by Jim Algie
These were all warm-ups for my biggest test thus far: committing my first international felony. In the life of a criminal this is akin to losing your virginity.
I checked the flight times on the board, half hoping mine had been cancelled or delayed. No such luck, it was right on schedule. I could still ditch the bag and the fake passport and retreat, but from somewhere in the past James Strate said, “Don’t chicken out, man. Whatever you do, don’t chicken out.”
I looked around to see where Mohammad and the customer were. Gone. Disappeared into the clumps of travellers pushing trolleys and pulling suitcases on wheels, hoisting backpacks, giving goodbye kisses and farewell hugs. At least the airport was busy. While I was grateful for the crowds and the anonymity they provided, the human camouflage also made it more difficult to spot all the airport authorities and, we assumed, plainclothes cops sauntering past, pretending they were tourists, or hidden away in a security room with a bank of monitors hooked up to hundreds of CCTV cameras.
I was running a fever of paranoia, spouting sweat from my armpits and my skin felt too tight for my face. Second by second, however, the adrenaline was wearing off and mutating into a deep sense of fear. The fear of arrest, interrogations, a trial and prison sentence, and having to explaining all that to my mom. “Well, I guess it started off innocently enough. James and I were curious about whether God exists…”
Exhausted and yawning, in the line up for the flight to Tokyo, I ran over the details of a passport with my photo in it and another man’s identity. Bill Davis from Green Bay, Milwaukee. Born February 12, 1969. Passport issued in Bangkok in ‘91. Tourist visa. I checked the stamp again. Fine. No overstay.
The passport looked okay too. Hard to tell if it was a fake or stolen or whether a broke backpacker had pawned it off for some fast baht. The sign in the alley outside the guesthouse where we lived at the top of Khaosan Road read: “We buy anything, dodgy or not.” They also sold fake university degrees, fake international press passes, and fake driver’s licenses supposedly issued by the United Nations.
Waiting to check in, the biggest hurdle were the airline employees – young Asian women with the same perfunctory smiles and airs of brusque congeniality, always asking the same questions. Is this your bag? Did you pack it yourself? Why are you going to Tokyo? How long are you staying there?
Their concern was understandable. If one of our “customers” made it through to Japan and was then stopped by customs and sent back to Thailand, the airline was fined a substantial sum of money.
The ringleader of our gang said he had an “inside man” in Thai customs and immigrations who would help us out if we got stopped or arrested, but was he telling the truth? That was the question I put to Mick, another resident in the Ploy Guesthouse and my partner in crime, a young Brit whose forearms were inked with two tattoos of the red devils logo of the Manchester United football club. Mick said, “Mohammad’s a petty crim who thinks he’s a godfather. Don’t trust ‘im with the steam off your piss, mate. Not enough d’s in dodgy to describe how dodgy that cunt is, d’ya know what I mean?”
The way he threw the c-word around all the time made me cringe. Where I come from that’s only hurled as the prelude to a fight.
From time to time, and this was the worrying part, the authorities would pull people out of the line up to check their bags. Before a run, we were not allowed to examine the contents of those suitcases. Mohammad said he’d already checked them. All the customers, he reassured us, were good Muslims who did not drink or do drugs. “It is very safe, my friend,” he said with a smile that, because I’d never known anyone from Bangladesh, was impossible to gauge for either sincerity or smarminess. My worst fear was that one of the “customers” had decided to take a kilo of heroin with him and I was left holding the bag.
God, this line up was taking forever. Typical. Some Asian family had been on a shopping holiday to Thailand and were now trying to check in a dozen suitcases without paying anything extra.
As soon as I handed over the passport and ticket, I made a point of distracting the woman behind the counter by smiling and asking, “Excuse me, but is the flight on time today?” to make sure she didn’t look over the passport too closely. She nodded. “Oh, that’s good. Can I have a window seat, please?”
Excellent. She barely glanced at the photo page. The only question she asked was about my luggage. “No, no check-in bags today.” I flashed her another smile and made deliberate eye contact to allay any of her suspicions, even though my stomach was aflutter and my button-down shirt was wallpapered to my back with sweat. “Just one carry-on bag, thanks.”
Finally she put the boarding pass on the counter, circling the gate and the boarding time with a pen. No need to listen to that spiel; I was not the one who would be boarding the flight to Tokyo.
I thanked her and made a beeline for the chrome gates. The last leg was always the most excruciating part. It was hard to saunter casually when some instinct for self-preservation kept pushing me from behind, wanting to make me break into a trot, ditch the bag, lose the passport, and jump into a getaway cab.
To the right led to Passport Control. Off to the left was an escalator that ran up to a coffee shop, a restaurant and a bathroom, which was where we did the switch. In the last stall, exactly according to the plan, stood Mohammad and the customer, a light-skinned Afghani no more than thirty. I handed him the duffel bag, gave the passport to Mohammad and I was gone, slipping back into the teeming crowd, coasting along on that last surge of adrenaline, and already counting the money in my head—almost three hundred dollars American for less than three hours of nerve-shredding “work”—before fending off the taxi touts to get a metered ride back to Khaosan Road.
At the end of every airport run, I always thought about James spitting on that church door and the two of us bolting down the street wide-eyed with panic for fear of any Biblical reprisals of hellfire and brimstone, like our Sunday school teacher had warned us. The setting had changed, and human trafficking was far beyond shoplifting and vandalism, but so many of the old scenes and friends I’d once known kept repeating in my head, like an endless film loop, I wasn’t really sure whether I’d changed or not—I still looked the same, my voice sounded pretty much the same—because nobody moves halfway around the world to take up a fly-by-night “job” in the criminal underworld of Bangkok so they can be the same old bore they used to be.
In the end, terminal diseases and accidents excepting, I think most people actually die of boredom. Bored of the world and bored of themselves. That’s not how I want to go: trapped in a hometown where an entire life is lived within a boring ten-kilometer radius.
PLOY GUESTHOUSE where Mick and I stayed was at the top of Khaosan Road, across the street from a police station adjacent to a Buddhist temple named after a victorious war against the Burmese. Few of the expats, and even fewer of the travelers staying around Southeast Asia’s main drag for backpackers, realized that this was the biggest port of call and safe house for international criminals in the region from the late eighties to the mid-nineties. For anyone who needed to lay low it made a good hideout, because it was easy to blend in with all the travellers. None of the guesthouses required a passport to check in, so anyone could register with a fake name. Rooms went for around three bucks American per night. And the local cops, according to Mick and Mohammad, were so busy doing their own deals and scams that they didn’t have any time left to scoop up the smaller fish in a dragnet. Every few months they’d round up nine or ten Africans and Iranians who had overstayed their visas, hold a press conference to show them off and then deport them. But they rarely busted any Caucasians.
After I’d done seven or eight boarding-pass runs and proven myself, Mick began telling me about some of his other cronies on the strip and in our guesthouse, peopled with a floating population of every criminal element. Nobody, except the small-time drug dealers, advertised their “wares” and “business interests,” but secrecy was impossible in such a small and
stifling world. At one time or another, Mick had worked every crime racket there was. “I’m a bit of an outlaw, me. So are these other gits.” According to him, Joe, the Irish guy with the bad teeth, was stealing passports from backpackers and fencing them; Taro and a couple of his Japanese friends were buying arms from the Thai military and reselling them to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka; Beyruce, who was either Iraqi, Iranian or possibly Moroccan, though he told everybody, “I come from the moon,” was forging credit cards; Hans had set up a business to launder drug money from Cambodia; a huge Hawaiian man nicknamed “Tiny” was working an insurance scam; Nigel was running Thai prostitutes to Japan; and Omar, the friendly Sudanese guy staying next to me, who claimed to be in IT, was part of a heroin-trafficking network.
Whenever any of the backpackers in the guesthouse asked us what we did, I followed Mick’s lead and said, “Import export,” which was more or less true. We imported men from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan and, for a considerable sum of money (only Mohammad knew how much), exported them to Japan where they would work illegally in factories. Because most of them could not speak English, Mick and I, and a constantly rotating crew of other wastrels and travellers who’d run out of money, had to get their boarding passes for them.
The Customs and Immigrations Department ran a low-tech operation in those days. They had no databases. One drug dealer in our guesthouse, who had been deported with a black mark in his passport, glued two of the pages together and came back into the country a week later at a small border crossing with Cambodia.
The boarding-pass scam would not have withstood high-tech scrutiny. How it worked was that we had the same name as the customer, even though the passports were from two different countries. Once we got the boarding pass and handed it to them, they would then board the flight. Mohammad never said how many of the passports we used were fakes. It was hard to tell because they looked like dead-ringers for the real McCoy. In criminal circles, Bangkok used to be referred to as the “false documents capital of the world.”
In spite of all the fast-food franchises, trendy cafes and boutique hotels that have moved in over the last decade, Khaosan remains a ribbon of road knotted with cheap restaurants, travel agents, street-side bars and cafes, silverware wholesalers and vendors selling plastic Buddhas, wooden dragons, Chang and Singha Beer T-shirts, velcro-strap sandals, and gaudy oil paintings of water buffalos in rice paddies and old men in conical hats smoking opium pipes: a cultural fantasia for backpackers who did not know the difference.
Back then it was almost impossible to walk the length of the street at night without hearing either The Eagles or CCR, as whatever passed for Western culture in Bangkok at that time was still a distant echo of the commotion caused by American GIs on R ‘n’ R during the Vietnam War. The music competed with the blare of Hollywood action movies playing in the restaurant-bars of the guest-houses. Each of them had a blackboard outside with the names and times of the films playing that night. Most of the backpackers were either dreadlocked punks or old hippies as hairy as Jesus, and their new disciples wearing fishermen’s trousers and tie-dyed shirts. Other than the vendors, waitresses, receptionists, and two deaf mute hookers who worked out of the Hello Bar and Guesthouse (long since replaced by a Boots pharmacy and a boutique hotel), no respectable Thais ever came anywhere near Khaosan Road. In the local news it was routinely described as a slum, or salum khaosan, and the scruffy backpackers mocked as “bird shit foreigners” because they looked like crap and fell out of the sky.
Most nights we met at the street-side bar with plastic stools in front of the Happy Home Guesthouse (“the Miserable Hovel is more like it,” said Mick), towards the end of the strip by the silverware wholesalers. Mohammad always sat at the head of the table. Mick served as his deputy. I mostly just listened and took notes in my head. Whatever new recruits Mohammad had rounded up asked the same questions over and over again. What happens if I get caught? Will I go to jail? Will I get blacklisted from Thailand?
Looking like a father at the head of the table, Mohammad, with a reassuring smile on his densely bearded faced, would repeat the same spiel to every newcomer. He repeated it so many times that I was starting to believe him. “It is very safe, my friend. I have my contacts inside Thai Customs and Immigration. It is a well-known fact, quite beyond dispute, that this is the most corrupt department in the whole Thai government. That makes it very easy for my workers. If I may quote the right honorable John F. Kennedy, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Mohammad smiled again. “My workers are not having any problems.”
“Piss off. I’m not your worker,” said Mick, “and JFK was a womanising scumbag. That arsehole killed Marilyn Monroe.”
Oh no, I thought, here goes Mick on another one of his conspiracy-theory tirades. The last one he told me about concerned a group of Jewish bankers conspiring to take over the world’s financial system. That, at least, was marginally more credible than any of his alien invasion stories.
Mohammad smiled again. “I admire Mick’s feistiness and his opinionated nature, but I fear he is having anger management issues again.”
Mick made a masturbatory gesture. He glanced at me and the new recruit, “What’s he bangin’ on about?” as I waved off a grinning tout selling lighters emblazoned with bare-breasted white women.
Mohammad smiled and ordered another round of beers for the three of us, as well as a banana shake for his tee-totalling self. The waitress, who looked like she was about fourteen but was probably nineteen or twenty, would not even look at him. In her eyes, this hairy, dark-skinned man was beneath contempt. She left his drink on my side of the table. The racist treatment that he was constantly dealt out in Thailand, and all over Southeast Asia, did not seem to bother Mohammad. He was too tough for that. In our runs to the airport, and lulls in the conversation during our almost nightly “business meetings” in front of the guesthouse, watching cockroaches skitter past our sandals and rats forage amongst the piles of garbage waiting to be picked up, he would talk a little about his past. “I am the only male in a family of ten sisters. My father passed away many years ago, so I am supporting the whole family. Grow up amongst eleven women and you soon learn the gift of superhuman patience and tolerance, my friend.” As he grinned Mohammad’s teeth shone a brilliant white against the dark beard. “You also get to use the bathroom about once every six months.”
The only other thing I knew about him was that he used to be the headmaster of a private boys school in Dhaka, or so he claimed, which perhaps explained the overly formal English he spoke and why he treated Mick like an unruly pupil who showed enough promise to be tolerated. Besides the “meetings” and airport runs, the only other time we saw him was on Fridays when, all dressed in white, he went to pray at the mosque near Khaosan Road. His rule was that no customers could fly in or depart on the holiest day for Muslims.
Otherwise, Mohammad drifted through our lives like a phantom, showing up at odd hours. Whether it was midnight or daybreak, he gave us the same smile and greeting, “Good morning, my friend.” We didn’t know where he lived. We didn’t have his phone number. We didn’t even know his surname or if in fact Mohammad was his real name.
When Mohammad talked about our “business meetings” and “my customers” and “my workers,” he was only being realistic; friendship really didn’t enter into it. It was the same shady story with most of the other smugglers, swindlers and scammers we knew on and around Khaosan Road. Everyone was using different aliases and nobody got very close, because it was too dangerous. We all knew the deal. At some point, they might inform on us or we’d inform on them.
On that night, Mick had brought a new mate of his down to see if he could get some work. Another Brit of Mick’s age (early thirties), Martin had a shaved head, a pink polo shirt with the collar rolled up and a beer keg for a torso. He introduced himself to me by holding up an enormous fist (all the knuckles crooked and scarred) in front of his face and sniffing it. “Smells like dead women, in
nit?” He turned to Mick, looking for his approval and only laughed after Mick did. I knew then that I wouldn’t have to worry about Martin trying to usurp my role as the third in command, because he was a follower not a leader, a corporal who would never be a commanding officer. To keep the new recruit in his place, I said, “That’s strange, ‘cause I thought your fist would smell like your boyfriend’s bum.”
Mick laughed that donkey’s bray of his and, just as I’d predicted, Martin parroted him. In their love of “dick contests” these guys were monotonously predictable.
Martin gestured with his shoulder in my direction. “For a Yank he’s all right.”
“Yves is one of the colonials from Canada,” said Mick.
“No, I’m from Quebec, which is a different country, culture, language, etcetera.”
Mick looked at Martin, expressing in a mere glance the solidarity of gang members and football hooligans, too weak to stand on their own and always ready to gang up on an outsider. “Don’t ask ‘im about the Frogs or he gets well uppity,” said Mick. “All those poncy snobs ever produced was a few smelly cheeses and some birds with big noses and smelly twats.”
Martin said, “Too right.”
None of their insults meant anything to me, because my name wasn’t Yves and I didn’t come from Quebec.
Actually, I didn’t care very much for Mick and I liked Martin, his new protégé, even less. At the same time, I couldn’t help but envy them and how comfortable they looked with their machismo, how brazenly they flirted with a table of young female travellers sitting next to us, how they walked around flaunting their muscles in beach shorts and singlets sporting the logos of Thai beers, and how few anxieties ever furrowed their foreheads or snuck into their voices.
Next to them, with my long unruly black hair sticking up at all angles like the ruins of a Gothic cathedral, my eyes the color of rain-water, and almost always dressed in black jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt, I must have cut an absurdly melancholic figure. But appearances are revealing.