Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson

by Stephen Leather

  We went up to my room and over a few more Heinekens from the minibar I repeated Bob’s offer to marry her and take care of her and her daughter. Dang definitely wanted to get out of Macau but she wasn’t sure about Bob. ‘He so boring,’ she said.

  I asked her what she wanted for her life.

  She beamed. ‘I want a house for my mother and father and a house for me and my baby. And a pick-up truck. And someone who loves me too much.’

  I got the feeling that Bob wasn’t even being considered for the role of ‘someone who loves me too much.’

  I told her that Bob would take care of all her financial worries. I had no doubt he would build a house for her parents. Up in Isaan, a half-decent house could be built for less than a million baht and Bob clearly had money to burn. I was starting to feel a bit like Bob’s pimp.

  ‘I want go back to Bangkok,’ she said. ‘Macau boring too much. If I stay here long time I take drugs again, I sure.’

  That was something, at least. If I could get Dang back to Bangkok at least Bob could talk to her in person. But I had no doubt that Broken Tooth would try to stop me if he found out that I was taking her out of Macau.

  I used my mobile phone to book two business-class tickets from Hong Kong to Bangkok. That would allow us to get onto the next flight in Hong Kong, no matter what time we arrived. All I had to do was to get to Hong Kong. I figured that trying to go direct, from Macau to Bangkok, would just be asking for trouble.

  There were two beds in the hotel room so there was no problem with the sleeping arrangements. The next morning I went with Dang to pick up her belongings and passport from her room. Luckily the Triads hadn’t taken her passport off her. I had a fall-back position in that I’d brought a passport belonging to a friend who looked a lot like Dang, but that wouldn’t have an immigration arrival stamp for Macau so I’d have been chancing my arm. Anyway, we took her things back to the hotel, packed them into my bag, then boarded the hotel courtesy bus to the ferry terminal.

  I checked to see if we were being followed. The motorcycle was there. When we got to the ferry terminal, I made a big show of saying goodbye to Dang, lots of hugs and kisses, then she got into a taxi as I walked into the terminal. I saw the motorcycle follow the taxi and knew that I was right. The Triads were watching her.

  I ignored the ferry and hovercraft ticket offices and headed for the offices of the local helicopter service. The six-seater helicopter would get us to Hong Kong in fifteen minutes, and there was a designated immigration queue that would have us to the helicopter within minutes. I bought two tickets for the next flight and then went downstairs to wait for Dang.

  The plan was for her to go back to her room, wait twenty minutes, then catch a taxi back to the terminal. If she was followed, it wouldn’t matter because they wouldn’t have time to get us before we were through the fast-track immigration. As soon as her taxi arrived I paid the driver, grabbed her hand and hurried her inside the terminal. I didn’t see anyone following her but I didn’t take any chances and we hurried through immigration and into the helicopter departure lounge. Half an hour later and we were in a taxi heading for Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong, and four hours later we were safely in Bangkok.

  Bob was there to meet us. He thrust a brown envelope full of banknotes into my hand and told me to send him a bill for my expenses. He hugged and kissed Dang and hurried her off to his waiting limousine. Dang was all smiles but I wasn’t sure how long it would last. She struck me as a girl who was easily bored. Still, I had my money and I had a satisfied client. A private eye can’t ask for much more.

  THE CASE OF THE TWO-TIMING THAI

  I normally steer clear of business investigations, especially where Thais are concerned. The thing you have to remember is that Thailand is for the Thais. Even the main political party is called Thais Love Thais. Farangs are outsiders, and the odds are always stacked against us. We can’t own land, we need visas to live and work here, we need to own businesses in partnership with Thais. If a farang ever runs up against a Thai in a business dispute, generally the farang comes off worse. And that’s if the local is playing fair. If the local is a shady character, he might decide to solve the dispute by hiring a guy on a motorcycle to put a couple of bullets in the farang’s head. Don’t laugh, it happens. It happens a lot. It’s not always a blatant bullet in the brain, either. Pretty much every week a farang will be found dead at the foot of his apartment block or lying on his bed with his head in a plastic bag. More often than not the cops will put it down to suicide but a lot of the deaths are murder, plain and simple. And a lot of the murders are the result of business disputes.

  I got a phone call one afternoon from a well-spoken English guy who said that I had come highly recommended and that he had a problem he needed help with. At first I assumed he was just another sex tourist who’d fallen for the charms of a pole-dancer but then he said he’d like to meet me the next morning at 7am for breakfast at a five-star hotel along with his regional manager. I knew then that this wasn’t going to be a bargirl investigation-sex tourists tend to stay clear of five-star hotels, they don’t get up that early and they don’t usually have regional managers.

  I spotted them as soon as I walked into the hotel restaurant. Two men in suits drinking coffee and reading the business section of the Bangkok Post. They both stood up and shook my hands. The guy who called was Alistair Stewart. He was tall with receding hair, late thirties maybe. His regional manager was Eric Holden, a Norwegian guy with white hair who was a few years older and several kilograms heavier. He was based in Hong Kong and had apparently flown over specifically for the breakfast meeting.

  They made me sign a confidentiality agreement before they told me what their problem was. I was already starting to get cold feet but figured that a five-star breakfast was worth hanging around for. Stewart’s firm was a major freight forwarder that had been operating in Thailand for five years. They had maintained steady growth and had been in profit since day one. They had a first class finance director and he kept a tight grip on the money side which is why alarm bells had started ringing over the company’s cashflow. The company had stopped growing and had actually lost several clients. Turnover was down and profits were starting to fall. Stewart and Holden had put their thinking caps on and had come up with the only possible solution: the company’s woes were something to do with the number three man in the local team, a Thai who they had hired the previous years as sales director. They didn’t have any evidence, it was a hunch more than anything, but they felt that he was doing something that was taking business away from them.

  As sales director, Gung spent a lot of time out of the office and so they wanted me to keep the guy under surveillance for a week. Find out where he went and who he saw.

  I ordered another plate of toast and then ran through my concerns. The first problem is that following someone in Bangkok is a nightmare. The traffic is terrible, traffic lights can take up to fifteen minutes to change, parking is problematic at best. I prefer to use motorcyclists but they’re not allowed on expressways and intersection flyovers so the only answer was lots of manpower and that was expensive and even then success wasn’t guaranteed.

  My second concern was a long-standing one. I had an unwritten rule never to investigate Thai men or Thai companies. The breakfast meeting came only a few weeks after an Australian auditor investigating a local firm was shot to death in the back of his minivan. I didn’t want to start flinching every time a motorcycle pulled up next to me.

  So my advice to the two guys was to hire a local firm to do the surveillance. Stewart and Holden both shook their heads. They didn’t trust a Thai firm to do the job. But I came highly recommended. That was nice to hear, but I still wasn’t happy about investigating a local. I had no way of knowing how well connected he was. For all I knew his brother could be a high-up police officer or Army general and they’re not the sort of people you want to upset.

  Stewart asked me to reconsider and said that he’d pay me half up
front. I doubled my daily rate and he didn’t bat an eyelid. Holden opened a slim leather briefcase and handed me a wad of notes. Unwritten rules aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, not when you’re holding a stack of real money. I agreed to take the case. Holden gave me a manila envelope which contained a photograph of the target, the names and addresses of the company’s clients, details of his car and house, his mobile phone number. Holden was clearly efficient, everything I needed was in the envelope.

  The two guys shook my hand and left. I had another coffee as I read through the file they’d left. The sales director was thirty-seven, obviously Thai-Chinese, slightly overweight with chubby cheeks and looking full of confidence. He lived in a landed property, which meant there was money in the family. I just hoped there weren’t too many relatives carrying firearms.

  In the afternoon I wandered down to my outside office, the clump of tables at Soi 13 where I sat and chewed the fat with Big Nong, whose aunt served Thai whiskey and Singha beer throughout the night. Big Nong was one of my most reliable part-time assistants. He was reliable, he didn’t drink and he spent most evenings at home with his two children. He used to work the night shift with his aunt, selling alcohol and cigarettes to the local bargirls, but then his wife discovered how much the bargirls who frequented the place earned and she joined their throngs herself, selling her body in a local beer bar and leaving him with the kids. He was a huge guy, and while he was very much a gentle giant he intimidated the hell out of everyone he met. At the nearby motorcycle taxi rank was a butch lesbian motorcycle taxi girl by the name of Nok who agreed to help me on the surveillance job for 500 baht a day.

  The next morning I was at a small restaurant at the head of the soi close to the head offices of the shipping company, drinking Cokes with Big Nong. Nok was parked close by on her Honda. I had arranged for Stewart to phone me on my mobile as soon as Gung got ready to leave the office. As no phone call was forthcoming, Big Nong, Nok and I ordered a noodle lunch. My phone rang just as I was sprinkling dried chillies over my bowl of noodles; Gung was on his way out.

  Nok got back on her Honda and I put on a helmet and climbed onto the back of Big Nong’s bike.

  Gung’s Toyota drove slowly down the soi and indicated left. We followed him, keeping well back. The traffic was light so we had no trouble keeping him in sight, but five minutes down the main road and he turned onto the Bangna freeway, which meant that we couldn’t follow him. A five hour wait and we’d lost him in five minutes.

  I remembered that Gung’s home was out Bangna way so we headed out there. Sure enough, we saw his car parked outside.

  I left Nok to keep an eye on his place and got Big Nong to take me home. According to the information Holden had given me, Gung’s mobile phone was from one of the big companies and as luck would have it I had a contact there who, for a few thousand baht, would give me a list of all numbers received and called. I phoned my contact and he promised to drop the information around next day.

  The following morning Big Nong and I were at the restaurant near the head office again. Big Nong had been told that a policeman owned the restaurant and I figured it wouldn’t be too long before the staff started to wonder what we were up to. I got my defence in first and told one of the waitresses that my wife worked in an office down the road and that I thought she was having an affair with one of her colleagues. I got lots of sympathetic smiles from the waitresses after that.

  Gung left the office at ten o’clock and we followed him towards Klong Toey Port. He spent an hour there and then we tailed him to an office block in Chinatown. Then he went home again. I checked the addresses against the customer list that Holden had given me. There were no matches. That could have meant he was drumming up new business for the firm, or that there was something going on that his employers didn’t know about. One thing was for sure, he wasn’t working hard. A couple of hours in the office in the morning, a couple of business calls, then home. However much Stewart was paying the guy, it was too much.

  On the third day Gung visited two more firms that weren’t on Holden’s list and one that was a major client of the firm, then spent three hours in a short-time hotel in Soi 3 with a very pretty girl who clearly wasn’t his wife. I fired off half a dozen long-range pictures with my telephoto lens as they left.

  I spent the afternoon at the Company Registrar on Ratchada Road. There’s a civil servant there that I’ve used on several occasions, so I slipped him Gung’s full name and date of birth and a 500-baht note. He ran the details through the databases and found that Gung was a director of half a dozen companies, all based in Bangkok. I took the list to the nearest Starbucks and compared the directorships with the addresses that Gung had visited over the past couple of days. There were two that matched: one was the office in Chinatown and the other was in Silom, close to the Patpong red-light district. Both companies were freight forwarders, in direct competition with Stewart’s business. Gung had joined the boards of both companies five years before he started working for Stewart. Bingo. It was obvious what was going on. Gung had joined Stewart’s company with the sole intention of poaching his clients.

  I didn’t have proof, of course. But over the course of the week Gung spent more time visiting his own companies and his minor wife than he did attending to Stewart's customers. And one of the firm's that Gung had visited didn't renew its contract with Stewart's company. I made a phone call, posing as a potential customer, and got the name of the freight forwarder they were now using. No surprises there. It was one of Gung's companies.

  I gave the information to Stewart and they sacked Gung a few days later. He made noises about suing them for breach of contract, but the photographs of him leaving the short-time hotel with his mistress put paid to that.

  There's a Chinese expression about not breaking someone else's rice bowl, and I had definitely broken Gung's. I insisted that Stewart and Holden didn't reveal my involvement in the case, but over the next few days I still found myself ducking when motorcyclists pulled up next to me. Thailand truly is the Land of Smiles but it's also the Land of Hitmen on Motorcycles.

  THE CASE OF THE MILLION-BAHT BARGIRL

  I’ve never understood why so many tourists end up sending money back to their temporary girlfriends when they go home. It makes no sense to me. Paying and playing while you’re in Thailand is all well and good, but why pay when you’re thousands of miles away? My bread and butter work is checking up on bargirls. And nine times out of ten, the client is a love-struck farang wanting me to check that his beloved isn’t doing what she was doing when he met her. There is a theory that sex tourists check in their brains on arrival at the airport, but there’s no excuse for long-term residents of the Land of Smiles to be shelling out money to bargirls. Anyone who lives here really should know better. You’ve only got to sit down at one of the beer bars at the entrance to Nana Plaza to see what goes on. Motorcycles buzz up with a pretty young thing on the back. The girl totters into the plaza to start work, the boyfriend drives off to play pool with his friends. After the bars have closed, the guy drives back and picks up the girl and off they go to spend her hard-earned cash. The girls are hookers hooking and they’re not going to stop doing that just because some guy thousands of miles away starts sending her a few thousand baht each month.

  Guys who live here know how it works, which is why I was so surprised when I met Yves. And even more surprised when I heard what the daft sod had done. He phoned me on my mobile and said that he’d heard good things about me from a couple of guys I’d worked for. It’s always nice to get a word-of-mouth recommendation rather than a client who has just seen one of the stickers I put on every ATM machine I use. Yves was French, very well spoken and clearly upper class so I put on my best shirt and tie and went around to his office for a chat. Well, not his office, actually. He was a bit wary about being seen with a private eye, so we met in a nearby Starbucks.

  I got there twenty minutes early which gave me time for a look around, but he turned up on h
is own and looked every bit as French as he’d sounded on the phone. He was a small man in his early forties, his hair starting to grey at the temples, fairly good looking and looking dapper in a double-breasted blue blazer, grey slacks and dark brown shoes with tassels on them. He bought a couple of coffees and then told me his story.

  He’d been in Thailand for most of his life. His father had been involved in the shipping business at the time of the legendary Jim Thompson, and on occasions they’d done business together. Thompson is just about the most famous farang in Thailand; he pretty much single-handedly set up the country’s silk exporting business before disappearing under mysterious circumstances.

  Yves had met several members of the Thai Royal Family and had married a Thai woman from a high-class background. She was now on the family estate in Pyrenees raising their three children. Yves travelled back and forth between France and Thailand, though he admitted that the Bangkok office pretty much ran itself. It soon became clear why Yves was spending so much time in the Land of Smiles. He was a frequent visitor to Patpong, one the city’s main red-light districts. Being married hadn’t stopped him fooling around and, with his wife in France, his sex drive had gone into full throttle.

  He usually drank in one of the biggest bars in Soi Cowboy, and was a close friend of the Thai owner. He paid and played and from the ‘cat that got the cream’ grin on his face, I could see that he enjoyed himself. Yves’s life had changed a month earlier when a twenty-year-old girl by the name of Boo walked onto the stage and started dancing around a silver pole.

  Boo means crab. It’s a common enough name for a Thai girl. Prawn. Chicken. Apple. Orange. For some reasons Thais seem to love to name their daughters after food.

  Anyway, according to Yves, Boo was drop-dead gorgeous. Waist-length hair, full breasts, long legs, tight stomach, great arse, hell I was getting turned on by the description alone. And when he took a photograph from his wallet and showed it to me I practically started salivating. She was hot. Hot, hot, hot.