by John Curtis
John Curtis was born in Wollongong, New South Wales, and is a former Australian Army commando and officer. He is also an expert in human survival and a graduate of ‘The Tracker’ school in the United States. He has been a guest lecturer at the Woodlore school in the United Kingdom, the Ragnarok Primitive Skills Gathering in Sweden, the RAAF Combat Survival Wing, Townsville, and has taught survival to the military from fourteen countries. He has worked for television as a consultant to Discovery Channel and reality TV programs. In 2004 he went to Thailand on a promise to his daughter to rescue children from brothels and, from that, founded The Grey Man organisation in 2008. He lives in Brisbane with his beautiful Japanese wife and his lovely daughter.
THE
GREY MAN
JOHN CURTIS
with Tony Park
First published 2011 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Copyright © John Curtis 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Curtis, John Alex.
The grey man / John Curtis, with Tony Park
9781742610504 (pbk.)
Curtis, John Alex.
The Grey Man (Organisation).
Human trafficking-Asia-Prevention.
Child trafficking-Asia-Prevention.
Child slaves-Asia-Prevention.
Park, Tony, 1964–
364.137092
Typeset in 13/16 pt Granjon by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane
Printed by McPherson's Printing Group
Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
These electronic editions published in 2011 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
Copyright © John Curtis 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Curtis, John Alex
The grey man / John Curtis, with Tony Park
364.137092
Adobe eReader format 978-1-74262-758-8
EPub format 978-1-74262-760-1
Online format 978-1-74262-757-1
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Typeset in 13/16 pt Granjon by Post pre-press group, Brisbane
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To my darling daughter
and my wonderful, supportive wife, Misao
To all the Grey Men and Women
You are special people
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This book is a personal account of my experiences in setting up The Grey Man organisation. It is as I remember it and the opinions expressed are entirely my own. Some names, locations and minor details of people have been changed to disguise their identities.
CONTENTS
Prologue Liberation
One Aimless
Two Epiphany
Three Thailand
Four The Grey Man
Five Paying the Boatman
Six A Life of its Own
Seven Armed and Dangerous
Eight Children's Stories
Nine A Japanese Girl and a Pivotal Radio Interview
Ten Back to Thailand, Hunting Paedophiles
Eleven Lights, Cameras – Not Much Action
Twelve Action Always Brings Opposition
Thirteen Cambodia: From Triumph to Tragedy
Fourteen The Future
Acknowledgements
Picture Section
PROLOGUE
Liberation
Chiang Mai, Thailand, December 2004
It was cool inside the nondescript, drab-looking building, a relief after the oppressive heat of the day outside. The place was on a backstreet, away from the loud go-go bars around Thapae Gate or the mainstream brothels in Santi Tam. There were no flashing neon signs, no bar girls hawking sex and themselves and luring gullible western tourists. This was a place of business, pure and simple. Illegal business.
I passed through the front door, stepping over a metal lip directly into a courtyard where three working girls sat eating noodles. They paused and looked at me, clearly bored but momentarily feigning interest, as Tam, my tuk tuk driver and go-between, spoke to the pimp. When Tam told the middle-aged Thai that I was looking for a young girl – very young – the women around the table went studiously back to their noodles.
The pimp nodded. I followed him to another part of the house, down a hallway smelling of mildew not quite suppressed by harsh disinfectant. A door was opened to a kind of anteroom, which in turn led on to the bedroom. Inside was a single bed, and in the corner a simple bedside table. I was told to sit in the anteroom and wait while Tam took his leave and the pimp went off to fetch the girl.
When the pimp returned a few minutes later, he ushered the girl into the room ahead of him. She wore bright red lipstick and a touch of blue eye shadow but she was only a child. She looked like a little girl who'd been experimenting with her mother's or older sister's makeup, trying to make herself look more mature. Ironic, I thought, as her youth was her greatest selling feature, and the reason for her value to the man behind her.
I tried to speak to the girl and found out she spoke virtually no English, and my Thai was fairly basic. Her name was Kem and the pimp had told me she belonged to the Shan hill tribe, from the Thai-Burma border areas.
‘How old are you?’ I asked her.
‘Si sip sam – thirteen,’ the pimp interjected.
I looked to Kem, and she nodded in confirmation.
I told the pimp I was happy with her and had him leave us together. Kem and I conversed in halting Thai for about half an hour.
‘I don't want to have sex with you – just talk. Understand?’
She shrugged and nodded.
I knew not to leap right in and try to get her out during our first meeting. I'd learned from my previous experience that Kem would probably be suspicious of me, and perhaps even dubious about the merits of running away. We sat in the anteroom and talked about our families. I told her about my daughter, Emma, and her life in Australia, where she would soon be starting school. I had already paid the pimp 800 baht (about A$30), but before I left I gave Kem another 200 baht for herself. I asked if I could see her again and she smiled and said yes.
I went to my Thai language teacher that evening and asked her to help me write out a series of q
uestions I would ask Kem when I next saw her. If she could read, this might make communication easier between us, or at least I'd be able to read out the questions slowly in Thai and hopefully make my intentions clearer to her. She couldn't read, so I had limited options.
A few days later, Tam took me back to the brothel, this time at night. A guy was sitting in the foyer who looked like an enforcer of some type. This was new. He wore black trousers and a white singlet and when he folded his heavily tattooed arms I could see hard ropes of muscle. I smiled at the pimp, who recognised me. I wanted him to get used to me as a regular visitor, as I didn't know how many times I would need to visit before Kem would agree to my plan.
Once in Kem's room I took out my list of questions and smoothed out the paper on the single bed. ‘Do you like it here?’ I asked her in Thai.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Mai chop – not like.’
‘Do you want to stay here?’
‘No.’
‘Are you allowed to leave here if you want, to go out in town?’
‘No.’
I asked for clarification, as best I could, of her last answer, to make sure she'd understood the question; she confirmed that her keepers did not let her out of the house at all. That was going to make things interesting.
‘Kem, I can take you away from here, if you want to go back to your village. Would you like that?’
‘Yes, I would,’ she said, though she showed no sense of relief or excitement. She seemed to view the proposition as a dream; perhaps she was already so jaded that she believed it would never come true.
As I mulled over how I might get Kem out of her drab prison we chatted in our broken Thai to use up the half hour I'd paid for. I asked her how she had ended up here, and though it was hard to get the full story it seemed she had initially been trafficked into Thailand from her village in Burma to work as a beggar.
This, I'd learned, was quite a common reason behind child trafficking, and was often the first stage in the slide towards prostitution and sexual exploitation. Burmese families, many of them desperately poor, would send their cute little kids to cross the border into Mae Sai in northern Thailand, where they would beg for money from comparatively rich Thais or foreign tourists, very few of whom visit politically isolated Burma. This begging is controlled by gangs and the children are expected to bring or send the money back to their families after the gangsters have taken their cut. In many cases the money is used to feed the parents' drug habits; addiction to ya ba – ‘mad medicine’, a mix of methamphetamines and caffeine – is quite common among the hill tribes.
To western ears it was hard to fathom how a parent could put a young, defenceless child at such risk, but Kem's story spoke both of the poverty in Burma – officially known as the Republic of the Union of Myanmar – and the ingrained sense of duty that children in this part of the world have to their parents.
The details of what had happened to Kem after leaving her village were sketchy because of our halting conversation, but it seemed a couple of guys had then trafficked Kem for a second time, from her ‘job’ as a beggar to her current hell in Chiang Mai. Perhaps a pimp had offered her untold riches, or maybe the promise of a job in a factory or working as a cleaner was all it had taken to lure her to the city. What was clear from our chat was that whether or not she had gone into the sex trade willingly, Kem now found herself trapped and wanted out.
Kem had been in the brothel for about four months, and since the pimp and bodyguard weren't letting her go outside,, I figured that she had not been there long enough to become desensitised. The longer girls stay in a brothel the less chance there is of keeping them out of prostitution after they're rescued; I felt with Kem that if I could get her out she would be very unlikely to allow herself to return to this life – but there were no guarantees.
I tried another tack. ‘Is there any way you can get out onto the streets by yourself? ‘
Kem shook her head. ‘The only time I go out, I must be with two of the other girls. They watch all the time.’
‘All right,’ I said, checking my watch. ‘I must go now. Come downstairs with me.’
She looked at me wide-eyed. ‘We go now?’ Her glance darted around the room and I knew what she was thinking.
‘No.’ I explained the first part of my plan to Kem as we walked back towards the courtyard. The pimp and the bouncer were eating noodles and at the sight of Kem the security man was on his feet, his hands curled in loose fists by his side.
‘It's okay,’ I said, ‘she's just saying goodbye.’
Kem stopped at the doorway and leaned against the frame. She smiled at me and waved and I waved back to her as I stepped out onto the street. My heart was racing and I was scared for her. I hated her having to spend even one more night in this place, but she had played her part perfectly.
Both times I'd visited the brothel I'd taken a small backpack with me. It had nothing in it except a bottle of water, but I wanted the men at the house to get used to me carrying it. So far they hadn't expressed any concern about it – and why would they? As far as they were concerned, I was just another sex tourist.
The next evening I returned to the brothel, though this time I had left Tam behind and come on a rented motorcycle. I parked the bike a short way down the street from the brothel as there was no room out front. I took my backpack inside, greeting the pimp and his tattooed enforcer, paid my money and walked towards Kem's room. I could almost feel their eyes on my back, and sense their sneers as they thought about the easy money they were making.
Once inside the room I unzipped my backpack and told Kem to get all her stuff and put it in the bag. She ferreted under her mattress and behind the bedside table to produce a pitiful but treasured haul: a postcard of elephants bathing in a river; a small shaggy toy bear, the kind of cheap toy you find in those machines where you use a crane to lift the prize; and a grimy envelope containing what I guessed was the little cash she'd been able to keep from the pimp's eyes. While young girls pressed into prostitution usually have very few possessions, what they do own means a lot to them. One of the problems that can arise when the police or certain non-government organisations (NGOs) conduct a door-kicking raid on a brothel is that if a girl is not allowed to go back to the house she will lose all her belongings, including any cash squirrelled away in a hiding place where the pimps wouldn't find it.
‘Ready?’ I asked Kem, once she had gathered up her treasures and stuffed them in the pack. She nodded. I sat on the bed and we made awkward small talk as the seconds and minutes ticked by painfully slowly on my watch. She didn't seem to be having second thoughts, which was good, but our allotted half hour seemed like it would never end. Finally, I checked my watch and with three minutes left of my time I stood up, took Kem's hand and gave it a squeeze. She squeezed back then let go, and followed me out of the room and down the hallway
The pimp and the bouncer were eating in the courtyard, as they had been last time, but this time they didn't bother to stand when they saw us and the pimp acknowledged me only with a nod. Kem took up her customary position at the front door, as if to wave goodbye.
Outside, I strode quickly down the street to my motorcycle. Throwing the pack into the front basket, I got on, kicked the bike to life, and raised the stand. I started to pull out into the street and the bike stalled. ‘Damn it.’
I kicked the starter again: once, twice, three times before it finally caught. I gunned the engine and brought the bike back down towards the brothel. I could see Kem still standing in the doorway. As I pulled up outside the place, she looked over her shoulder, then stepped over the metal lip at the entrance, ran to me and climbed onto the back of the bike.
I made sure she was on then glanced back at the house. ‘Shit!’
The tattooed guy's silhouette filled the door. He must have been concerned at the amount of time Kem had been lingering by the doorway waving to me, and had got up from his noodles to investigate. I found out later that Kem had seen him coming up behind her
and that was when she made the decision to run for it.
I gunned the bike and we shot off up the street. It ended in a T-junction after just a hundred and fifty metres or so and when I looked in my rear-view mirror I could see the bouncer was climbing onto a bike and starting it up.
‘Hang on!’ I yelled at Kem in English. I leaned into the corner and in spite of her lack of English she got the idea, wrapping her spindly arms tightly around me. I thought that if the guy caught up with us I'd tell him we were going to get some food and didn't understand she wasn't allowed to leave. It was lame, but I wasn't looking for a fight and I doubted they wanted an incident involving a farang, as the Thais call white western foreigners. Ignoring the hoots of other startled bike riders and cars, I dodged and weaved in and out of the traffic and revved the little motorcycle hard as I took a random turn and then another, desperately hoping I'd lost the tattooed man. I found myself in a kind of mall area that was for pedestrians only. People jumped out of my way as I pressed my horn button and I was dimly aware of yammering behind me as I shot into the dual carriageway traffic flow of Kad Suan Kaew Road, a major thoroughfare heading out of town.
The traffic lights turned red just as I approached a major intersection, so I gunned it again and raced through the stoplight. Fortunately, the other traffic hadn't quite started moving yet and I went into a wide U-turn without easing off much. The front wheel wobbled, Kem held on tighter, and I nearly lost it as I brought us around and started heading back up Kad Suan Kaew.
I looked across and saw the tattooed man on the other side of the road. He couldn't cross the traffic island between us, but he saw me all right. I swore again and flew in and out of the traffic. Damn it, I thought to myself, if I lose it here I'm going to kill this girl I've been trying to save! There had been no time to put a helmet on her.
If you watch lots of movies, you'll get the impression that all Special Forces soldiers are trained in everything from undercover work, counterintelligence and sophisticated electronic lock-picking to flying helicopters. In reality there was very little – if anything – in my military background to prepare me for the situation I now found myself in. I've ridden bikes most of my life, but I'm no speed demon and at that moment I was definitely on the edge of my comfort zone. My bike was pretty underpowered, but fortunately the bouncer's looked old as well. I was trying to get as much of a head start on him as I could before he managed to turn around at the lights and follow us.