Jim Algie Read online

  According to Chris, a lot of the crime in Pattaya is foreigner against foreigner, mostly in the form of bar room brawls, football hooligans on a rampage, or territorial disputes over a bargirl. Serving as a breakwater against outbursts of violence, and to cut down on unscrupulous locals preying on visitors, are the Foreign Tourist Police Assistants (FTPA). Every night, from 9pm to 3am, they cluster around a white van at the top of Walking Street. Clad in black SWAT-esque uniforms, some of them carry handcuffs, batons and pepper spray. In person, they look intimidating. In reality, they’re benign. Much of their work involves helping tourists find their hotels, settling disputes over bar bills and pouring drunks into pick-up truck taxis.

  At night, the FTPA patrol Walking Street, which is the lay of the land for Vegas-like razzle-dazzle—go-go bars, discos, ritzy seafood restaurants and Elvis and The Beatles impersonators. The FTPA works hand in hand with the Tourist Police, although they are not allowed to conduct investigations. Like any local, they can make citizen’s arrests. That rarely happens. Made up of ex-cops, ex-soldiers and businessmen, the unit is well respected by locals. They are a friendly and benevolent bunch that would probably rescue your kitten from a tree. The former leader, Howard Miller, was appointed as the Honorary British Consul in August 2010. One of the city’s most successful expat entrepreneurs, Howard also runs Pattaya One News, a cable TV show and website.

  The Thai Police Volunteers who work out of the cop shop near Soi 8 on Beach Road had nothing but praise for the FTPA. These volunteers are not allowed to make official statements to the press, but speaking on condition of anonymity, one of the almost 400-member force commented, “The problem a lot of tourists face is that the regular police don’t speak much English, so the FTPA is practically a translation service that saves us a lot of time and trouble.”

  In front of the station, next to the strip of beer bars with hostesses calling out “Hello, welcome”, the cops and volunteers enjoy taking billiard breaks on an open-air table. The volunteer said the biggest crime nuisance in the city has nothing to do with foreign mobsters or international criminals on the run, but juvenile delinquents. “This province [Chon Buri] has the highest rate of juvenile crime in the country. Many of the rural couples that come here to work end up working in bars at night and the children don’t have much supervision or money. So they run amok and get into trouble. Mostly they form gangs and attack each other.”

  From time to time this youthful angst and desperation boils over into homicide. Two Russian women on a package tour to Pattaya were shot to death on Jomtien Beach in 2007 by a Thai youth. In mid-2010, drive-by shootings ricocheted across the crime pages. A hostess at one of the beer bars off Second Road was shot in the leg by a pair of motorcyclists speeding past. The majority of crimes committed by juvenile delinquents are petty: snatch-and-run robberies, thieving motorcycles and picking pockets. For most locals, tourists and expats, these incidents happen off the radar.

  In ‘Fun City’, it’s the whiff of sex not gunpowder that clouds the air and senses. In and around South Pattaya, taxis whiz past bearing signs for the Lolita’s Pattaya Gentlemen’s Lounge. This lounge specialises in fellatio, and their slogan reads, ‘Our girls will blow you away’. A ‘love hotel’ has an opaque window with a half-naked female figure next to a sign that reads ‘Thai Chicks Rock’ and, above that, ‘Welcome to the Good Life’. The Windmill Club advertises its ‘wares’ in local papers with ads showing dancers that promise ‘Pussy Without Attitude’. Along Soi 6 is a series of bars-cum-bordellos with hostesses dressed in everything from schoolgirl outfits to flight-attendant garb, standing or sitting outside neon-splashed venues with telltale names such as ‘Sex in the City’, ‘Lick’ and ‘The Hole in One Bar’.

  In an age of sensationalism where the world’s oldest obsession is used to sell almost everything, no one can accuse these establishments of false advertising or hyberbole. In Pattaya, you get what you come and pay for.

  This degree of constant titillation has given rise to a number of gossip and advice columns in the local press. Night March (recently renamed Night Walker) is a regular rundown of the sexier local bars in Pattaya Today, in which the author refers to the women as ‘damsels’ or ‘chrome pole molesters’. Beers are ‘liver wasters’, and the dialogue revolves around ‘tumescence’.

  The presence of so many foreign men getting involved with bargirls (mostly immigrants from poor farming communities in the northeast) has spawned a lot of friction, heartburn and Agony Aunt columns in the local English press. Oi, of the Pattaya Times, happily dispels the delusions of Western men looking for soul mates and true romance in the city with younger women. “You know Jeremy, even though you’ve been here sometime, I really don’t think you understand Thai people or their culture. Life is very hard here which you have seen. It’s not really all about, ‘I love you!’. Ordinary people don’t have time for heart and romance, there’s not much romance in the village when your kids are crying and hungry and you have nothing to give them. It’s really more about taking care and providing. We’re not a romantic race like Western people, we’re more realistic. If a woman stays with you it’s because you provide for her and her family and she loves you. She doesn’t have to tell you every five minutes like in the movies. I’m not saying it’s right or this is how it should be. I’m just saying that’s the way it is. For a man to write to women half his age and expect true love without the finances to support them both in a decent lifestyle is just totally unrealistic. One day you will pass on and she will be old already and now alone with no one to provide for her. Did you ever consider that?”

  Toss in a few of these misunderstandings, add alcohol and frustration to the mix and it’s a Molotov cocktail that goes off now and then, like when an ageing Scandinavian man ran amok in the Royal Garden Plaza, throwing acid in the faces of any Thai women he saw, because a young bargirl had spurned his affections and drained his bank account back in 2007. That’s an extreme take on a familiar tale in Pattaya and Bangkok, where the bookshelves in local shops are filled with similar tales of foreign men penning their self-published memoirs of being conned by duplicitous women.

  Such stories have given the city its reputation, but many long-term expats think the sordid tales are exaggerated. “Pattaya is an easy target. It’s a scapegoat for anything Thais or expats or tourists want to pin on it, for sexual diseases, or drinking too much, or anything negative,” said an American English professor who goes by the nickname ‘Scooter’.

  A 12-year resident of Pattaya and a film buff fond of quoting Nietzsche, he said, “I’ve never had a problem on Walking Street or any of the bars on Soi 6. One night a friend lost in his wallet on Soi 6 and went back thinking they’d stolen it, but he got it back with all the money intact. I’ve never heard of anyone getting ripped off or mugged. Of course it could happen if you’re drunk out of your mind at 4am and staggering around.”

  As much as people try to paint the city in black and white terms, or denigrate it as some Asian Babylon, Pattaya and its floating populace of visitors, migrant sex workers and expats is far too colourful for these monochromatic stereotypes. One of the biggest events of 2010 was the ‘Say No to Violence Against Women’ parade on Pattaya Beach. Led by Thai aristocrats and dignitaries, with students representing each major school and a UN Goodwill Ambassador, the procession drew 10,000 marchers to the same strip of Beach Road peopled day and night with streetwalkers sitting on benches and the spiky tail of a life-size dinosaur in front of a mall. Even some of the pickup truck taxis with racy ads also sport stickers for a UNIFEM campaign to stop violence against women.

  The most bipolar city in Thailand—and possibly Southeast Asia, or maybe the entire world—has an upside, too. Head over to Jomtien Beach and it’s a different planet, with five-star hotels, families, groups of screaming teenagers being pulled through the water on ‘banana boats’ and Thais having seafood picnics. According to the Tourism Authority of Thailand, the Russians, Chinese and South Koreans lead the tourist p
ack. Of these vacationers, the Russians are the most obvious. There are entire streets filled with signs in Russian, restaurants replete with specialties from the Ukraine and Uzbekistan and hotels booked solid with package tourists from the motherland off the lanes near Jomtien Beach, with the Pattaya Park Beach Resort and its 170-metre-high Tower Jump in the background. Over on Walking Street, there are nightclubs with karaoke in Russian and a go-go bar named Galaxy staffed by Eastern European women.

  When I spoke to a couple of university professors in their 40s from Moscow, they explained the city’s free-and-easy appeal for the survivors of communist blight and repression. “Under the communist system, it was difficult to get travel passes to go anywhere and even if you could, nobody had any money to travel. Everything, I remember, was grey and polluted. There were always scarcities of basic things. Even today, Moscow is more crowded and jammed with traffic than Bangkok. So we come here and it’s all very beautiful, exotic and tropical,” said Vladislav, an aeronautics professor and former weightlifter with the Soviet Olympics squad.

  With a refreshing brusqueness, he added, “What is this early closing time in the rest of Thailand? We don’t need government babysitters treating us like children—it’s bullshit! Pattaya is much more progressive and liberal than the rest of the country and we Russians enjoy all the entertainment and restaurant options. My wife she enjoys the shopping. Sometimes she gets drunk and likes to get onstage and dance with the girls…” He exchanged a knowing smirk with his wife, Sonia.

  Sonia, a professor of anthropology with a lobster-red tan, nodded. “Do you know how cold it gets and how long the winter lasts in Russia? Many characteristics of any people are informed by the weather. That is why Eastern Europeans and Russians sometimes seem like cold people and why we need so much vodka to warm up.” She smiled. “Thais have a tropical personality which is much warmer, so we come here and feel much more warm, too. These days, everyone talks so much about freedom and free trade and free speech, but as abstract concepts. Freedom is also a destination and we Russians feel that, to use a communist expression, Pattaya is a liberated zone.”

  The city’s freewheeling nature that she complimented has never been curbed. The Social Order Policy implemented by the government in 2001, stipulating that bars must shut by 1am, never caught on in Pattaya. These establishments still stay open until 3 or 4am or later. The nationwide no-smoking policy in bars and clubs fizzled out in Pattaya within days. During the aftermath of the May 2010 protests, when a curfew was imposed in Bangkok for weeks, the nightspots of ‘Fun City’ shut down for just one night.

  But here’s the rub. On the surface, Pattaya seems like a free and easy-going place. Delve a little deeper and you get stonewalled. The FTPV will not speak to anyone without the express consent of the Tourist Police. Any questions put to the honorary consul have to be vetted by the British Embassy. None of the crime reporters from any of the local dailies returned my calls or requests for interviews. What appears to be an open city is rigidly controlled by vested interests. As an example, many locals said the brothels on Soi 6 are only allowed to open from 1pm to 1am because the cops call the shots.

  Simultaneously open and closed, this tension defines the city and provides much of its fascination. It also sanctions the most heinous kinds of hearsay. “Did you know that half of Pattaya is run by the Russian mafia?” “That Thai guy was set up as a scapegoat for the murder of those two Russian women on the beach. It wasn’t a robbery gone wrong; the two women still had their cell phones and all their valuables on them. Russian mobsters killed them.” “The world’s biggest arms dealer, the ‘Merchant of Death’, who was arrested in Bangkok but got off on a technicality before they could extradite him to America, used Pattaya as his base of operations.”

  These tales are all shots in the dark, impossible to confirm or deny. As Scooter said, “A lot of these stories are rumours that come from expats talking, but I’ve never seen anything to confirm them. The theory is the average Russian wouldn’t make enough money to come here for a big holiday, so people assume that they must be gangsters or former communist officials who made a killing, or corrupt business people.”

  For gangster-spotting, Pattaya 24/7 (one of the most explosive and richly characterised ‘shells’ in Christopher Moore’s series of books) is insightful. The story’s Thai ‘godfather’ has a penchant for flaunting his ill-gotten gains in the form of expensive cars, watches and clothes. Some of the bearish Eastern European men strutting down Walking Street with the penultimate ‘fashion accessory’ for any mobster on their arms—a statuesque blond—adhere to the same ostentatious dress code. This is not unusual in the criminal underworld, the novelist explained. “It’s true of gangsters all over the world. It doesn’t matter whether they’re Hell’s Angels in Toronto, the Russians, or the Italian mafia in Chicago, New York or Philadelphia, or drug barons in Latin America. These are not terribly complex people. They want to flaunt their status, power and influence. Most of them don’t even think of themselves as godfathers or criminals. In their own eyes, they’re businessmen…businessmen doing good things for the community.”

  In the funhouse mirror that is ‘Fun City’, appearances are distorted and deceiving. The Harley-riding bikers, whose nightlife haunt is the Tahitian Queen Rock ‘n’ Roll Bar on Beach Road, are not the outlaw motorcycle gang they resemble. Dressed in their leathers and jeans, and rumbling down the roads astride their ‘hogs’, the members of the Jesters Motorcycle Club are actually good Samaritans who pride themselves on working for underprivileged children and other charities. Their biggest event of the year is travelling en masse to Phuket for the annual ‘Bike Week’ held every April, when motorcyclists from all over Southeast Asia gear up for rallies, revelry, tattoo contests, a Miss Phuket Bike Week pageant, and—yes, doing good deeds for the community.

  Opened in 1978, the Tahitian Queen is the oldest bar in the city. Run by former GIs, it has not changed much in the last three decades. There are no ‘naughty’ shows, the dancers do not strip, the décor is gilded Vegas kitsch and the medleys of vintage rock—from the Doors and the Stones to KISS and Jimi Hendrix—echo the soundtrack of the Vietnam-era film Apocalypse Now, famously described by filmmaker Frances Ford Coppola as ‘the first rock ‘n’ roll war’.

  Until the late 1960s, Pattaya was a comatose fishing village. During the Vietnam War, it became an enclave for GIs on “R ‘n’ R”,catering to the soldiers with all the down-home comforts of America such as go-go bars and Western-style clubs with Thai musicians (most notably the former executioner Chavoret Jaruboon) playing covers of rock-solid standards.

  Much of the city was planned and built by American engineers. That explains why the lanes along Beach Road are arranged in numerical order and why the city’s grid-like and wide roads make it one of the country’s most well-planned and easy-to-navigate destinations. By the time the war ended in 1975, around 700,000 GIs were descending on Pattaya every year. Many traded in their army fatigues for shorts and flip-flops, married local women and set up travel-oriented businesses and nightspots.

  Over time, the American influence has waned. It’s most prominent every year during the joint naval exercises called ‘Cobra Gold’, when the warships of the United States, Thailand and, in 2010, Korea, formed an armada of Marine Corps might. “You used to see all the American warships in Pattaya Bay,” said Scooter. “But in recent years they’ve docked at Sattahip, the Thai navy base. Maybe in the past the sailors were rowdier when they came into town, but they’re pretty well behaved now. The Shore Patrol checks up on them. The Marines also get involved with some charity projects like building houses for the less fortunate.”

  With ‘pillars-of-the-community’ gangsters, good Samaritan bikers, massive campaigns to stop violence against women, well-behaved sailors and quite possibly the only group of foreign police volunteers in Southeast Asia... what is Pattaya coming to? This might be the most philanthropy-minded citizenry in the entire country, but few of those stories will ever mak
e it beyond the city limits. As Michael Moore discovered during the making of his documentary Bowling for Columbine, the murder rate had actually decreased in many large American cities. At the same time, TV coverage of murders had increased by more than 700 per cent. Good news means bad ratings. Hence, the majority of do-gooders will continue to get cropped out of Pattaya’s big picture so the media can blow up mug shots portraying the minority of scoundrels such as Jeff Savage. The video of Savage threatening to loot and torch CentralWorld in Bangkok during the 2010 protests went ‘viral’ on the Internet. The British citizen and Pattaya resident was given a 45-day sentence after pleading guilty to violating the Emergency Decree. Since he had already spent some time in jail, Savage was released from custody pending deportation. Upon hearing the judge’s verdict, he burst into tears. “It’s a miracle, I am surprised, and there is justice in Thailand. I want justice for all—the dead, red shirts and even yellow shirts,” he told the press.

  Lest anyone finger certain nationalities as the chief troublemakers in the city, Christopher Moore said with a dry chuckle, “No countries have a monopoly on producing morons and hooligans.”

  As the influx of different ethnicities changes the complexion of the city, the crime syndicates are drawing fresh blood from different sources, such as the Middle East. An Iranian couple caught with 67 million baht worth of crystal methamphetamine, or ‘Ice’, at Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok in July 2010 were bound for Pattaya. The police said it marked the first time the drug had ever been seized in liquid form. Increasingly popular for smuggling, the drug is liquefied and soaked up with towels. Even though it loses some of its potency, the narcotic can be smuggled in far greater quantities that are more difficult to detect.