The Grey Man

by John Curtis

  ‘Maybe I drive the rest of the way, yes?’ Sila said. I had to laugh. Pissed, and on a motorcycle with no brakes and now very wonky steering, Sila was still a better rider than me.

  Back in Australia, in September, Russell drew up an employment contract and a statement of duties for Panom, our only paid employee. We were happy at first to give Panom a lot of autonomy – virtual free rein with just a bit of guidance from us.

  For a while things went well. Panom was very effective at catching bad guys, but therein also lay the problem. Panom and his buddy ‘The Major’ seemed far more interested in busting foreign paedophiles than in rescuing underage kids.

  There's a term in the military known as ‘mission creep’: an army goes into an operation with a set mission, but as things develop and change on the ground, so too does the mission and it expands to cover a whole range of activities – and not always in a good way. There is a risk that a force can be diverted from its primary goal, perhaps because of difficulties on the ground, or because a different course of action seems more appealing or more achievable. That's what began to happen with Panom.

  I hate the way paedophiles destroy the lives of their victims through their actions, but I did not go to Thailand in the first place to catch sex tourists or local child abusers. Sure, through the course of my work I've been able to gather a lot of intelligence on paedophiles, and so too have other Grey Man operatives. We pass this information on to the authorities and, if they need us to, we sometimes help out with identification and surveillance of suspects. Sometimes, as with the British man Davenport, it's easier for another westerner to get close to a foreign paedophile and track them than it is for the police to do so. However, I had not set up a vigilante organisation with a mission to bust foreign sex offenders. I also knew from my time in so many brothels that the main abusers of children are the locals. While foreign paedophiles are significant, they still make up less than 25 per cent of the demand.

  Over time, however, Panom and the Major seemed to devote a disproportionate amount of their attention to tracking and arresting paedophiles. It was frustrating, but understandable on one level. There was much more kudos to be gained in the Thai media by bagging a westerner than rescuing an underage Thai girl. The former was almost guaranteed front-page news, while the latter would be lucky to rate any media coverage at all. I wasn't interested in column centimetres in a Thai newspaper, but the Major was and so too, I suspected, was Panom. One of our people reported to us that they seemed to be competing with each other for the front page.

  Another complaint I had about Panom was that it was often hard to get information out of him and he jealously guarded his contacts and his information. He would email me reports telling me he had met with a policeman, but when I asked for the name and contact details of that cop, he would stonewall me. I guess he'd been burned by IJM, but I worked hard to build his trust and to assure him that The Grey Man was here for the long haul and that it would be better for us all to share what information and intelligence we uncovered. I think I was too reasonable. After all, he worked for us and he was gathering the information and meeting the contacts on our time.

  Still, there were rescues, and Panom did a good job recruiting other Thais to work for The Grey Man. Perhaps it was our fault for giving Panom too much leeway, I thought. I'd known all along he was a direct-action kind of guy who preferred kicking in doors to quietly spiriting kids to freedom.

  Panom did do a good job busting a lady-boy pimp who was getting girls into prostitution by lending them money and then charging extortionate interest rates so that they sank deeper and deeper into debt. The pimp was a bad bastard who beat his girls and Panom and the Major brought him down, which was great. I kept on at Panom, though, about our core business of rescuing trafficked kids.

  ‘I could rescue a hundred trafficked women for you if you want,’ he said.

  We had a problem with definitions, it seemed. Panom, perhaps influenced by his time with IJM, would have been happy busting into brothels, alongside the cops, and shutting them down. His view was that many of the women working in the sex industry would have been trafficked at some point in their lives. He thought we should be getting them out, rather than focusing on underage kids. As I've mentioned, The Grey Man isn't anti-prostitution per se, and I countered that it was not our business to be ‘freeing’ women of legal age. From what I'd learned, if they had worked as sex workers for a long time they might not want to give up the business or be capable of walking away. I did not want us to be the type of organisation like IJM that kicked working girls out of their premises and left them with no source of income and no possessions, especially knowing that many if not most of them would simply drift back into the business. We were not raising money in Australia to shut down the Thai sex industry.

  I met with Empower, the Thai-based sex workers' support group, to discuss the best way to deal with the problem. They were very helpful and their main spokesperson in Chiang Mai, an Australian named Liz, was very knowledgeable and a real character. She told me how sex workers' advocate organisations like hers – who go into the brothels, distribute condoms, provide health education and teach girls English – could not get any funding from the US State Department because it had a policy of not helping organisations that supported sex workers. The hypocrisy of the right-wing religious element in the US never ceased to amuse me.

  SEVEN

  Armed and Dangerous

  Having Panom on the ground, along with his mate the Major, gave us some interesting insights into how law and order was enforced in Thailand.

  As I've mentioned, to outsiders the police in Thailand can appear corrupt, and to a certain extent they are. The Major explained to me, however, that it wasn't just about cops lining their own pockets. The Thai police are notoriously under-resourced and will sometimes be expected to pay their own expenses, such as transport and accommodation if they have to pursue a case outside their normal jurisdiction. If they want to be armed with something more modern than an old-fashioned six-shot revolver, they even have to buy their own pistols.

  The Grey Man entered this unusual system as a force for good. We would uncover leads and pursue them to the point that we needed the police to get involved, but often we would face a situation where the local police did not have the money to see an operation through to its conclusion. We found ourselves paying transport and accommodation and meals for police, just to get them to where they were needed. Typically, we weren't talking about a lot of money – maybe A$120 to see the successful arrest of a trafficker and the freedom of a couple of kids. To my mind it was money well spent, as the operation would not have happened otherwise. It wasn't a perfect situation, but it worked.

  We occupy an unusual place in the Thai justice and social systems. We're involved in investigations and rescues, but we're not police. We're involved in development and preventative programs in the hill tribe villages, but we're not a developmental NGO. We place rescued kids in what we believe are the best and most appropriate shelters, but we're not a charity supporting homeless kids. Just as we like to operate in the shadows, we inhabit a shadow zone between a number of quite distinct jurisdictions and, because of that position, we can also act as a link between organisations that are often distrustful of each other, and sometimes in outright conflict.

  Our role is reflected in the makeup of our volunteers. We have the ex-police and former Special Forces guys who are much more at home working with law enforcement officers in the countries we operate in, and we have other excellent operators whose interest lies more in the development and prevention programs in the villages. As such, our people can easily cross the line between police and aid agency – a line that serves as an unbridgeable gulf for many of the players in Thailand.

  I'd learned from IJM's experience that if you spend all your time pissing off the authorities you'll soon be forced out of the country. We heard from a highly placed source that IJM had embarrassed Thailand on the international stage by speaking
out against a proposal by the US State Department to recognise the country's efforts at fighting trafficking by moving them up a peg on the ranking of countries around the world. IJM flexed its political muscle back home in America and wrote to the State Department objecting to this move, saying Thailand had not done enough. I personally disagreed with IJM on this, because as well as the problem of child prostitution and trafficking moving underground I also believed it had diminished a bit during my time in the country. The Thai government and police were trying to fight the problem on many levels, but they were under-resourced.

  IJM also set itself up as a target by making it known that it was keeping files on corrupt police officers. Like I've said, it was hard to know where corruption started and stopped in the police. For my part, if the police aren't protecting paedophiles and traffickers, or brothels that keep underage sex slaves, then I can work with them. IJM was mostly made up of lawyers – not traditionally the best friends of cops – and to make matters worse several IJM people had told me that they believed God's law overrode the law of the land.

  Whenever IJM conducted an operation, they milked it for all it was worth in the media, which is fair enough for them, but this, too, would have pissed off the Thai police and other authorities, who were all striving to be seen to be doing their jobs. We didn't chase local media coverage because we didn't want or need it, but IJM was grabbing column space and airtime that the police believed belonged to them. Finally, to top it all off, IJM was American; in answer to my question about how IJM worked with the Thais, local people would simply say to me, ‘They are American’, and smile.

  I have no problems with Americans – in fact we have had some very good American operatives – but I think Australians, perhaps because we come from a country small in population, tend to be more respectful of local traditions; we, too, jealously guard our own identity and culture. I think the Aussie approach is much more about working with the locals rather than telling them what to do.

  We'd been operating as a charity for about a year and had rescued about forty girls in that time when Sompop came to us with some information about a trafficker which would lead to an operation that showed just how closely we were working with the Thai police, how frustrating this could be, and, potentially, how dangerous our work could be.

  In March 2009, Sompop contacted Panom and told him that one of the rescued girls at his DEPDC refuge, who had been trafficked into Thailand from Laos to work as a sex worker, had been contacted covertly by the man who had brought her into the country.

  According to the girl, the trafficker was now offering to take her back to her family in Laos, presumably for a price. It was an odd story, but I supposed if a person had low enough morals to bring a girl into a country against her will he wouldn't be averse to making money by taking her home again. The other, more likely scenario was that he just wanted the girl to go with him so he could feed her back into the underworld.

  Sompop asked us if we would be interested in setting up a sting to catch the trafficker. Russell and I discussed it and I told Panom to get on to it. Panom and I had our differences of opinion, but we were both excited by the prospect of helping the police put away a guy who was moving girls illegally across borders. According to the girl in Sompop's care, the trafficker in question, who I will refer to simply as Chet, was moving about a hundred underage girls a year into Thailand.

  The Grey Man wanted to set up a sting at the border crossing at Chiang Khong when Chet next crossed the Mekong River from Laos. Panom had to go to Bangkok to discuss the case with the police because it cut across a number of organisational and physical jurisdictions. The girl's case had previously been handled by the Thai Crimes against Women and Children Division (CWD), but we wanted the sting to be run by the cops we knew and worked with, including Panom's man, the Major. However, due to jurisdictional issues, we weren't able to do this.

  Panom arrived at CWD's offices and met with the deputy commander, a colonel. The colonel told Panom that he could not have arrest warrants drawn up within eight days – when the trafficker was next expected to be in Thailand – and that we should consider postponing the case. I'd learned in my time in Thailand that an operation was more likely to be mounted if it was hung on a warrant, which required knowing the name and details of the trafficker. It was a maddening piece of bureaucracy that had stymied operations in the past. Panom pleaded our case and was told to wait. After several hours a female police lieutenant arrived at the offices and said that she would try to contact the captain who was the original case officer and see if he could supply all the details on the trafficker, as this might expedite a warrant. After several phone calls were made it turned out the captain was not at work that day, and Panom was told to come back the next day. I felt for the guy, and could sense his frustration in the daily report he emailed to me.

  Panom's discussions with the lieutenant and the colonel highlighted another maddening loophole. If Sompop was involved in handing the girl back to the trafficker, even as part of a sting, he could also be liable for prosecution for trafficking. It seemed crazy.

  Because of the requirement for a warrant we missed the deadline to mount an operation at the time the trafficker had proposed picking up the girl. However, we decided to take matters into our own hands, with some help from Sompop. The girl had given Sompop the trafficker's mobile phone number and Sompop called him. Sompop told the man that he would return the girl to him, but he wouldn't be able to get her to him on the initial day he had proposed. Sompop added that he knew some men who wanted to buy young girls from Laos, and asked the trafficker if he could bring some with him when he came to collect the girl. The trafficker agreed to meet the ‘buyers’, and Sompop arranged for Panom and one of his Thai volunteers, Mee, posing as pimps, to meet the smuggler. Mee was someone Panom knew and vouched for, a film school graduate with a lust for adventure.

  Panom and Mee travelled to Chiang Khong, where they met the lead trafficker, Chet, and his boat crew at the Luang Temple Port. Two of the guys stayed on the boat during the meeting, and Panom noticed that both of them kept one hand near their hip, as though they were ready to reach for guns. Negotiations began and the smuggler agreed to supply Panom with four underage girls from Laos.

  With this kind of hard intel – about girls being brought into the country, as well as one who was supposedly making the trip back to Laos – the police in Bangkok were galvanised into action. The Grey Man needed to fly up a legal team to the border to get the paperwork squared away in record time, and we also needed to organise for an armed police team to be present because it was clear the bad guys would be carrying weapons. All this required money, to cover transport and accommodation expenses, and as usual The Grey Man was asked to foot the bill. We considered it money well spent, though I cautioned Panom to keep an eye on the costs.

  The legal team and the armed police were in place and ready to go when Sompop received a call from Chet telling him he would have to cancel the pickup of the girl. All the ring-ins from Bangkok had to return to the capital and we were left with a bill for about $3000 in hotel, car hire, airfares and meal expenses. I was pissed off about the wasted money, and even more so when I picked apart the expenses and found that Panom had booked the senior police and prosecutors into expensive hotels. I'd told him to look for decent, clean budget places but he'd ignored that direction and instead gone for the nicest places in town in order to impress his high-ranking police buddies. I didn't blame the police, but I questioned Panom's loyalty, whether it was to us or whether he was trying to ingratiate himself with the police.

  A couple of weeks later Chet contacted Sompop again and told him he was coming back on 18 March. Sompop told him he would have the girl ready for pickup, and that he would contact the ‘buyers’ – Panom and Mee – and have them ready to receive the trafficked girls.

  The meeting was again arranged to take place at Luang Temple Port at Chiang Khong. With the benefit of extra time, the CWD and Grey Man volunteers mounted
surveillance on the port, and followed up leads on two women, Ya Peng and Daeng, who were believed to be working with Chet. Sompop's girl and some other girls who had been trafficked by Chet had identified the women as the local contacts in the smuggling ring. The new plan called for an even bigger operation than the first, with the police split into two teams – one to pick up Chet when he landed, and the other to raid the house in Pharn where the female members of the smuggling ring lived.

  Because the traffickers were suspected of being armed, I authorised our people to carry weapons as long as they had police permission. The police agreed. Panom had been a champion pistol shot, so I was confident he could handle himself. He would take the lead among our people, with Mee and another Thai Grey Man volunteer in support.

  All the police units were in place by eight in the morning and at 10.10 am Panom contacted the police colonel in charge to advise he could see, through his binoculars, Chet's boat leaving the Laotian side of the river, heading for Luang Temple Port. Chet landed at what passed for a beach and strode towards Panom. The word was given for the police to move and they homed in on the head trafficker. One of Chet's accomplices was between his boss and the boat and he made a run for it just as the lead policeman was drawing his weapon to arrest the boss. Panom, who was closer than any of the cops, took off after the crewman. He caught the guy, grabbed him and put him down on the ground.

  At the same time, a raid was launched on the house occupied by the women, Ya Peng and Daeng. In the house, the police found a fifteen-year-old Laotian girl who claimed she was there of her own volition, although she had no passport and admitted to entering the country illegally. With the female smugglers present, it was thought the girl was too scared to admit she had been forcibly trafficked.

  In the boat at Luang Temple Port, Panom, Mee and the police team found four frightened Laotian girls in their early teens – Chet's miserable cargo, destined for life in a Thai brothel where they would be traded to local and western paedophiles. The operation was a success, and it subsequently emerged that as well as trafficking girls for sex, the people-smuggling ring was also bringing in girls to work as cheap underage labour at a clothing factory sweatshop run by a relative of one of the two women the police had arrested. The early intel had been close to being right, but the revised number of kids trafficked per year by the group was a hundred and twenty.