Stephen Leather - Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye - True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson

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.

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.