 Outside the Dog's Bollocks pub, a blackboard
is pointing out that "Charlton v Yids" will be screened on the bar's
television later this evening. Down the narrow street that leads to the
Pattaya beachfront, past the cafes offering a full English breakfast and
the masseuses offering full everything else, every middle-aged British
male seems to be accompanied by a Thai woman half his age, half his size
and seven times as attractive.
On the crowded beachfront, as jet skis skid across the bay, every
counterfeit imaginable is available, from Ray Bans to Rod Stewart CDs.
Newly arrived Brits, identifiable by their fake Premiership football
shirts, shorts and hairless alabaster legs, are handed flyers offering
trips across the border to Cambodia on "visa runs" and assistance in
"getting positive results for any length 'overstay'". One stall is
selling women's T-shirts reading "No Money, No Honey" and, for men,
sleeveless black T-shirts pronouncing "Good guys go to Heaven, bad guys
go to Pattaya."
Detective Superintendent John Sweeney from the Metropolitan police has
made five visits over the past two years - all on extradition business.
It's the new Costa del Crime, he says, thanks to the numbers of
Brits fleeing the law at home for lives of lucrative, beachfront liberty
in Thailand. You see them all there in their singlets and tattoos.
It's a perfect place for them. What the Thais must think of British
people I have no idea. What makes it attractive for someone on
the run is that it is very easy to pick up bogus ID, it's very cheap to
live and you can get yourself fixed up with a Thai woman very easily,
says Sweeney.
The lid was lifted on the British expat underworld in Pattaya during a
murder trial at the Old Bailey in December. Matthew O'Connor, a London
taxi driver and martial-arts expert who co-managed the Camden club
Barzaar, was charged with the 1997 killing of Ronald Hinkson outside his
club. O'Connor, who fled the country with a false passport immediately
after the killing, was tracked down to Thailand four years later and
spent two years in jail there fighting extradition. He was acquitted of
the murder after he told the jury that he had not been involved and had
only disappeared because he believed the dead man's friends were after
him.
O'Connor, like many on the run, had managed to create a new world for
himself in Pattaya, complete with a Thai partner with whom he had a son.
He might have spent the rest of his life there, untroubled by the
British police, had it not been for another Pattaya expat, Ian Muirhead.
A small, nervy man, Muirhead had been in jail for various offences in
Britain and the US before he ended up enjoying the benefits of Thailand.
Muirhead's modus operandi, typical of the counterfeit trade from
Thailand, was to purchase fake fancy goods at a fraction of the price of
the genuine article, ship them back to London and have them sold off by
associates working in the London markets. He was not making a fortune -
he reckoned between £2,000 and £4,000 per monthly trip - but combined
with the phoney visa business, it provided a comfortable life. He was
arrested in England in 2002 after trying to pull off one trip too many.
In exchange for a £21,000 reward, he divulged the new identity and
whereabouts of O'Connor, then operating under the name of Roy Cann.
O'Connor, who had used Muirhead to collect money for him from London,
had also found the counterfeit goods trade allowed him a comfortable
life in Thailand. Like Muirhead, he traded in replica football shirts,
buying them for £3 and selling them for £15. The fact that Thailand is
one of the world centres of counterfeit production provides expat
criminals with a wonderful way of making money relatively free from
risks. If they have legal problems, the police are very bribable.
The old Costa del Crime in the south of Spain was where villains took
advantage of the collapse in 1978 of the extradition agreement between
Spain and the UK. For a while in the 1980s, up to 100 major British
criminals enjoyed their San Miguels without fear of a hand on the collar
of their Hawaiian shirts (the door to Spain was closed in 1985 with a
new extradition accord, although it didn't apply to those who were there
already). The old Costa del Crime provided a haven with full access to
the staples of the expat Brit: televised football, beer and breakfast.
Pattaya can offer all of these - along with a young female population
who show an unfailing attraction to well-off, middle-aged Brits in
shorts and sandals.
So is Pattaya really the new Costa del Crime? "Not at all; it's more
like Blackpool," says one expat Londoner who now owns a bar just up the
road from the Dog's Bollocks, where Muirhead and his pals hung out. It's really very relaxed, says the Londoner.
There are a few
ex-cons here but I don't know of anyone on the run - apart from one guy
who's now gone to the Philippines [which has no extradition treaty
with Britain]. You get all kinds here: your golfing fraternity and
just normal people.
Oddly, no one in this supposedly family-friendly golfing idyll wants to
talk on the record. To an observer, indeed, Pattaya is much more
identifiable as the home of "beer bars" where a "bar fine" is paid to
take a woman off for sex, or go-go bars where "lady drinks" are bought
for the dancers, who are also available for sex for as little as £10. A
Brit on the run can, for very little investment, find himself a woman, a
place to stay, a new identity and, with the right connections, a way of
scamming enough money to stay for ever.
Of course, there are plenty of expats who have nothing to do with crime
and who are attracted by the sun and cheap property. Around £30,000 will
buy a very comfortable apartment near the beach, and rents are minimal -
650,000 British tourists visit Pattaya every year. One legitimate
English businessman who has been in Pattaya for a decade says he has
seen the town grow by 10% a year since then. There were some problems on
the criminal front, he says, but mainly with people who overstayed their
visas.
There have, however, certainly been no shortage of crime stories
involving Britons in the town. Last month, Bernard Le Court, a
52-year-old chef from Liverpool who moved to Thailand six years ago to
open a restaurant, had his throat cut in Pattaya. A local taxi driver
was arrested after the body was found in bushes near Pluta Luang, 22
miles south of the town. He was said to have heavy gambling debts and to
have robbed Le Court of his camera equipment and money. He could face
the death penalty if convicted.
The lively local paper Pattaya Today, one of three local
English-language publications, provides a round-up of the criminal
happenings complete with graphic photos: Thai police make a speciality
of posing beside the bodies of murder victims. In one week last month it
was carrying reports of a Briton, Alexander Downey, caught with three
packs of "ice" (pure amphetamines), and a report that noted that "the
Brit's landlady said she believed he had made some enemies in Pattaya
and they had decided to put an end to his nefarious activities". Another
report told of a "Swiss guy found expired in condo - possibly hit with
hard object".
It is not only British criminals who are attracted to Thailand; while
the British and Australians are the most involved in the counterfeit
business, some sex trade and drugs, Russians are involved in
prostitution and West Africans in drugs and diamonds. Down on the front,
one 20-year-old Thai businessman offering fake YSL suits says that
Englishmen have a bad reputation locally: They get very drunk There
are Germans, too, but the English are the worst. Pat, a 27-year-old
Thai bar-girl, says the English are the best and the worst customers.
What does she mean? They do like to get very drunk.
Unlike Patong, Thailand's other main hangout for British expats and
tourists, Pattaya was not affected by the Boxing Day tsunami. There is
little doubt, however, that the catastrophe in the region may have
provided some people with a perfect way of disappearing. There are many
apocryphal tales in Pattaya about British criminals who got new
identities after claiming that their passports had been washed away in
the waves. Even if they can't secure a phoney identity in Thailand, a
taxi ride from Pattaya takes you over the border into Cambodia where it
is even easier to disappear. Last summer, a bogus passport ring was
busted in Bangkok with false ID from New Zealand, France, Belgium and
Spain being sold for as little as €1,500 (£1,000 each). There are
services available, too, for criminals who want to stay in Thailand but
who do not want the risk and bother of travelling abroad to get their
visa renewed. For 3,200 baht (£42) for a tourist visa or 7,500 baht
(£100) for a three month non-immigrant visa, someone will leave the
country on your behalf and return with the necessary renewal stamp.
There are currently 41 Britons in jail in Thailand, according to
Prisoners Abroad, mostly on drugs charges; some are serving sentences of
49 or even 99 years, their only faint hope a royal pardon. The jail
where they are housed, the Bang Kwang or "Bangkok Hilton", has now
become so notorious that visiting a detained Brit has been added to the
list of things to do for backpackers in the area. In a recent book
called Guns, Girls, Gambling, Ganja, three Thai academics from
Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok wrote that Thailand has acquired
an international reputation as a country where illegal businesses can
flourish because of poor law enforcement. This is bad for Thailand's
international reputation. It is, however, good for a Brit on the
run.
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