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

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 for 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.

Anyway, Hank didn’t try to pull the wool over my eyes regarding Elle’s pedigree. He’d met her in a bar in Soi Cowboy. She was dancing, he’d paid her barfine, they’d gone to a short-time hotel and he’d given her money for sex. No confusion there, then. She was a bargirl who worked in a bar. Which is why what happened next was so surprising. Hank fell in love with her. Hook, line and sinker. She was, he told me with a perfectly straight face, the love of his life. After their first encounter, he paid her bar fine for ten days and took her to Koh Samui for a holiday. They’d walked hand in hand on the beach, watched the sun go down, eaten sea food and gazed into each other’s eyes. He’d told her his history, and she’d told him everything about her life. She had a six-year-old daughter, she supported her aged mother, her husband was long gone, her dream was to open a beauty parlour. That’s why she’d started dancing in Soi Cowboy, to get together enough cash to pay for her own business. It was also, of course, why she’d started spreading her legs for strangers, but I didn’t say that. Just call me Mister Tact and Diplomacy.

Hank wanted to take care of Elle and her family, and eventually he planned to move to Thailand on a retirement visa and live with her. Elle’s story was typical of a thousand you’d hear anytime you sat down next to a bargirl. But for some reason she’d touched Hank. He wanted to help her. He wanted to take care of her. She was a damsel in distress and he was a knight in shining amour. He opened his wallet and took out a photograph, a head and shoulders shot of a rather plain thirty-something Isaan girl with too much make-up. ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ he said.

I nodded. I smiled. I nodded again. She didn’t look much to me but Hank was the client and he was paying for my time. If it meant I’d get more money I’d have probably told him that he was a ‘handsum man’ and stroked his thigh. I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right. It isn’t only bargirls who tell people what they want to hear.

Hank took the photograph back, stared at it with moist eyes for a while, then slid it inside his wallet again. He continued his story. He’d offered to pay Elle a monthly ‘salary’ so that she could take care of her mother and daughter while she attended a good hairdressing school. Once she was qualified, Hank intended to set her up with her own beauty parlour. Elle was over the moon with the arrangement. She had to work at the bar until the end of the month to collect her salary and drinks commission, but once they had paid her she’d quit and start studying haircutting. It was only when he’d gotten to the airport that Hank started having second thoughts. He was twenty years older than Elle, he only had her word that the husband was out of the picture, and like most long-term visitors to Thailand he’d heard all the horror stories. He wanted me to check that everything was kosher, that she wasn’t continuing to sleep with customers, that she did indeed quit her job at the bar at the end of the month, and that she wasn’t still married. He also wanted me to find a good hair salon training school. All of it easy work which I figured wouldn’t take more than a day or two at worst, but he pulled out a wad of NZ dollars and handed me a week’s retainer before I could say anything. I thought about giving him half of it back, but just as quickly remembered that rule number one of the private-eye game is that the client was always right. Rule number two: never look a gift horse in the mouth.

I wished Hank a safe trip and headed back to the city. Coming up with the name of a good hairdressing school was easy. I’d been asked the same question more than a dozen times that year. It was a standard bargirl scam, to ask a sponsor to pay for her to learn hairdressing. Most just pocketed the cash and carried on hooking. Some started the course but quit after a week or so to go back to hooking. Some did the full course and then went back to hooking. So how many bargirls had I met who’d gone on to become hairdressers? Err, let me think about that. Err, none. Zero. Not one. That doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen, of course. I’ve never seen Father Christmas, but my seven-year-old nephew says he brought him a bicycle last year. The best schools were in Siam Square, and opposite the Siam Commercial bank on Petchburi road. I already had the names, addresses and contact numbers on my computer but figured I’d wait a few days before emailing Hank. Rule number three of the private-eye game: don’t make it look too easy.

Hank few out on Friday night but I left it until Monday before checking out Elle’s bar, figuring it would be easier to talk to her on a quiet night. Her bar was at the Asoke end of Soi Cowboy, small and sleazy, just the way I like them. I wandered in, wide-eyed as if I was a newbie, waied the waitresses and ordered a Jack Daniels and Coke. There were three tired-looking go-go dancers who were well past their sell-by date, up on a podium and another five clustered around a couple of Asian guys in suits, probably Japanese. The girls were probably thinking of the good old Rule of Four when it came to the Japanese: four inches, four minutes, four thousand baht. Okay, that’s racist, but then hell, we didn’t attack Pearl Harbour, did we?

My drink arrived. The Coke was flat which was par for the course in a go-go bar, but the JD was the real thing. I sipped it and studied the girls. None looked like the photograph that Hank had shown me. He’d given me her number so I squinted at the small circular badges that all the girls were wearing. Each badge had the girl’s number, as required by law. It also meant that guys didn’t have to bother remembering a girl’s name. Hank had told me that she was Number 27. One of the waitresses sat down beside me and started rubbing my thigh. She went through the basic bargirl questions. Where was I from? How long had I been in Bangkok? What hotel was I staying at? Australia. One day. The Sheraton. There was no number 27 in the bar which was either good news or bad news so far as Hank was concerned. Either she’d quit her job early or she was already in the sack with a punter. It turned out to be option three. The track came to an end and the bargirls tottered off to be replaced by a second shift. The middle girl was wearing number 27. She was fairly heavy set and her hair was a bit shorter than in Hank’s photograph. The longer that I sat and looked at her, the more I began to question Hank’s judgement. She wasn’t in the least bit easy on the eye. I guess if pushed I’d have described her as one-bag girl. That’s how I rank the dogs I come across. A one-bag girl is so ugly that you have to put a bag over her head to do the dirty. If she’s really ugly you need two bags. One for her, and one for yourself so that no one will recognise you. And if she’s really, really ugly then you need a third bag, to throw up in. So I guess using that scale, Elle wasn’t too bad. Anyway, I smiled and gave her a little wave and she started to dance around the pole a little more enthusiastically.

Twenty minutes later the girls shuffled off the stage and four more not-particularly attractive girls took their place. Elle appeared at my side, wrapping a leopard-skin sarong around her waist. I said hello and offered to buy her a drink. She had a cola, the standard bargirl’s commission drink, and within a few minutes she was stroking my thigh and I was getting her life story. She told me that she wanted to open up her own beauty salon and I took a risk by suggesting that she was very pretty and that she must have some guys who could help her. She giggled and said that yes, she had two guys who really liked her but that she wanted to do it herself. She told me about her daughter, and she told me that she lived on Sukhumvit Soi 101, which is the address that Hank had given me. I bought her another drink and brought up the subject of her bar fine and she said sure, she’d love to go with me. I said I didn’t think girls could go back to my hotel and she said that was fine, she knew several short-time hotels. I said I was still jet-lagged but that I’d be back the following night and that I’d barfine her then. I got a pout and a quick rub of my genitalia but then it was time for her to dance again. And she went back to the podium.

The waitress came over and asked me if I wanted another drink, so I ordered a JD and Coke and bought her one, too. She sat next to me, stroked my thigh and told me how handsome I was. She whispered in my ear that if I paid her barfine and took her to a short-time hotel, she’d screw me for free. That was a standard bargirl scam, I knew from experience. She was banking on the fact that she’d be so good in the sack or I’d be so drunk that I’d forget the deal and pay her when she left. I told her that she was cute, which she was, but that I really liked Number 27. But I hear she has a few boyfriends, I said.

The waitress nodded sympathetically. Yes, she had a soldier in Germany who liked her a lot and a man from Australia who gave her money. I figured Australia was close enough to New Zealand that it was probably Hank she was talking about, but even so it looked like my client was getting the short end of the stick.

I paid my bill, waved goodbye to Elle and ducked as she blew me a kiss. The next day I emailed Hank with my report. I gave him all the details I had on hairdressing schools, and told him that he could expect to pay about 30,000 baht for a year’s course at a good school, or about half that for a six-month course. If Elle were to graduate from one of the good schools she’d have no trouble getting a job in Bangkok. And I told him that he probably wasn’t Elle’s only sponsor. There was the German soldier, and there could well be other men who were sending her money. And I made it clear that she was still happy to have her bar fine paid.

I got an email back thanking me for my help, and I figured that would be the end of it. Hank wasn’t stupid, he’d been around the bar scene long enough to know how it worked, so I assumed that he’d do the sensible thing and just cut his losses. He was a nice guy, too, because he didn’t ask for a refund. He’d paid for a week but I’d only worked on the case for an evening. He didn’t ask for a refund and I didn’t offer. Rules number one and two came into play.

It turned out that I was wrong. Not about the refund, but about Hank’s intentions. He phoned me from Auckland and told me that he’d had several long chats with Elle, that she’d left the bar for good, and that he had paid for her mother and daughter to join her in Bangkok. Elle was working in a small hair salon and she was just about to start at hairdressing school. Hank wanted to pay me to check that Elle was being straight with him. He wanted me to check that she had left the bar and that she was indeed going to school. He said that he would send me a week’s retainer by bank transfer, so I told him I’d do what he wanted. I figured he was wasting his time, but if he wanted to throw good money after bad then rules number one and two of the private-eye game came into play.

That evening I went back to Soi Cowboy, had a few JD and Cokes and bought a few for my friendly waitress. Elle had indeed quit her job, which was one up for Hank. Elle had told him that she wanted to enrol at a beauty school in Soi 55 and Hank had wired the 20,000 baht for the year’s tuition. The next day I headed out there and spoke to a group of motorcycle taxi boys. They knew nothing about a beauty school and that was strange because the motorcycle boys spend all day ferrying people up and down the road and usually know everything that happens in their area. One of them said there was a small place down the road where young girls practised cutting hair, but it wasn’t really a school. I gave the guy fifty baht to take me to the place. It was an open air set-up with two chairs for cutting hair and a reclining chair next to a tap, all under a tattered awning tied to trees with lengths of rope. Below the awning was a hand-painted banner offering lessons in hairdressing and sewing with a ‘special promotional rate’ of 2,000 baht for a six month course. I asked to speak the boss and an old woman stepped forward, her face the texture of old saddle leather.

I gave her my biggest smile and threw in a respectful wai, then told her that my girlfriend wanted to learn hairdressing. No problem, she said, they were open five days a week from nine until five. Girls paid a flat 2,000-baht fee and turned up whenever they wanted. I mentioned that I knew a girl called Elle who had enrolled at the school and the old woman nodded enthusiastically and said that yes, Elle had enrolled but that she didn’t turn up very often. I asked her if the girls who completed the course received a diploma and she grinned, showing me a mouthful of bad teeth, and said sure. I doubted that the diploma would be recognised by any decent beauty salon but at least Elle hadn’t lied about signing up for a course in Soi 55. But she had lied about the cost, and had obviously pocketed the difference. I asked the old women if it was okay to take a photograph of the ‘school’ to show my girlfriend and she readily agreed. On the way home I popped into an internet cafA© and emailed a quick report to Hank, along with the digital photograph.

I figured that would be the end of the romance. She’d lied to him about not going with customers, and she’d fleeced him for 18,000 baht. Hank was enough of a realist to know that a girl who lies twice will keep on lying. And that without trust, no relationship has a hope in hell of surviving. I was wrong. Six months later he phoned me again. He was in New Zealand, and he was still very much in touch with Elle. After my second investigation, he’d had several long heart-to-heart chats with her and she had agreed to leave the temptations of Bangkok and to live with her mother and daughter in Udon Thani. Apparently the fact that he seemed to be aware of her every move had convinced her that there was no point in lying to him anymore. He had agreed to give her one more chance, but only on condition that she stayed with her family in her home town once she had graduated from the hairdressing school. I had already told him that the school’s diploma wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, but she had attended classes every day and he had phoned her constantly, checking that she was sticking to her word. She was always either at school, or at home, and after six months she’d proudly sent him a photocopy of her diploma and headed back to Udon Thani with her mother and daughter. Hank had paid to set her up with her own beauty parlour and wanted me to drop by next time I was in Udon Thani to check on her progress. He wired me a two-day retainer and we agreed that I wouldn’t charge him for travel expenses. I figured he’d already paid me enough, plus I had several bargirl investigations arranged for Udon Thani. The Isaan town is a major source of prostitutes for Bangkok’s red-light districts. Probably a third of all farangs who ask for my help have gotten involved with girls from Udon Thani. The girls are pretty, generally, and darker than the Thais think is attractive. Their looks, coupled with the poor farmland and lack of decent jobs, mean that there is a constant stream of young girls on the busses into the capital, eager to work in the bars and massage parlours. Many meet a farang who wants to take care of them and every week dozens head back to Udon Thani with the promise of a monthly ‘salary’ from an overseas sponsor. A good percentage of them go straight back into the arms of their Thai boyfriend and husband, and once the sponsor starts to get suspicious that his sweetheart isn’t being as faithful as he’d hoped, that’s when they call me in. I had four Udon Thani investigations ready to go so I added Hank to the list, hired a nondescript Toyota and drove over to Isaan with my wife. She’s from near Udon herself and speaks Thai, the Isaan dialect and Laotian so she pretty much covers all bases, language-wise.

Elle’s beauty parlour was next to her house, some forty kilometres from Udon Thani. I wore sunglasses and a Singha beer baseball cap just in case Elle were to recognise me from my visit to the bar in Soi Cowboy, and I dropped my wife off outside the beauty parlour. I drove off and parked a mile or so away while I read the Bangkok Post from cover to cover and then drove back to collect the little lady. She’d had her hair cut and washed and her nails done and Elle had obviously studied well because she looked great. My missus and Elle had chatted away, as the girls do when they’re getting their hair done, and Elle had pretty much recited her life story. She had a boyfriend in New Zealand who loved her and who was coming to live with her one day. His framed photograph was hanging above her framed diploma, and there were snapshots of the two of them together all around the mirrors in the salon. The man took care of Elle and her daughter and her mother, and he was a good man with a good heart, Elle had said. She even offered to ask Hank if he had any friends who might be interested in my missus, but my missus, bless her, said that she was happy with the farang that she already had. That’s what she told me anyway, but I deleted Elle’s number from her mobile when we finally got back to Bangkok, just in case.

Elle said that her parlour made her about two hundred baht a day, which was pretty good money for Isaan, and a lot more on days when there was a function or party in the village. She enjoyed the work and loved her boyfriend, she said, and she was finally content with her life.

‘She’s a lucky woman,’ my wife said to me as we drove away from Elle’s house. She was right. Elle had been lucky to escape from the bar scene, and she was lucky to have a man like Hank supporting her. Most men would have given up on her long ago, cut their losses and found themselves another girl. But Hank had persisted and by the look of it his persistence had paid off. So maybe Hank was lucky, too. Only time would tell. Time, and maybe another visit from the Bangkok private eye.

‘What about you, love of my life?’ I asked the wife. ‘Do you feel lucky?’ She just gave me one of the smiles that the Thais are famous for, and said nothing.