, NBI deputy director for intelligence services, after Flores’ death, “but they were not smart enough. Our law enforcers are much, much smarter than them.”

It would be hard to argue with Lasala after the successful government operation against the robbery gang. But the statement begs the question: Why did it take our law enforcers nine long years to neutralize the group, and only after more than 40 brazen, high-profile armed raids on banks, warehouses and other well-secured business establishments, which practically made a mockery of our law enforcers? (In contrast, if we may digress a little, two holdup men were arrested in a police checkpoint set up along Betty Go-Belmonte Street soon after they robbed two men in a Shell gas station along Tomas Morato Street, Quezon City last month.)

Without meaning to diminish the NBI’s success, Lasala’s statement tends to lend credence to suspicions that its leader might have been under the protection of influential people. It does not help to erase these suspicions that at least four of its members have been linked to an incumbent Pangasinan town mayor; and that the immediate reaction of police authorities was to blame the private security guards manning Greenbelt 5 for failing to prevent the robbery and the ensuing firefight because of a breach in security protocol.

And now there are reports that Flores himself might have been a government intelligence “asset,” which could help explain why his group was so daring and could operate with impunity for such a long time.

But regardless of whether Flores was a government asset or not, the NBI’s success against his group shows that government can annihilate crime syndicates if it really wants to—if they’re headed by assets, simply by reining them in; if they’re not, through high resolve and hard work.

PNP Director-General Jesus Verzosa regretted Flores’ demise only because he could have given the police vital information about other criminal groups. “Sharing their men and firepower is common among organized crime groups,” Metro Manila Police Director Roberto Rosales said as he cited the participation of the Ampang-Colangco Group in the Greenbelt 5 attack.

The Alvin Flores Group, no doubt, was only one among several robbery groups operating today. If our law enforcers have the capability to destroy a powerful criminal gang like Flores’ with deadly efficiency, why are such groups able to survive for so long?