The Next Best Thing

by Wiley Brooks

  Other branches of the Chirathivat family had established similar satellite shops in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, as well as Chaing Mai in northern Thailand, the Laotian capital of Vientiane and Saigon. All suffered at the hands of the Japanese.

  World War II threw a major wrench into the Chirathivat family plan to become the dominant crime family in Southeast Asia. Family leaders suffered and died at the hands of the Japanese. By the end of the war, the family's outposts, like its base in Bangkok, were shadows of what they were before the war. Family members still cooperated with each other, but the vision of the crime empire had faded.

  The successes of the Communists in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos eroded the family network even more. The Saigon branch thrived during the Vietnamese-American war, but within a year of the fall of Saigon several family members were dead and others had fled back to Bangkok. It was a similar story in Phnom Penh.

  Joey met Big Willie not long after he moved to Penang in 1981. By then, Joey had become a purse-snatcher. He was smart enough to know he was leaving money on the table with every purloined purse.

  Here's what he would do. He'd target an older white woman and when he could see a clear getaway path, he'd grab the purse and run like hell. He always knew where he was running to: an out-of-sight place where he could take a moment, undisturbed, to dump the contents on the ground and quickly go through them. There was always cash and it went straight into his pockets. Then he'd look for anything that would be easy to pawn. Everything else he'd leave there on the ground then he'd slink away.

  Every time he'd leave behind credit cards – all older white tourists carried credit cards – usually a book of traveler’s checks and often a passport. Joey just knew those things just had to have some value to someone.

  One day, the purse carried a small Leica camera. He took it to one of the handful of pawnbrokers he used. After telling Joey how much the camera was worth, the man eyed him closely.

  "Look, kid," the shopkeeper said, "I have a pretty good idea how you got this camera and all the other stuff you've brought me in the past. I'm thinking there's more, right?"

  Joey grew a little suspicious. His eyes darted around, but everything appeared as it had in the past.

  Joey looked back at the man, who held his gaze, then pulled out a booklet of ten crisp American Express hundred-dollar traveler’s checks. The man eyed Joey and the checks and chewed on his lower lip.

  "I know someone," he finally said, "who might be able to help you. Tear out one of the checks. I'll show it to my friend and see what he says. Come back at eleven tomorrow morning."

  Joey tore a check from the checkbook and gave it to the man. He returned the next day as instructed. The broker told him to go to a nearby café for lunch at one o’clock. There would be a very big, well dressed Thai waiting for him.

  "Everyone calls him Big Willie. You'll see why. Speak English when you see him."

  Joey couldn't miss the well-dressed but obese Thai man sitting at a private table toward the back of the dining room. He walked to him.

  "Big Willie?" he asked. The man nodded. "I'm Joey. I was told to meet you here." Big Willie pointed to the empty chair across the table from him. He signaled the waiter to serve them.

  "Tell me about yourself, Joey."

  So, Joey did.

  He told Big Willie how he had arrived in George Town a few months before. He had been in KL briefly before, having moved there from Melaka. He then got into the more interesting part of his story.

  "I was born in Melaka. My mother died when I was seven and I never knew my father. My mother said he was a British sailor."

  "That explains your looks."

  "Yeah, I don't look much like my mother. I suspect I have my father's eyes and nose."

  "And hair," Big Willie added.

  Joey nodded.

  “So, tell me, Joey, what exactly do you do?”

  A moment of truth, but Joey saw no reason to hold back.

  “I grab purses from old white ladies.”

  Willie accepted that answer in a matter-of-fact way.

  “I pocket the cash and pawn what I can.”

  “But you get things that you don't know what to do with."

  "Yes. Like the traveler’s checks. I always get credit cards, too. Sometimes a passport. I suspect the passport is worth something."

  "Of course."

  Joey immediately asked how much, but Willie shook his head. He focused on the beer the waiter had set before him. Neither uttered a word.

  "How often do you steal a purse?" Big Willie broke the silence.

  "Two, sometimes three times a month."

  That was the right answer, as far as Big Willie was concerned. Most purse-snatchers get greedy and think they’re never going to get caught. He had known young men who would go for purses every day. He would stop working with them because he knew it was just a matter of time before they were caught. When the police nab a young thief, they’re going to drill him to learn who his fence is.

  "Good answer. From now on, bring everything to me and I mean everything. And you have to follow my rules. OK?"

  "What rules?"

  "Well, rule number one is obvious, but it has to be number one. Don't get caught. If you get caught, you and I will never work together again. Have you ever been caught?"

  Joey told him about getting caught in Melaka. It was a few months after Pastor Johnny had left. He said he could recall vividly being handcuffed and taken to the police station. It was an awful experience. He had grabbed food off a table – he was hungry, after all – and then had the rotten luck to turn and literally run into a police officer. He spent the night in jail but was released the next day.

  The fat man gave a subtle nod of his head. He used a finger to trace a design in the lace around the flowers that sat on a centerpiece on the table.

  "And what did you learn from that?" he asked.

  “To always know how I’m going to get away."

  Big Willie smiled a big toothy smile.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “What about unexpected opportunities?” Big Willie asked. “Carpe diem, right? You see a little old lady walking alone with a big purse dangling from her arm. Almost too good to be true. What do you do?”

  "If I see an old lady like that, I start looking around to see where I’d run and who might chase me. If it all looks good, then yeah, I’ll grab it. But if I see anything I don’t like, I pass.”

  "Good. Good. Don’t get greedy.”

  Joey frowned. He wasn't sure what Big Willie meant. Steal less? Big Willie saw that Joey was confused.

  "Look, the more time you can put between grabs, the less likely you'll be caught. Do you know why?"

  Joey peered at his curry, then looked back at Big Willie. "Less chance for people to remember what I look like."

  "Excellent! You never want people to remember you. Never!” He paused and peered more closely at Joey’s face. “That will be harder for you so it’s even more important."

  The waiter came and asked if they would like another beer. Big Willie’s glass was empty, but Joey’s was still almost full. The Thai simply pointed at his glass. The waiter left to get him another.

  "Tell me, Joey. You speak English like an American. If I didn’t know better, I might think you were an American. How did that happen?”

  "After my mother died, I was taken in by an American pastor and his wife. They ran a mission school in Melaka. They had no children and treated me as a son."

  "How very fortunate for you."

  "Yes. My good fortune.”

  Joey explained that everything at home was in English. They watched a lot of American TV and movies on videotape. His American mom – what he called her – tutored him every day.

  “She would play a movie on the Betamax,” Joey said, “then pause the tape, back it up and replay a bit of the dialogue." He pantomimed pushing the buttons on the machine. "She'd then have me repeat it. My job was to speak exactly like the guy in the
movie. Sometimes, we'd replay the piece eight, nine, even ten times. Mom said she was training my ear in order to train my voice. It sounds boring, but I loved it. I loved her."

  "Are they still in Melaka?"

  "No,” Joey said, then explained that his mom went back to the States. A month later, his dad packed up and left, too.

  “He gave me some money and said he'd come back, but he didn’t."

  Big Willie’s gaze drifted to an attractive Chinese woman who had just walked in. She was wearing a body-hugging red dress. She was well coiffed and carried herself with an air of confidence. She was hard to miss. Joey’s back was to her.

  “Always dress to blend in,” Big Willie said, returning his eyes to Joey. He told the young man to never wear a shirt or hat that would be easy for others to describe with any detail.

  “That hat you were wearing when you came in,” he said to Joey as the waiter set his second beer before him.

  “What about it?”

  Willie paused to take a sip and savored it.

  “That NY on the front,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing people remember.”

  Another point came to him. Mix up where you grab purses, the fat Thai continued.

  “If you grab in front of Khoo Kongsi, don't go back there for at least a couple months,” he said. “And never snatch near where you live or anywhere close to me.

  "Listen to me, Joey. Never lead anyone to me. If you do, well, you'll never do it again."

  Joey saw the deadly serious expression on Big Willie's face. He got the message. If Big Willie got arrested because Joey led the police to him, Big Willie would kill him. It was something he'd never had to think about before. But he understood it. If he was caught, he could never give up Big Willie. Besides, if he went to prison, he'd need Big Willie again when he got out.

  "I understand," Joey said.

  Big Willie paid for lunch, then told Joey to walk with him back to the shop. Joey needed to know where it was because that's where he would bring the things he stole.

  “Bring me everything you get,” Big Willie reiterated. “Well, you can just stick the cash in your pocket. But everything else. You might be surprised at what has value.”

  “Even the purse?”

  “Yes. Obviously, you want to keep it out of sight. Some purses have hidden compartments. And some will be true designer bags. Those have value in and of themselves.”

  At the shop, Big Willie asked Joey for the rest of the traveler’s checks. Joey handed them to him.

  "And do you have this woman's passport?"

  "I didn't keep it."

  "Hmm. Too bad." He opened a file, withdrew a stack of twenty-dollar bills and counted out some for Joey. "If you had the passport, I could have given you twice as much for the checks and another three hundred dollars for the passport itself."

  Joey's eyes widened. He had literally dumped and walked away from hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars. Never again.

  One day, Joey asked Big Willie how someone could travel with only two-hundred or three-hundred dollars on them.

  "I know they use their credit cards and some of them have traveler’s checks, but I bet when they left for their trip, they had a lot more than a few hundred dollars in cash."

  "They wear money belts. It’s where they keep most of their cash."

  Joey had no idea what a money belt was, so Big Willie explained that it was a pouch that a tourist would wear under their clothing. Older tourists, Big Willie said, traveled with more cash than younger ones.

  "Those old ladies you rob could easily have twenty hundred-dollar bills in a money belt," Big Willie said. "They only keep the cash in their purse that they think they might need that day.”

  He explained that many of the older folks go to a bank almost every day to convert dollars into ringgits.

  Joey thought about all the old ladies he had robbed of their purses. How many, he wondered, were wearing a money belt with a couple thousand dollars in it. His mind went to work trying to figure out a way to get to all that cash.

  In the six years since that first meeting, Joey had seen Big Willie often. Big Willie became more than a mentor to him. Joey profited from the older man’s advice. The average Malaysian was earning about a thousand dollars a year. Joey was pocketing three times as much. The two had grown much closer. Joey would show up with goods to fence and Big Willie would insist on taking him to a nice indoor restaurant. Joey found that if he went home and dressed in better clothes, Big Willie would take him to an even finer place. Joey even had what he thought of as his Big Willie dinner clothes.

  At a quiet table over dinner one night about three years ago, Joey leaned in closer to Big Willie and said he had an idea for something bigger. Instead of snatching purses from old women, he would prey on young American women – girls really – traveling alone.

  "It's all about getting to the money belt," he told Big Willie when he first laid out the plan.

  To get to the money belt, he had to get them alone. To do that, he would need to win their trust or their lust. He suspected that playing to their lust was the easiest and fastest route.

  “You’ve always said I could pass as an American,” Joey said. “If I become just another American backpacker, but a charming one, I’ll win them over.”

  Big Willie sat quietly, staring at the candle that flickered on the table between them. Finally, he looked back to Joey and said, “Yes. I believe you could.”

  Big Willie told him that he’d need a good backstory. It needed to be one he could deliver convincingly to each young woman he targeted.

  “Keep your lies as close to the truth as you can,” he said. “You’ll be less likely to get tripped up.”

  Over the next hour, the two of them built Joey’s new life story. It indeed stayed close to the truth with one huge difference. In the new version, the pastor and his wife adopted Joey and then took him back to live in North Carolina.

  Joey’s story began as it actually had. His mother was a Malaysian woman who met a British sailor who she knew only as Reggie. She was an attractive eighteen-year-old who worked at the port. One evening, the sailor was taking shore leave just as she was leaving work. He exuded charm and confidence. She was taken by him.

  Reggie’s ship was only in port for a few days. Reggie was long gone before his mother learned she was pregnant. It was tough being a single mother with a biracial son in a country where to be officially considered to be Malay you had to have a Muslim Malay father.

  Even as a toddler it was obvious his father was not Malaysian. For some people, the first thing they noticed when they looked at the little boy was that while his skin tone matched theirs, little else about his appearance did. Eyes, nose, shape of his face, even his sandy brown hair clearly came from his daddy’s genes. But his mother endured the ostracism and provided for him as best she could.

  Then, when he was just seven years old, his mother was struck by a car while crossing a highway. She died at the scene. Everything about the story was true to this point.

  Then the fiction took over. There was no one to take care of Yusof, his Malaysian name, so authorities placed him in an orphanage. They knew, of course, that no one would want him.

  Luckily for Joey, the assistant director of the orphanage was a member of a nearby mission church run by an older childless couple. The gentleman brought young Yosuf to church one Sunday and Helen Jackson, Pastor Johnny's wife, fell in love with him on the spot.

  In the story that Joey would eventually repeat as if it were the gospel truth, the man from the orphanage was able to arrange for the pastor and his wife to adopt the boy by saying he wasn’t actually a Malaysian Muslim, but the son of a Christian Englishman. That ruse might have worked in real life, but for Joey it never came to that.

  The real story of Yusof’s young life was that after his mother died, he lived on the streets. That’s where Mrs. Helen found him one day. He had survived as a seven-year-old thief and scavenger. He looked it. But Mrs. Helen saw a
beautiful young boy, a gift from God. Pastor Johnny wasn’t so sure, but he knew that when his Helen had her heart set on something that he’d best let it be. So, in real life, the pastor and his wife took young Yusof in and raised him like their own for the next ten years.

  In Joey’s new life story, the pastor and his wife’s mission service ended the year after Joey joined them. When they had adopted him, they gave him an American name. Since Yusof is the Muslim version of Joseph, they renamed him Joseph Thomas Jackson, but simply called him Joey. He moved to North Carolina with them and they raised him as their only child. After high school, he attended Barton College, a small Christian college near them, and earned a degree in business administration.

  It was a good story. Joey was able to make it sound real. Inspiring even.

  Joey paid Big Willie to create a US passport and a North Carolina driver’s license for him.

  Joey's plan was to woo a young American woman traveling alone somewhere in Malaysia and get her to take him back to her hotel. Once in the room, he would gag her and tie her up, then rifle through her stuff. He was looking for her money belt and anything else of value.

  Big Willie, though, saw a fatal flaw in the plan.

  "You’re not considering one of the key rules to not get caught, Joey. Blend in. You don't want anyone to be able to describe you. These girls are going to be able to tell the police exactly what you look like and even your American name. You have a very distinctive look, Joey. The police will come looking for you."

  Joey nodded in agreement. “What can I do?”

  "For starters, don’t do anything in or around George Town. This is your safe place. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “There are probably places these girls go to. That's where you should do it.”

  "Yeah. There are places. They go to a lot of beach areas. I see them all the time when I’m out at Batu Ferringhi."

  "Too close."

  “Yeah, I know."

  "So, get to know the places they hang out, make a plan, go do it, then jump on your motorcycle and ride back here as fast as you can. Best case is that you’re back here handing stuff to me before anyone ever finds the girl.”