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

In between watching girls dancing around silver poles I decided to take a look at the local horse scene. My client took me to a huge stable in Siricha owned by a wealthy Thai who, as it happened, had gone to university in New Zealand. He loved horses but spent so much time building hotels and office blocks that he had no time to manage his stock and they were a pretty rough collection of horseflesh. In no time he offered me a job, and I moved to Thailand.

I hit the ground running. I trained during the week, we went to the Bangkok racetracks every Sunday, and on Monday-my day off-I stayed over in the Grace Hotel with a succession of temporary girlfriends plucked from the hotel’s disco. Spending so much time with jockeys and bargirls, neither of whom spoke much English, my Thai language skills improved by leaps and bounds.

The client’s horses were okay, but in most cases were just a few generations removed from Mongolian ponies and they weren’t a patch on the thoroughbreds I’d worked with in New Zealand. The problem was, for a horse to race in Thailand, it had to be born in the country. It didn’t take me long to spot the loophole in that regulation, so I flew over a pregnant mare and trained up her foal. She was a little beauty and on her first big race she was a firm favourite. Then, in typical Thai fashion, disaster struck. A jing jok, a tiny lizard that loves to climb across ceilings, fell on top of our jockey. The Thais regard that as just about the worst possible bad luck, equivalent to a farang breaking a mirror or walking under a ladder. The jockey rushed of to the local temple on the back of a motorcycle but crashed on the way back. He was still able to ride but crashed his horse into the back of one of the front runners and shattered her knee. She had to be put down and my client came in for all sorts of flak from his friends along the lines of ‘you’ve got an expensive farang trainer but your horse still dies’. Needless to say it was a massive loss of face and the only solution was to let me go.

By then I was pretty much addicted to the Thai nightlife so decided that I’d stay in the country. I decided to put my newly acquired Thai language skills to use and landed a job as marketing manager of a hotel in Surin, a largish town not far from Cambodia. I was mainly teaching the staff basic English, updating brochures and menus, and marketing the hotel around the world. It was a monster of a hotel, the biggest in Isaan, with 600 rooms, a ballroom, a nightclub, karaoke bar, three restaurants and two enormous conference centres, where most regional government and police meetings were held. And the kicker for me was the massage parlour with eighty beautiful girls. Forget the sweetshop. Now I was the kid in the sweet factory.

The Surin job meant that I also picked up Khamen, the Cambodian language spoken in the Thai border provinces of Surin, Buriram and Si Saket, and that came in handy when I started working as a private eye as many bargirls come from those provinces, and it’s a big advantage being able to speak to them in their own language. Then, once again, disaster struck, in true Thai fashion. My employer’s family were openly known as Isaan mafia and had a nice sideline importing Russian prostitutes with the help of the local head of police, who had his own suite at the hotel. Back then middle class Thais had money to spend and they’d only ever seen big blonde women on the movie screen. The girls were charging 3,000 baht for short time and there were queues down the corridors all day. My bosses were planning to bring in more girls and send them on a tour around the region’s hotels, splitting the profits with the other hotel owners. Anyway, two of the family members became infatuated with the same Russian girl. One was an old guy, the other was much younger, but both were rich and neither wanted to back down. Eventually the younger guy had the older one murdered and the shit hit the fan. The local police chief had no chance of keeping a lid on the scandal, the family sold the hotel and moved to the United States, and I found myself out of a job. I went back to Bangkok and booked into a cheap hotel on Sukhumvit Soi 8. I took a long, hard look at myself. I didn’t want to work with horses again, and I was fed up with the hotel business. I was fairly proficient at speaking Thai and Khamen, and I knew pretty much all there was to know about bargirls. I didn’t fancy running a bar, but after a few tourists asked me to check up on their temporary girlfriends after they’d gone home, I had the idea of setting up a private detective agency. I figured that way I’d be paid to do what I did best: to hang around with bargirls and drink Jack Daniels.

When I’d set up as a private eye, I had no idea that my first paying customer would be a middle-aged Thai lady who wouldn’t dream of setting foot inside a go-go bar. But I was determined to do my best for her. The problem was, all I could do was to wait. And wait.

It was a month before the Thonglor police phoned me to say that the Reverend Armitage was in custody in Nong Khai and that they’d sent a pick up truck to bring him back to Bangkok. I phoned Khun Bua to give her the good news, then I went down to an internet cafA© and fired off emails to the two brothers, telling them that Marcus was in custody and that he would be facing serious jail time. I gave them a few details of what life was like in a Thai prison-based on my own experience, since you ask-and told them that the only way to avoid a long spell in a cell with an open toilet and wall-to-wall mosquitoes was for Marcus to pay back the money he’d stolen.

The next day Armitage was in a holding cell at Thonglor police station. I went in to have a look at him. He didn’t look like a man of the cloth. He was wearing faded blue denim jeans, a Chang Beer T-shirt and a baseball cap, and there were shackles on his legs. He was complaining to anyone who would listen to him that he was going to complain to his embassy, that he was a Canadian citizen, that they had no way to treat him like this, and so on. The fact that the three guys he was sharing the cell with and most of the officers at the station spoke absolutely no English meant that he was wasting his breath. And even if he was able to make himself understood no one there would have given a damn. Armitage was a farang and the Thai legal system showed farangs no favours. Innocent until proven guilty had no standing under Thai law. He would stay in custody until his trial. He would be found guilty for sure, and he’d get three years in the Bangkok Hilton-the infamous Thai prison-unless he bought his way out.

At first Armitage thought I was from the Embassy but as soon as he heard my New Zealand accent he started getting cagey, telling me that he wouldn’t speak to anyone but his lawyer. I told him that Khun Bua was well in with a Supreme Court judge and that there wasn’t a lawyer in Thailand who could keep him out of prison. And once the court heard how he’d defrauded a good Christian woman they would throw away the key. Thai prisons are seriously nasty places. Up to forty men sharing a cell with an open toilet, the lights on all day and night, prisoners sleeping like sardines on the floor, no airconditioning, rampant disease and god-awful food. Armitage was facing a long sentence and I told him that I didn’t think he’d survive more than a few months.

There was only one way he was going to stay out of prison, and that was to pay back the money he’d stolen. Immediately. At the moment he was in a holding cell. Police could be paid off, Khun Bua could be persuaded not to press charges, and Armitage could walk away. But once Armitage was charged he’d be in the system and there would be nothing he could do to save himself. It was his choice, I told him.

He started to say that he didn’t have the money, that his bank account was almost empty, his companies had all been losing money, but I held up my hand to silence him.