In the two decades that Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Philippines – much of it under martial law – his official presidential salary barely reached $10,000 a year.
His wife Imelda, a former beauty queen, earned even less as a minister in his government.
Yet by the time Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown in 1986 by angry mobs, these "conjugal dictators", as they were dubbed, had amassed a staggering amount of wealth.
Imelda Marcos's infamous shoe collection — estimated at almost 3,000 pairs — remains the most notorious symbol of the couple's outrageous opulence.
She loved luxury European brands like Christian Dior and Gucci but also had a standing order of 10 locally made shoes to be delivered every week.
Her shoes, however, pale against the billions of dollars stashed in secret bank accounts around the world or spent on high-end real estate, jewellery, artwork and stocks.
Only after the Marcos regime's downfall did Filipinos truly comprehend the magnitude of their plunder.
The Marcos family had carried off one of the greatest government thefts ever seen, stripping up to $13.5 billion from the country's coffers to fund their lavish lifestyle.
No government or industry, it seems, was immune from their greed.
The dictator and his cronies were found to have pillaged everything from foreign aid to World Bank loans, forcing outright takeovers of major companies and soliciting bribes for lucrative government contracts.
More than three decades after they were forced into exile in Hawaii — where Ferdinand Marcos died in 1989 — most of this hidden wealth is still missing or the subject of court proceedings that have dragged on for years.
Now, with their son Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos tipped to become the next Philippines president at elections next month, any lingering hopes of recovering the family's illegally acquired fortune appear increasingly slim.
"The family has convinced itself that they're entitled to their ill-gotten wealth," Ruben Carranza, the former head of a special government commission set up to recover the funds, told the ABC.
"He's running to redeem the family name.
"But he's also running to make sure that the family keeps their impunity in place."
The beauty queen and the 'war hero' cut a ruthless path to the top
Even before entering politics, Ferdinand Marcos's reputation was based on a fraud.
He claimed to be "the most decorated war hero in the Philippines", who had been awarded three US army medals from World War II.
But while Marcos had served in the US Armed Forces in the Philippines, the country's National Historical Commission later declared that his tales of heroism were "full of lies".
Imelda Marcos came from a large Catholic family, studied education and worked at the Philippines Central Bank.
In 1953 she entered the Miss Manila beauty pageant but didn't win.
She met Marcos the following year at the Philippines Congress, where he was already a parliamentarian and her cousin was the speaker of the House of Representatives.
Eleven days later, they were married.
Once Marcos was elected president in 1965, she became famous for her exorbitant spending as the Philippines' first lady.
On a single overseas trip in 1983, she apparently spent $9.5 million in 90 days, including $14,150 on bedsheets, $58,000 on sterling silver serving dishes and $611,000 on gems from Cartier.
In a recent Netflix documentary about her life, Imelda Macros said such spending was essential so she could be the perfect first lady.
Ferdinand Marcos's 21-year rule was notorious for corruption, extravagance and brutality.
As he and his family lived in luxury on the state purse, the Philippines economy stagnated, the income gulf between rich and poor ballooned and thousands of political opponents were tortured or killed.
In 1972, as his two-term limit was nearing an end, Marcos declared martial law and then amended the constitution to allow him to stay in power indefinitely.
A plane out of Manila loaded with diamonds and cash
Stories of Marcos's turbulent last days in power and their flight into exile are legendary.
By 1983, as resentment against his reign was already rising, senator Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, a long-standing political rival, was shot dead on the tarmac of Manila Airport as he returned from years in exile.
His assassination helped trigger a wave of protests that eventually culminated in the People Power Revolution – backed by the military – that forced Marcos from power three years later and thrust Aquino's widow Corazon into the presidency.
With the country on the brink of full-scale violence, it was US president Ronald Reagan who urged Marcos to step down and leave the country, guaranteeing him asylum in the US if he agreed.
No other country had been prepared to do so.
With a mob of angry protesters massed outside the Malacañang Palace, the Marcos family fled Manila.
Even in the chaos of being exiled, they managed to scoop up millions of dollars worth of valuables, including cash, jewels, gold and art.
The estimated 300 crates loaded onto two US Air Force planes that carried Marcos family members and their cronies to Hawaii also included weapons, bank deposit certificates and the deeds for numerous overseas property holdings.
Officials in Washington at the time said that jewellery belonging to Imelda Marcos was stuffed into nappy boxes, along with $200,000 in gold bullion and nearly $1 million in Filipino currency.
Some of this loot was confiscated and later returned to Philippine authorities. But it would take government lawyers decades to recover even a fraction of the Marcos family's ill-gotten wealth.
The mysterious bank accounts of 'William Saunders' and 'Jane Ryan'
One of the earliest acts of the new government of Corazon Aquino was to set up a Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), tasked with tracking and recovering the missing millions.
In 1986, the year Marcos went into exile, the World Bank estimated his fortune at up to $13.5 billion, while the average income for ordinary Filipinos was just $1,017 a year.
Government lawyers launched the first of countless lawsuits to seize jewellery, paintings, real estate, and hundreds of millions of dollars hidden in foreign accounts.
But it was no simple task. The pair had 21 years to siphon funds from Philippine coffers and hide them around the world, mostly through front companies or under false names.
In 1968, Ferdinand Marcos had opened the first accounts for himself and Imelda at Credit Suisse Bank, using the name William Saunders for himself and Jane Ryan for his wife.
One of the PCGG's biggest successes was to recoup $927 million in cash from Swiss banks.
In a historic move, Switzerland froze the Marcos's assets after bank officials were told that the pair had deposited more than $271 million just weeks after they had fled to Hawaii.
It still took 60 rulings from the Swiss Federal Supreme Court before the funds could be returned to the Philippines.
Over the decades, Philippine authorities have also recovered tens of millions of dollars in real estate, jewellery, artwork and shares in the San Miguel brewery, the country's largest private company at the time.
In 2014, a former secretary to Imelda Marcos was jailed for six years in New York after trying to sell valuable artwork the Marcos pair had bought, including one by the French Impressionist Claude Monet.
Vilma Bautista had managed to sell "Le Bassin aux Nympheas" from Monet's famous water-lily series for $43 million to a London gallery.
Philippine authorities launched legal action before she could sell three other paintings, by Monet, Alfred Sisley and Albert Marquet.
But hundreds more paintings – many by world masters – remain missing.
The government has also recovered several jewellery collections worth millions that belonged to Imelda.
One was found in her personal safe at Malacañang Palace, while another was confiscated from an associate caught smuggling the jewellery out of the country on her behalf.
The jewels alone were valued at up to $7.1 million, including a 30-carat marquise diamond bracelet with a $1 million price tag from Bulgari in New York.
It is estimated that barely one-third of the Marcos's ill-gotten wealth has been recovered, Ruben Carranza said, some through litigation and those that were surrendered.
That still leaves up to $9.5 billion worth of assets unaccounted-for.
"And those are the likely places where they would still have assets hidden."
Many of the dozen or more luxe properties the Marcoses bought in the US have never been recovered.
In 2012, the Philippines supreme court ordered the forfeiture of $54 million held in a bank account Ferdinand Marcos set up in Panama.
The funds had allegedly come from Japanese World War II reparations paid to the Philippines which mysteriously vanished.
But the money has been frozen for years while victims of the Marcos regime demand they be handed over as compensation.
'All they found were shoes, beautiful shoes'
More than 36 years after Ferdinand Marcos was ousted and the family fled into exile, not one person has gone to jail over their illegally acquired wealth, though not for want of trying.
The family was allowed to return to the Philippines in 1991, after the dictator's death.
Imelda Marcos was charged with about 60 criminal and civil charges including corruption and tax evasion.
She was convicted and sentenced to between nine and 12 years in jail, but the Supreme Court later reversed its decision.
Imelda twice ran for president, both times finishing near the back of the pack, but successfully stood for the Philippines Congress.
To this day, she remains unrepentant for what she and her husband did.
In 1998, she famously boasted: "We practically own everything in the Philippines."
In 2018, she was convicted on new charges of funnelling a quarter of a million dollars in public money into Swiss foundations.
She was again sentenced to jail for up to 11 years and disqualified from holding public office. But an appeal on those charges is still pending, allowing her to remain in Congress until the case is decided.
Hundreds of pairs of her shoes — left behind as she and her husband fled in 1986 — were later donated to a museum at Marikina, the heart of the country's shoe industry.
"They went into my closets looking for skeletons, but thank God, all they found were shoes, beautiful shoes," Imelda said at the time.
The rise of Marcos Junior
Despite the divisive legacy of his family, Imelda and Ferdinand's son Bongbong Marcos has emerged as the frontrunner to become president in elections on May 9.
Recent opinion polls show he has the support of 56 per cent of voters, well ahead of his closest rival, Vice-President Leni Robredo on 24 per cent.
Boxing great-turned-senator Manny Pacquiao, who is also standing for the presidency, scored just 6 per cent.
Most of the country's 67 million voters are now too young to remember the corruption or brutality meted out to thousands under martial law when Marcos Senior was president.
And in a country where poverty and unemployment remain entrenched, many Filipinos think of the earlier Marcos era as a time of relative prosperity.
Bongbong Marcos himself once said: "If my father was allowed to pursue his plans, I believe that we would be like Singapore now."
A former Supreme Court judge warned that if Bongbong Marcos wins the presidency, the decades-long battle to recover the family's ill-gotten wealth will likely stop.
"That's really the problem.
"He'll probably abolish the PCGG."
Bongbong Marcos himself has denied he would shut down the organisation set up to reclaim his father's ill-gotten gains if he becomes president, and has even vowed to strengthen its role as an anti-corruption agency.
"The first time it was organised, it was really an anti-Marcos agency," he said.
But Ruben Carranza said Bongbong Marcos's involvement as a party in court challenging government lawsuits against his family, and his role in administering his father's estate, are proof that even as president, he will always put his own financial interest above that of his country.
Bongbong Marcos himself admitted he personally tried to withdraw $200 million from a secret family bank account in Switzerland in the weeks after his family went into exile.
Only a decade ago, he said he still hoped to secure some of the cash and property the Philippines government was fighting in court to recover.
"He's been living off ill-gotten wealth.
"It's a major motivation for Bongbong Marcos to stand for president."
