Jim Algie Read online

  Richard Barrow, the British expat who runs the largest collective of English-language websites on Thailand, posted a map of the escape route on the Paknam Web Network. In an interview he did with the author, MacMillan told him, “Every element of good fortune became essential: the existence of an army-boot factory for the rope; the paper factory for the long bamboo poles—even the umbrella factory, as I’m sure I would have been spotted by the tower guards without that umbrella shielding my pale face.”

  Using a fake passport, MacMillan fled the country after serving three years in Khlong Prem. Having done ten years in an Australian jail and other stints in prisons across Asia, he said, “I’ve been in worse prisons [than Bangkok]. By that I mean terrifying. There was two months in solitary in Pakistan when I was fed only watery beans poured through the bars with a piece of roof guttering, for the solitary door was never opened.”

  The book that may blow these all away is slated for release in late 2010. A Secret History of the Bangkok Hilton is a collaboration between Pornchai Sereemongkonpol and Chavoret Jaruboon. Pornchai has dug deep into the pits of the prison’s history to excavate more than a few buried skeletons, as well as provide an overview of the Thai judiciary and the beheading ritual, and personal letters from death row convicts. Now that Chavoret has retired from the prison and has terminal cancer, the book is kind of a last will and testament for him. Of all the characters that have populated Bang Kwang over the last eight decades, he remains one of the most colourful and contradictory.

  Growing up in the Bangkok neighbourhood of Sri Yan, the son of a Buddhist father and Muslim mother, as a boy Chavoret had to walk past a brothel that doubled as an opium den on his way to a Catholic school. Learning English from his father’s collection of albums by Frank Sinatra and Hank Williams, he played guitar in a series of rock ‘n’ roll cover bands that entertained the GIs all over Thailand. True to his self-deprecating wit, he said, “I was never that handsome or talented and I needed a steady job with a government pension to support my family.” His musical talents were more noteworthy than that. Some of the journalists or relatives of prisoners coming to Bang Kwang would be treated to his soulful versions of sob songs by Hank Williams or upbeat rockers by Elvis, sung in a rich baritone as Chavoret finessed the fretboard of an acoustic guitar he always kept in his office.

  Ironically, the man who executed 55 inmates over 19 years has also been hailed as a prison reformer. Susan—the ‘Angel and She-devil of Bang Kwang’—recounted, “If it wasn’t for Chavoret helping me with the paperwork and dealing with all the bureaucracy, I wouldn’t have been able to do half of what I’ve done here. You’d think the inmates here would hate him, but he’s very well-liked and respected.”

  On one occasion, Susan was visiting a group of older Thai inmates serving life sentences—many of them hadn’t had a visitor in years—and she went over and hugged a man covered in sores. “Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Chavoret shed a few tears. He’s a bit more of a softie than he lets on,” she said, “and I think he’s dealt with the guilt of his old job by drinking a lot.”

  Pornchai, his co-author, drew a different bead on this complex character. “He’s not really a man given to introspection. So I don’t think he dwells too much on his old job. But I have been pleasantly surprised by the way he’s handled his cancer diagnosis. He’s still in good spirits and sometimes he invites me out for a steak dinner.”

  While we were sharing drinks and dinner with Chavoret one night in a restaurant overlooking a pond filled with water lilies, his wife of 30 years joined us at the table. Tew said, “At home he won’t even kill ants or caterpillars. He has a good heart and we never talk about the prison at home.”

  Chavoret took a banknote out of his wallet and handed it to her. Everyone at the table laughed. “We’re always joking around like this,” he said. “That’s what keeps our marriage fresh and the friendship has kept us together for this long.” Later on, he insisted on paying the tab for everyone at the table.

  In his early years at the prison, some of the misfires he witnessed in the ‘room to end all suffering’ would have sent more sensitive souls on a one-way trip to the madhouse. Such was the case with Ginggaew Lorsoongnern, a nanny who kidnapped the son of her wealthy employers. When the ransom money did not materialise, her two male accomplices stabbed and buried the boy while he was still alive. To ward off any threats of a haunting, the killers (just like the guards in the death chamber) put flowers, incense and a candle in the boy’s hands before tying them with the scared white thread monks use to repel evil.

  Ginggaew did not participate in the murder, but she was sentenced to death in early 1979, along with her two accomplices. The young woman struggled all the way into the death chamber and kept struggling as they tied her to the cross. The executioner fired ten bullets into her back and the doctor pronounced her dead. But as they brought one of her accomplices into the room, Chavoret and the guards heard her scream in the tiny morgue. Not only that, Ginggaew was trying to stand up. Pandemonium ensued. One of the escorts rolled her over and pressed down on her back to accelerate the bleeding and help her die,” wrote Chavoret. “Another escort, a real hard man, tried to strangle her to finish her off but I swept his arms away in disgust.”

  Even after they executed one of her accomplices, the doctor found that the woman was still breathing. He ordered the guards to tie her back on the cross and this time they used the full quota of 15 bullets to ensure she was dead.

  That was not the end of it. Pin, her other male accomplice, was still breathing after the first round of 13 bullets and had to have ten more shots.

  Chavoret and the rest of the guards were all struck by the fact that Pin and Ginggaew had suffered much the same fate as the little boy they had stabbed and buried alive. It was karma, they decided. The boy had choked to death on dirt. The man and woman had choked to death on blood.

  After a decade of helping the prison authorities by serving as an escort or one of the men who tied the inmate to the cross, Chavoret received an official order to become the chief executioner in 1984, a job he did not want and only took to earn more money to support his wife and three children.

  Before pulling the trigger, he would pray to a powerful spirit for absolution, explaining that he was not killing the person out of malice, he was just doing his duty. “I had no power in the judicial process. After the police, the witnesses and the judge all had their say, I was just the final link in the chain.”

  Afterwards, he would go out drinking with his fellow prison officers in order to ward off the guilt and the haunting sensation that the dead person’s spirit was shadowing him. He was paid 2,000 baht for each execution, money which he religiously donated to a Buddhist temple to make some merit for himself and the condemned men and women. The temple’s abbot was stunned to find out that one of his most regular donors was a man who had broken the first precept of not killing any life forms time and time again. When Chavoret asked him who should shoulder the blame for these executions, the abbot responded by repeating the Buddhist belief in the interconnectedness of life. “It’s everyone’s fault: society, the government, the laypeople, the criminals, television, poverty, hopelessness, desperation, anger, greed—everything and everyone is at fault.”

  In person and in his book, Chavoret has detailed the many improvements at Bang Kwang. Paramount among them is a new breed of guards, who must now have a university or college degree, unlike the old days when a fair number of the guards had no more than six or seven years of basic education. The new recruits have brought with them a bevy of new projects, from boxing matches and vocational programmes to more correspondence courses and workshops.

  The medical facilities have also gotten better. When Susan first began undertaking projects there in the mid-1990s, the ramshackle ‘hospital’ had no mattresses or wheelchairs, no dental care or even aspirins, and the medical budget per year was less than US$3,000 dollars for 7,000 prisoners. “If you got sent to the hospital back then, it wa
s assumed you would never get out again. Many inmates died on a metal frame covered with bare boards, but the mattresses we put in are still there and the conditions are much more hygienic now, and they’ve got a proper doctor and dentist. If their families and the embassies push, the prisoners can get prescriptions filled and even anti-viral drugs for HIV and AIDS. The conditions still aren’t great, but they’re much better than before,” said the altruist, adding that conditions have also improved in many of the homes for orphans and the elderly and disabled where she has worked. “Thailand has made incredible progress in the last 30 years.”

  For all the pros, however, there all still plenty of cons. For one, the legal system is as corrupt and haphazard as ever. In many surveys of Southeast Asian countries, only Burma and Indonesia consistently rank lower than Thailand for corruption in the judiciary system.

  “If you sentenced me to an indefinite sentence, even in a five-star hotel with congenial company,” said Susan, “it would still be hell. But the kind of indefinite sentences they give out here are completely arbitrary and the punishment rarely fits the crime. The police force is corrupt, the evidence is tainted, the judges rotate, there’s no juries, or background checks or extenuating circumstances that look into poverty and ignorance. What can you say about a justice system where a 75-year-old man who accidentally killed a friend in a drunken argument gets sentenced to 104 years and six months in jail, while a real murderer gets out after a few years because he’s got the right contacts?”

  Drug dealers continuing their lives of crime from behind bars and substance abuse are two other plagues that continue to poison the populace of Thai prisons. As former inmates and heroin-traffickers Garth Hattan and Warren Fellow have said, it is a tragic irony that the drugs which landed them (and many others) in jail, or on death row, are widely available to inmates at inflated prices.

  The current director-general of the Corrections Department, Chartchai Suthiklom, held a press conference in 2010 to announce that they have installed mobile phone signal jammers in jails in Ratchaburi and Nakhon Ratchasima provinces to stem the flow of drugs. He said that guards have found mobile phones hidden in hollowed-out books, thrown over prison walls and wrapped in condoms found in prisoners’ sphincters after court appearances. With a phone, the drug dealers can set up deals from behind bars and have the money transferred into their bank accounts by relatives. The dealers also vie for cuts of the lucrative prison market, where drugs sell for up to five times the street price. Of the 210,000 convicts incarcerated in Thailand, the director-general estimated that around half are addicted to drugs, primarily methamphetamines.

  For human rights advocates, however, abolishing capital punishment is at the top of their agenda. That seemed like a probability after Thailand switched to lethal injection at the end of 2003. Earlier, former director Pittaya and a task force had visited Texas—which has more inmates on death row than any other state— to observe an execution. The former director of Bang Kwang said, “A muscle relaxant and sedative is given to the convict shortly before they inject him with the lethal dose so he’s already asleep and doesn’t have any convulsions. It’s a much more humane form of capital punishment and only takes about four minutes in total.”

  After three convicts were executed in late 2003, the courts were still handing down death sentences (mostly for trafficking in methamphetamines), but there were no more executions until 2009, when two middle-aged men Thai were executed by lethal injections. In the media blitz that followed, some inmates have alleged that prisoners are paying ‘life insurance’ to authorities, anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 baht per month, so that their names do not come up next on the list.

  Although Chavoret believes that capital punishment has not caused the crime rate to decrease, he insisted that it’s still necessary in Thailand, citing the example of one of the two Thai women he executed.

  “She had a long history of previous offences. She killed an infant and packed its body full of heroin—the same technique some American GIs used to use with their dead comrades to export the drug into America—and then she tried to carry the dead child across the border to Malaysia. What can we do with people like this?” he asked rhetorically.

  He had a point. What did the parents of the child who was used as a drug courier’s ‘doll’ think was just punishment? What about the family members of the ten-year-old girl raped multiple times by three different men, or the boy who was buried alive and choked to death on dirt? Would they not feel justified in wanting to see the killers of their children and siblings receive the maximum possible punishment for those unspeakable crimes?

  In theory, the reasons for abolishing the death penalty are clear enough. In reality, the issue is stained with too much blood and clouded by too many warring emotions impossible to codify in the heartless terms of legalese.

  Asked if he was happy to see death sentences being executed with needles instead of firearms, Chavoret said, “Sure, I’m happy about it. It’s more humane and I’ve never liked guns and never had one at home. Besides, I’m going to go down as the last executioner in Thai history.” He cracked a grin and laughed.

  True to the festive Thai spirit, the change to lethal injection occasioned another party at Bang Kwang Central Prison, not dissimilar to the 72nd anniversary celebrations held the previous year. For the TV cameras, celebrity pop stars jammed on-stage, ladyboy dance troupes kicked up their heels and smiling prisoners waved flags, as a group of monks sprinkled holy water on the machine-gun to ‘purify’ it. They then released more than 300 balloons to symbolise the spirits of all the condemned men and women who had lost their lives in the ‘room to end all suffering’. By all appearances, it was another jolly and ritualised occasion in the land of contradictions where the justice of karma, not jurisprudence, overwrites the letter of the law.

  Pattaya: The Vegas of Vice?

  With golf courses and scuba-diving, go-karts and shooting ranges, cheap hotels and bars with Happy Hours from 10am to 10pm and working girls on tap 24/7, Pattaya is a young man’s wet dream come true.

  As diverse as the city and its denizens are—from a motorcycle club of Harley riders who do charity work for underprivileged kids, to a mosque and sizable Islamic community beside a Catholic church—its reputation is best summarised by the popular T-shirt slogan: ‘Good Guy Goes to Heaven, Bad Guy Goes to Pattaya’.

  The city’s name is practically a synonym for ‘debauchery’ and a mere mention pricks up ears, causing either smirks of approval or scowls of disdain. The Vegas-like excesses of late-night carousing and serial womanising have inspired a local twist on an often-quoted line from Martin Scorsese’s film Casino: ‘What happens in Pattaya stays in Pattaya.’

  As a hotbed of vice, or so the legend goes, ‘Fun City’ has racked up substantial media coverage on both local and international fronts for harbouring foreign criminals and sexual deviants. Within the same week in mid-July 2010, the police arrested a former cop from Belgium wanted for impersonating one of the embassy’s staff, and a Finnish man who changed his nationality to Swedish after he was caught bringing kilos of cocaine into Thailand. He later swindled a Swedish real estate company out of almost 1.5 million dollars before being nabbed in Pattaya when he returned to see his Thai wife.

  These men were small fry compared to Mikhail Pletnev, the Russian pianist and conductor arrested for allegedly raping a 14-year-old boy. After arriving at the Pattaya provincial court on 19 July, the 53-year-old read a prepared statement, “I have always stated that I will assist the police in every way I can with their enquiries into the allegations that have been made against me. I say again these allegations are not true. I also state, contrary to media reports, that during the police search of my home nothing connected with the allegations—no photographs or other visual material—was found in the computer.” The highly regarded virtuoso also denied running a music school in Thailand or ever being a full-time resident. For the last decade, Pletnev said he had only ever stayed in the country for a week or
two a time. If convicted, he faces up to 14 years in prison and a 40,000 baht fine.

  To ferret out foreign criminals on the lam in Pattaya, the police opened a branch office of the Transnational Crime Data Center (TNCDC) off Jomtien Soi 5 in August 2010. Cooperating with Interpol, the FBI and the US Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as that of EU countries and Australia, the office’s sign outside the building lists the top crimes in order: ‘International Terrorism, Identity Fraud, Arms Smugging (sic), People Smugging (sic) or Legal Labour, Money Laundering, Drug Trafficking.’

  At the press conference to open the centre, Police Superintendent Colonel Athiwit announced, “Information technology is used to expedite the identification and capture of fugitives. The TNCDC gives us the technological support and databases we need to catch criminals who have become more sophisticated in hiding their identities.”

  Considering these preventive measures and the numerous crime stories, surely Pattaya must be one of the most dangerous cities in Southeast Asia? Not so, say the expats. Gavin, a young Brit whom I spoke to—who, along with his Thai wife, co-runs the New Hope Massage and Fish Spa over on Soi 13, where patrons sit outside with their legs immersed in a glass tank as dozens of fish nibble on the dead skin—said, “I think the danger element is overrated in Pattaya. Anywhere can be dangerous if you’re looking for trouble.”

  His claim is echoed by Christopher Moore, the Canadian novelist and Bangkok expat, who has spent a lot of time in the city over the years, especially when researching his 2004 thriller Pattaya 24/7. “I don’t find it very threatening, but like most things in life, the level of threat correlates to the risks you’re taking. You can take those kinds of risks in Bangkok or Des Moines, Iowa. Pattaya is no more dangerous than any mid-sized American city.” During his research, however, he discovered that the amount of smuggling along the coast is prodigious. “It’s impossible to police a coastline that long. It’s like the border between Mexico and the United States.”