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

by Stephen Leather

  THE CASE OF THE RESTAURATEUR’S WIFE

  I can probably count my Austrian clients on the fingers of one hand but I was just as willing to accept euros as I was to take pounds and dollars so I was quite happy to offer my services to Helmut when he emailed me from Salzburg. He was in his late sixties and in my experience there’s no fool like an old fool, especially when there are Thai girls around. But Helmut had been a frequent visitor to the Land of Smiles over the years and from what he told me he knew how things worked. He’d picked up a Thai wife a couple of decades earlier and together they had set up a Thai restaurant. That was par for the course. Bargirls always seem to think that they can cook and half the Thai restaurants in Europe have been set up by girls who started life dancing around silver poles. In my humble opinion that’s the reason why Thai food outside Thailand is generally so bad. Helmut’s wife wasn’t a great cook, he admitted, and she wasn’t a fan of hard work. They’d soon separated and he hadn’t seen her for years but Helmut had been bitten by the restaurant bug and decided to stick with it.

  He started to recruit chefs and waitressing staff from Thailand and with the missus out of the kitchen the food, and the takings, soon improved. Before long he had a chain of very successful restaurants in Austria and was making regular trips to Thailand to recruit staff. On one of his recent trips he’d met a thirty-something woman called Mem who had been put forward as a possible manageress. She was from Khon Kaen but her husband had walked out on her so she’d moved to Bangkok to work and support her daughter who was a student at one of the city’s universities. She’s worked in catering for almost a decade and Helmut didn’t think twice about hiring her to run one of his restaurants. She was an attractive woman and soon became Helmut’s live-in girlfriend and eventually his wife. He emailed me a picture and she seemed a good sort.

  Over the years Helmut gave her more of his restaurants to manage and he started spending more time looking after his other business interests. Once Mem’s daughter had graduated, Mem started visiting her in Thailand several times a year. It was when she returned from her latest trip Helmut started to smell a rat. He found a receipt for a gold bracelet worth 50,000 baht. Helmut knew that she’d only taken a small amount of money with her and nothing had shown up on any of his credit card statements. Helmut asked Mem about the bracelet-she told him that it was a present for her daughter and that it had only cost 5,000 baht but that she’d asked for a receipt for ten times as much so that she could have it insured for much more. That sounded like nonsense to Helmut, so then Mem told him that the 50,000-baht receipt would give her more face with the staff in the restaurant. That made a bit more sense because face is hugely important to Thais, but even so it was a red flag that something might be amiss so he’d gone trawling through the internet and found my website. Helmut wanted me to pay a visit to the jeweller’s store to check how much his wife had paid for the bracelet. That’s what he wanted, but of course there was more to it. He wanted to know whether or not she’d lied to him. And if she had lied, that would open up a whole new can of worms.

  Anyway, he sent me a scan of the receipt and wired a retainer to my bank account. The jeweller’s was a small shop in the Big C department store complex in Ratchaparohp Road. I paid the shop a visit and told the lady in charge that my Thai friend had brought a lovely bracelet there and that I wanted something similar. I showed her the receipt and the woman said that she remembered the sale. The lady had brought the bracelet for her daughter but it had been a one-off and if I wanted a similar one it would have to be made to order and that would take a few weeks.

  I told her that I was still a bit confused by Thai money. Had it cost 5,000 or 50,000? The woman laughed and said it was definitely 50,000-the bracelet was solid gold with real diamonds.

  I emailed Helmut with the news that his wife had indeed paid out 50,000 baht. He said he’d do a little auditing on the home front and get back to me. A week later he got back to me. There were discrepancies in the accounts of a couple of the restaurants that Mem was managing. And the takings of her restaurants seemed to be well below the levels of the others in the chain. He was pretty sure that she was skimming money, but he wanted to be one hundred per cent sure before he confronted her. He had the number of her bank account in Bangkok-would I be able to get a copy of her statement? I said that in Thailand anything was possible providing you had enough money. Helmut said that money was no object and he wired me the funds.

  I had a good contact within the bank that Mem used and for half the money that Helmut sent I was able to get a digital photograph of the screen showing her account. It contained a very modest 30,000 baht, which meant that she was hiding her ill-gotten gains elsewhere.

  Then I got another email from Helmut. He had spoken to a trusted member of his staff, who told him that Mem had mentioned building a new home in Khon Kaen. Helmut wanted me to carry on digging and he agreed to send me enough cash to cover me for two more days.

  I took a plane to Khon Kaen and hired a taxi driver at local rates once I’d shown that I was fluent in his Isarn dialect. Our first stop was the area municipal office where all housing plans have to be registered. It didn’t take long for me to ascertain that Mem was indeed having a new dwelling built. The land ownership office was along the corridor and it only took another fifteen minutes to find out who owned the land where Mem was building the house. It belonged to Mem’s former husband. And that was most definitely a red flag that something was rotten in the state of Austria. Or Khon Kaen, anyway.

  I got the driver to run me out to the site, expecting to see the usual Thai home being built-a slab of concrete acting as a foundation, a living room and a kitchen with one or two bedrooms and a bathroom, total cost about 100,000 baht. What I found was a mansion under construction with more than a dozen young workers scurrying around under the watchful eye of a middle-aged foreman wearing a Chang Beer baseball cap.

  I wandered over and told the foreman that I was impressed by the quality of his work and that I was also thinking of having a house built. Thais are as susceptible to flattery as anyone and he was quite happy to tell me that Miss Mem’s mansion had a two million baht price tag. That was quite reasonable by European standards, but it would make it the most expensive house in the village by a long way. The foreman was busy and didn’t have time to chat, but he was happy enough for me to take a few pictures with my digital camera. I headed back into town, booked into a hotel and emailed the pictures to Helmut.

  My driver picked me up at eight o’clock in the evening and we headed back to the building site with a couple of dozen bottles of Chang Beer and several bags of fried grasshoppers. As I’d suspected, the foreman had gone home leaving his workers camped around the site. My beer and snacks were well received and I sat down with them and started chatting in their native Isarn. They had seen the wealthy Thai woman who was building the house, but didn’t know her name. She lived abroad, was married to the village headman and would soon be returning to live in the house with her husband. It looked as if poor old Helmut was being well and truly shafted. I figured that as soon as the house was finished, Mem intended to take as much money as she could from Helmut and hightail it back to Khon Kaen.

  I left the labourers with the beer and insects and went back to the hotel to send another email to Helmut. I didn’t tell him the bad news about Mem but asked him to email me with any bank details he had for his stepdaughter. I figured that Mem had to be getting Helmut’s money into the country somehow, and she clearly wasn’t using her own account.

  I spent a very enjoyable evening in a local disco entertaining a bevy of beauties at Helmut’s expense, and woke with a major hangover at midday, too late to enjoy the hotel’s complimentary buffet breakfast. I wandered down to a Dunkin Donuts outlet, stocked up on coffee and carbohydrates, and then visited an internet cafA©. There was an email from Helmut waiting for me. He’d sent money to his stepdaughter’s account in Khon Kaen a few years earlier so he had her account details. I went to the branch
shortly after they opened and played the part of a dumb farang. I spotted a rather plain middle-aged Thai woman, waied her and gave her one of my winning smiles and a box of imported chocolates. I asked her if she spoke English and she said a little. I said she spoke it really well and we were soon on great terms.

  I gave her Mem’s daughter’s full name, address and account number and explained that my brother had just transferred a large amount of money to the account to pay for the construction of his new home. I said that I had spoken to the site foreman who had complained that his men’s wages hadn’t been paid. My new best friend dutifully keyed in the details and I saw her eyebrows head skywards.

  ‘How much he send?’ she asked me.

  I shrugged and took a stab at one million.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘There is twenty million baht in the account but no transfer this week.’

  Twenty million was a big chunk of change, all right. I gave the cashier another winning smile and said that there was no problem, that she was probably waiting to earn some interest before paying the workers, and that all was well with the world.

  I didn’t tell Helmut how easy it had been to check his stepdaughter’s account, of course. There’s no point in letting the client think that the job’s easy. And besides, it had been a quiet month. I stayed in Khon Kaen for another day at Helmut’s expense and went back to see the cuties at the local disco, and then sent him a full report and a bill for the job that guaranteed I’d be keeping the wolf from the door for a few months.

  Helmut was devastated by what I told him. He’d honestly believed that he’d found the perfect wife in Mem, but she’d lied to him and stolen from him. He’d gone back through all the accounts and it was now clear that she had been skimming money from the restaurants from the day that she’d started working for him. She become greedier in recent months, a sure sign that she was planning to leave Helmut for good. He’d always thought that he had a good relationship with his stepdaughter, too, but she had obviously been more than happy to help steal from him.

  Looking at it from Mem’s point of view, I guess she was just doing whatever she could to make a better life for her family. Her Thai husband was more concerned with his status in the village than what his wife was doing overseas, and he knew that she would be coming back to him one day. Helmut was nothing more than a golden goose, and so far as they were concerned he had more money than sense. What they didn’t bank on was him having enough sense to employ yours truly.

  According to Helmut, she hit the roof when he confronted her with what he knew. At first she tried to lie about it, but the photographs of the Khon Kaen house and the land ownership records put paid to that. Then she begged for his forgiveness, promising that she really loved Helmut and would happily divorce her Thai husband. When that didn’t work she told him that she wanted half of everything he had or she’d have him killed. Helmut just threw her out of his house, changed the locks and hired a good lawyer. Last I heard Helmut was fit and well and hadn’t paid her a euro.

  THE CASE OF THE PERSISTENT SPONSOR

  When I first set up as a private eye in Bangkok, I didn’t run to luxuries like an expense account, an office or even a half-decent pair of shoes, and I certainly didn’t have an advertising budget. Not for me the delights of a full-page advert in the Bangkok Post or a twenty-second commercial in the middle of a popular Thai soap opera. I made do with a strip of stickers that said ‘When You Are Away-Does Your Girl Play?’ and gave my mobile phone number and my website address. Whenever I passed an ATM or visited a toilet I’d leave behind one of my stickers. It was one of my strategically placed stickers that brought in Hank, a frequent visitor to the Land of Smiles. Hank was at the airport waiting to catch a plane to New Zealand but he wanted to meet me. He agreed to pay for my fare to and from the airport and for my time so quicker than you could say ‘I’ve an electricity bill that has to be paid by Wednesday or they’ll cut off my power’ I was in a cab heading for the airport.

  Hank was a fairly good-looking guy in his late fifties, broad-shouldered and with most of his own hair and teeth, and he was wearing a decent suit and had an expensive gold watch on his wrist. He gave me his life story in the first five minutes of me shaking his hand and sitting down next to him in the airport coffee shop. He’d set up his own travel agency business in Auckland and had started visiting Asia when more and more of his clients started heading out this way. He was divorced with two sons at decent universities, and like most Westerners who reached middle age he soon realised that he’d have a much more interesting sex life in Thailand than he would in downtown Auckland. As a fellow Kiwi I could only add a heartfelt ‘Amen’ to that. Hank was a realist, though. He knew that he hadn’t become a more interesting or attractive person simply because he’d flown halfway around the world. The fact that every bargirl called him a ‘handsum man’ and hung on his every word wasn’t because he was God’s gift to women. It was because he had money and they wanted some of it. Hank knew the rules of the game and was happy to play by them. He started visiting Thailand every few months and was a regular face around Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy. He made no secret of his desire to ‘pay and play’ and only smiled when the girls accused him of being a butterfly. That’s one of the many contradictions you come across in the Land of Smiles. A bargirl who has sex with several hundred men a year is just doing her job. But if a bargirl catches her client screwing another bargirl, he gets accused of being a butterfly or worse and there are tears and tantrums. Funny old world.

  Anyway, Hank paid and played and had one hell of a time. And then, after almost a decade of flying in and out for a bit of the old in and out, he ran into Elle. The girl of his dreams.

  Hank held up his hands as I smiled. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard it a thousand times before. My girl is different, she really loves me, she’s a good girl at heart, she doesn’t really want to be a hooker, she wants to be with me.’

  I shrugged. Yeah, I’d heard it a thousand times before. And it always ends in tears. Hookers hook, end of story. No girl is forced to work in Patpong or Nana or Cowboy. It’s a career choice. And girls, especially bargirls, do not give up their career for a man twice their age for love. They might, just might, give up work if a guy is stupid enough to sponsor them, but it all comes down to money at the end of the day.

  It’s usually tourists who get conned. They arrive in Thailand for a couple of week’s hard-earned vacation, meet a pretty young girl and fall for her. They pay to have sex, then it turns into what they laughingly call ‘the girlfriend experience.’ She takes him out to eat with her friends, shows him where she lives (taking care that her Thai boyfriend’s stuff is well hidden), escorts him around a few temples and places of interest, and spins him a sob story about family circumstances forcing her to sell her body. The tourist offers to support her if she gives up working in the bar, and the negotiations start. He’ll offer 10,000 baht, she’ll say she needs at least 60,000 baht a month to support her family, and eventually they’ll settle on 30,000 or 40,000. The tourist flies home and starts sending her a salary every month by bank transfer or through Western Union.

  What the tourist doesn’t know is that a hard-working go-go dancer can earn upwards of 100,000 baht a month. And that’s without a sponsor or two sending her money. Why would anyone with half a brain think that a pretty young girl is going to sit at home for a fraction of their earnings? For love? The girls didn’t sign up to dance around a silver pole and have paid-for sex with strangers because they were looking for love. They want money. Lots of it. And the only way to get a girl out of the bar scene is to pay her more than she can earn working. Any girl who claims to be doing it for less is lying. Not that they’d see it as lying. They’re just telling the guy what he wants to hear.

  Anyway, tourists are one thing, long-time visitors or permanent residents (sexpats, as they’re usually known) are another. They should know better. But time and time again I get calls from men who’ve been in Thailand for years who f
or one reason or another have let down their guard and opened their hearts to a bargirl. I don’t know why it happens, I really don’t. Tourists I can understand, most of them check their brains in at the airport on arrival, but guys like Hank should know what they’re getting into trying to have a proper relationship with a bargirl.

  While I’m on the subject, just because a girl doesn’t work in a bar doesn’t mean that she’s not a bargirl. Being a bargirl is as much of a state of mind as it is a job description. A lot of guys who’ve married a stunner from Isaan will take you to one side and say proudly ‘she wasn’t a bargirl, you know.’ Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t pay to have sex with her the first few times. Or that he isn’t continuing to pay to have sex with her, one way or the other. She might have worked in a hotel or a hairdresser’s or a beauty parlour, or even be a student, but she was almost certainly a freelancer who charged for sex with foreigners. Some of the biggest rip-off artists I’ve come across have been ‘regular’ girls doing ‘regular’ jobs. Equally, there are girls who work in the bars who couldn’t be described as ‘bargirls’. There are waitresses who are working to put themselves through college, cashiers who work in the nightlife industry while a relative takes care of their children and who wouldn’t dream of sleeping with a customer. I’ve even known go-go dancers who won’t let customers pay their bar fine. One earned a big salary as a featured dancer and showgirl, plus she got a stack of tips every night. With the commission she got on drinks that guys brought her, she was probably making 40,000 baht a month. Her husband worked as the bar’s DJ and they were as happy and faithful a couple as you could meet. So, a bargirl doesn’t necessarily work in a bar, and a girl who works in a bar isn’t necessarily a bargirl.