By day, Rogelio Roxas worked as a humble locksmith at Baguio, a few hours north of Manila.
In his spare time, he was an amateur treasure hunter.
In the decades after World War II, it was a popular pastime that once verged on a national obsession in a country where Japanese soldiers were accused of looting and hiding vast quantities of gold and other valuables during their occupation of the Philippines.
Legend has it that General Tomoyuki Yamashita and his forces buried tonnes of gold and other stolen treasures in underground caves and tunnels in the country's north, with the intention of retrieving it all after the war.
But Japan eventually surrendered, and Yamashita was captured by US forces and convicted of war crimes.
He was executed in 1946 and the secret of where he may have buried the gold loot went with him to the grave.
It was years later that Rogelio Roxas, then still a teenager, met a Japanese man who told him his father had served as a soldier under Yamashita and once drew him a map showing the buried treasure.
Another man he met had worked as Yamashita's interpreter, and said he had once been taken to secret tunnels in Baguio where he'd seen boxes of gold and silver, along with a gold statue of Buddha.
So it was that in 1970, Mr Roxas, by then 27, led a team of treasure hunters to find the gold and began digging, day and night, in an old mine shaft behind the Baguio Hospital.
Gold bars, handfuls of diamonds and a mysterious statue
It took them seven months to break into a system of underground tunnels where they stumbled on bayonets, rifles and a human skeleton wearing a Japanese army uniform.
They discovered one tunnel — about 1.8 metres high and 9m long — completely filled with boxes.
Mr Roxas opened one box and found 24 small gold bars.
Then, in a concrete vault beneath the tunnel floor, Mr Roxas found a gold-coloured Buddha statue standing about 90-centimetres tall.
He estimated it weighed at least 1 tonne.
It took 10 men to move the statue and gold bars to Mr Roxas's home, where he later found the buddha's head could be removed.
Inside he pulled out "handfuls" of uncut diamonds.
Before he could return to the tunnels to retrieve the rest of the stash, Mr Roxas set about selling the buddha and some of the gold bars.
He met three prospective buyers. One of them had the statue examined and declared it was 22-carat gold.
Another buyer, Joe Oihara, agreed to pay Mr Roxas 1 million pesos — equivalent to about $2 million in 2022 — as a deposit to buy the gold statue.
But a few days later, a group of eight armed thugs in military uniforms arrived.
A deal turns into a heist
The men forced their way into the Roxas home without a proper search warrant, and seized everything: The gold buddha, the diamonds, 17 remaining gold bars, samurai swords and a coin collection.
Even the Roxas children's piggy bank was stolen and family members were beaten.
It turned out that Oihara had been staying at the home of Josefa Marcos, the mother of Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator who declared martial law the following year.
It was Marcos himself who had ordered the raid on Roxas's home, after learning of the gold from Oihara.
The president's uncle, Judge Pio Marcos — who had previously granted Mr Roxas a permit to dig for the treasure — warned him that he was now in danger and likely to be killed.
Mr Roxas and his family fled town and went into hiding.
But a few months later he was caught and arrested. He was beaten and tortured with electric shocks and cigarette burns.
Mr Roxas was threatened with death and told he would never see his family again if he didn't sign an affidavit exonerating President Marcos of any culpability in the golden buddha theft.
He was forced to sign a separate affidavit recanting his report of the theft at his home.
The locksmith was eventually freed, but when he turned up to speak at a political rally, hand-grenades were thrown onto the stage where he was supposed to sit.
Several people were killed or seriously wounded.
Mr Roxas went into hiding for another year but, when he again tried to return to his home at Baguio, he was arrested and jailed for two years for illegal possession of a firearm.
He was one of thousands of Filipinos who were jailed on trumped-up charges or, indeed, without any charges at all.
Thousands more were killed by the Marcos regime.
When Mr Roxas was finally released from jail in 1974 and returned home to Baguio, he noticed Philippine government soldiers standing outside tents behind the Baguio hospital.
They were excavating an area near where he had found the golden buddha.
Mr Roxas had steadfastly refused to reveal the site of the gold treasure, but government forces had clearly found it.
Soon the tunnels were empty.
A court rules Marcos owes Roxas $22bn
It was only after Ferdinand Marcos was ousted from power in 1986, and forced into exile in Hawaii, that Mr Roxas lodged a lawsuit against him, seeking compensation for his torture and false imprisonment, as well as the loss of the gold treasure.
He alleged that Philippine government soldiers had seized the Yamashita treasure and that Marcos himself had subsequently sold much of the gold.
Witnesses even testified that Marcos had had some of the gold re-smelted in order to sell it surreptitiously.
But Mr Roxas never received a cent.
He died in 1993 before the case went to trial in Hawaii's District Court. Ferdinand Marcos died before him, in 1989.
But the case continued, even after both men were gone.
In 1996, a jury effectively found Marcos Sr guilty, and awarded Mr Roxas a staggering $US22 billion in damages, said to be the largest settlement of its kind at the time.
The compensation was eventually revised down to about $US19 million, including $13 million for the gold treasure and $6 million in damages for battery and false imprisonment.
As the beneficiary of the Marcos estate, Imelda Marcos was ordered to pay the Roxas family and his Golden Budha Corporation (sic).
A Marcos family lawyer, James Paul Linn, dismissed the order at the time, saying: "It's non-collectible. It's Monopoly money … there's no money there."
The Roxas family take on the Marcos family again
Three decades since Rogelio Roxas launched his original claim, lawyers for his estate and his Golden Budha Corporation are seeking a new hearing in the trial against the Marcos estate.
They are still engaged in "collection efforts" since the original judgement against Imelda Marcos.
Lawyers for the Roxas estate say a new trial hearing, if granted, will officially target the Marcos estate, but will name two representatives: Marcos's widow, Imelda, and their son, Ferdinand Marcos Junior — or Bongbong as he's known.
Bongbong was recently elected president, returning the once-exiled family to the upper echelons of Philippine power.
"Imelda will be on trial, to the extent that she received the benefits of the monies improperly obtained by Ferdinand Marcos," said Clay Robbins, a lawyer acting for the Roxas estate.
"So Imelda is a direct party. Bongbong is just a representative [of the estate].
Mr Robbins said the "bad acts" in this case were committed by Marcos Sr.
"[Bongbong Marcos] is representing the estate of his father, but he is not personally being held liable or responsible," he said.
"Although he most clearly has been the beneficiary of the gold that was taken."
Neither the new president nor his mother will appear in court this time.
At the original trial in 1996, several witnesses testified that they had seen stacks of gold bars at the Malacañang Palace in Manila and at the Marcos's summer home.
Bongbong Marcos gave evidence that he had never seen any gold and he had no knowledge of the Yamashita treasure.
"Right now, in my mother's home, there is a rather large golden buddha," he said at the time in a deposition to the court.
"You don't mean made of gold?" he was asked.
"Oh, no. It's golden, it's … the colour of it is gold, yes, but I'm quite sure it isn't gold because I saw two people lift it. And, if it was gold, that couldn't be done."
"Did you ever know of any gold being stored at Malacañang?" he was asked.
"No, definitely not," was his reply.
In 1992, Imelda Marcos claimed that her husband's fortune had come partly from "Japanese gold" that he had found after World War II, and not from funds he had embezzled from state coffers.
She said some of the gold had come from the Yamashita treasure, but that Marcos had never disclosed its existence to tax authorities because the amount was so huge "it would be embarrassing".
She said Marcos had hidden the gold in several places, including the walls of their home in northern Luzon.
The frozen $US35 million fund that everyone wants
The Roxas family is dogged in their attempts to recover what, they say, rightfully belongs to them.
They believe there is only one way they can receive compensation: By chasing a piece of a huge sum of money known as the Arelma funds.
The trouble is, thousands of people want to be paid out from the same account.
In 1972, Ferdinand Marcos's cronies funnelled millions of dollars into a secret Panamanian shell company called Arelma.
US Supreme Court findings show that Bongbong Marcos and his mother hired a banker in 1997 to try to recover the assets in the Arelma account.
Now frozen and in the custody of the United States, the funds are today worth around $US35 million.
The Roxas family claims that $US2 million that Marcos deposited into the account was most probably derived from the Yamashita treasure and can be traced to the property stolen from their late patriarch.
Mr Robbins said lawyers for the Roxas estate will be asking the Southern District Court in New York to award it its rightful interest in the account.
But it could be an impossible task.
Lawyers for the Philippines have argued that all of the "ill-gotten" wealth of Ferdinand Marcos belongs to the people of the Philippines.
A court in Manila long ago ruled that the funds in the Arelma account should be forfeited to the Philippines government.
Thousands more Filipino victims or their families are also chasing compensation from the Arelma account for their own wrongful imprisonment or torture under the Marcos regime.
And, in 1996, a US court awarded the Arelma funds in their entirety to a group of 9,539 victims — known as the Pimentel class — as part of a $US2 billion judgement against the Marcos estate.
Later, an anti-graft court in Manila ordered the Arelma funds be forfeited to the Philippines government.
'Atone for what his family have enjoyed at the expense of my father'
The legal squabble over who has rightful claim to the Arelma funds has now dragged on for three decades.
A US court also ruled that the Roxas family could not prove the Arelma account was set up with the proceeds of the Yamashita treasure.
But Mr Robbins said that ruling was made without giving Mr Roxas or his estate the opportunity to explain the source of the funds.
"We're cautiously optimistic the court will see the truth and the arguments that we're going to be making, and will decline to forfeit these monies to the Republic of the Philippines," Mr Robbins said.
Mr Roxas's daughter, Jeana — who is representing his heirs in the case — said she had full confidence that the US legal system would recognise and enforce the original judgement from 1996.
Mr Robbins has been in the Philippines this month to meet local lawyers to help build the Roxas case. He also plans to launch separate proceedings in Manila.
As for the gold that her father found, whether it truly was the legendary Yamashita treasure or not, Jeana Roxas says she has no idea where it is now.
"[The Marcos family] should satisfy the judgement out of their immense wealth, in order to atone for what his family have enjoyed at the expense of my father and his heirs," she said.
