The Grey Man

by John Curtis

  There was no call for any westerners to be involved in the undercover aspects of the operation, however I went to Chiang Khong, where the operation was being mounted from, to check on things before it was launched. I'd checked into a budget hotel that cost about 500 baht (A$20) a night, and then gone to find the place where Panom and the senior cops were staying. Again this turned out to be the most expensive hotel in town, and more than three times the cost of the place where I was staying. I was furious. It took me three months to raise the money for this operation only to see it used up in a few days and part of that was accommodation for the police. What added insult to injury was that I was using my own money to pay for my flights and hotel.

  Panom had ignored my earlier advice after the false start about keeping an eye on expenses. Rather than heed my words about having to account for every dollar donated to us by people in Australia, he'd gone ahead and booked a fancy hotel to impress the hierarchy. I told him I wanted to have words with him, but I wasn't about to pull the plug on the operation – as tempted as I was for a moment – after all the planning that had gone into it.

  I rang Panom and told him how angry I was about the situation. He told me he had to use that hotel because it was up-market enough that pimps couldn't hang around the lobby and check with the desk staff to see our people's passports. It sounded believable, but I didn't believe him. I thought it had more to do with impressing the police.

  That operation did end up costing a lot of money – around $7000. We had, however, helped bust a ring that over the years had trafficked several hundred children, so from that point of view it was money well spent.

  The Grey Man's involvement in the case didn't end with the dramatic events on the beach. The girls from the smugglers' boat had been taken to Sompop's shelter, but the accused women's relatives were passing messages to them promising to hurt – maybe even kill – them if they testified in court. As the investigating police had all headed back to Bangkok it was left to Panom to act as a self-appointed bodyguard to the girls during their trip to the capital to attend court. It was another example of how The Grey Man worked with the police, doing their job in some cases, and also of how for all his faults Panom's heart was certainly in the right place.

  For all of the effort Panom had put into getting the officials to Chiang Rai and buttering them up by putting them in swanky hotels, the operation didn't translate to good media coverage for him and the Major. Normally an operation of this size would have garnered significant media coverage, but our guys were pipped by another raid by the CWD and Australian Federal Police elsewhere in the country which netted two foreign paedophiles – an Australian and an Italian. This was front-page news in the Bangkok Post, the leading English-language newspaper in Thailand. Personally, I think that the disruption of the Laotian trafficking ring was a much bigger story, and that Panom and the police and prosecutors who'd come up from Bangkok deserved their moment of glory. We'd busted a syndicate that had trafficked hundreds – maybe thousands – of children, but the newspapers had focused on the arrest of the foreigners.

  I'd learned long ago that the vast majority of cases of abuse and exploitation of children were conducted by Thais rather than foreigners, but this was not the sort of news the media or the people of Thailand wanted to hear. It was preferable, it seemed, to blame foreigners for the terrible things that were happening to kids on a daily basis. It was funny to hear a major NGO in Australia claim that Australians were the biggest abusers of kids in Thailand. It got media coverage but from my experience it wasn't true.

  Frank Weicks had worked in child protection in the police in the US and he once told me that the average paedophile might abuse about forty kids in the course of his life. Others claim up to 250, but whichever figure you accept, taking those two foreigners who were arrested by the CWD and AFP out of the game had therefore probably saved a good number of Thai kids; still, it irked me, and Panom no doubt, that the media couldn't see the significance of breaking up a trafficking ring. The lack of coverage meant nothing to The Grey Man – I wouldn't have wanted us mentioned anyway – but it might have sent a message to traffickers and pimps that the police could mount operations against them, and not just their foreign customers.

  EIGHT

  Children's Stories

  At the heart of what we do, of course, are the children whose lives we hope to salvage. In truth, though, I try not to think too much about the girls we've rescued.

  If you spent too much time dwelling on how they ended up in the sex industry and what happened to them in the course of their enforced labour, you might go crazy and lose your faith in humanity. From the start, I didn't want to be involved in the ongoing care of rescued kids – not because I didn't care about them, but because I wanted to focus on what I thought I could achieve, and what I thought I'd be best at.

  It's important to understand that this is a complex problem we face. Nothing is cut and dried. Kids are trafficked in many different ways and places and for a wide range of reasons. The men who buy their services from the pimps and mamasans may be western paedophiles, Asian tourists, or local Thais. Some children are sold as cheap labour, and some of these kids may be sexually and physically abused by their employers.

  The one heartbreaking thing that underlies all of this is that in many parts of the world children are a commodity. They are bought, sold, traded and worked until they are of little or no value. When that happens, they are discarded. Here are two of their stories.

  Wei was born into an ethnic Chinese family living in Burma.

  Some of the Chinese communities who live in Burma and Thailand are the descendants of traders who came long ago, while others are the offspring of more recent migrants. A battalion of Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist soldiers found themselves in the Thai-Burma border area at the end of the Second World War and when the communists took over their country they elected to stay in Thailand. They started growing tea, and the community they formed, intermarrying with local girls, thrives to this day.

  Burma is beautiful but nearly destitute, and like most countries in south-east Asia it has a strong element of corruption. Ethnic minorities, including the hill tribes, are marginalised and shunned in Burma, as they have been until recent times in the more progressive Thailand. As I've described, Burmese children are sometimes sent across the border by their parents to beg for money. Other kids are sent to work in factories or shops in the expectation that they will send money home to their parents. If their parents know or care about the risks their children may face, they ignore them.

  At just eleven Wei was lured across the border into Thailand by a family friend who had established a relatively prosperous noodle shop in Chiang Mai. She may have been sad to leave her parents, but it's possible her sorrow was tinged with a glimmer of hope. In Thailand, unlike Burma, she had the opportunity to earn real money. She would be the dutiful daughter her parents had raised her to be, but perhaps she could put aside enough Thai baht to buy herself a few things as well – perhaps a much-prized mobile phone, jeans, or a nice pair of shoes.

  Wei came to our attention when Panom received a call from a contact in the Chiang Mai government multidisciplinary team, inviting him to attend a meeting with them, officers from the local police CWD detachment, and the Ping Jai shelter. At the meeting a child welfare worker explained that Wei went to school by day and worked in the noodle shop by night. That part of her story was not unusual. However, Wei's teacher had begun noticing changes in the girl's behaviour. Her grades had begun to slip and she seemed withdrawn and moody. The teacher had counselled her, gaining her trust, and Wei told the teacher that she had been repeatedly raped by her employer and guardian, Warrawat Myguntap.

  Such was the integration between The Grey Man and the police and other authorities that Panom was invited to sit in on the formal interview with Wei. The girl said Warrawat had first made sexual advances towards her three years earlier, not long after he'd brought her into Thailand in 2007.

  ‘I s
aid no to him, but he insisted,’ Wei told the interviewer.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He forced me. He raped me,’ Wei said. She told her interviewer she'd had enough and did not want to go back to her guardian's house. As well as raping her, he sometimes beat her.

  Panom and some child protection officers went to the noodle shop and told Warrawat that Wei would not be returning home or to work. They searched the man's house and took some pictures into custody. Because of the oddities of Thai law, the authorities needed a photo of Warrawat to help get a warrant issued for his arrest. They hadn't been able to seize one at his home, but a picture of him and Wei together was found at the girl's school. As with the Laos trafficking-gang case, we knew that going through the laborious process of getting a warrant taken out against Warrawat would make it more likely to happen, and increase the likelihood that an ultimate prosecution would be successful. I can only guess what was going through Panom's mind when he confronted this bastard.

  Panom went to Mae Ping police station in Chiang Mai to get the paperwork moving on the warrant. When he was there he discussed the case with a female police officer, Captain Omuran. We proposed that Wei be taken to the New Life refuge in Chiang Mai, as they had permission to look after kids who were illegal immigrants. We'd supported New Life in the past, including purchasing a motorcycle for their social worker to help her get out to the hill tribe villages.

  Once the warrant was issued, Panom accompanied the police back to Warrawat's place and was there for the arrest. Wei was eleven when she was first raped: just a child. Warrawat was charged with sexual penetration of a girl under the age of thirteen, and with assault. He was also charged with trafficking Wei.

  Wei's case was an interesting one from our point of view, and demonstrates one of the roles The Grey Man frequently fills in Thailand. Wei wasn't found or rescued by us, but she might not have been saved if we hadn't been there. Wei's teacher had alerted the authorities and they were on the case, but it was important to note that Panom, representing The Grey Man, was invited to the preliminary meeting to discuss the case.

  The Grey Man acts as a catalyst in Thailand. The reason Panom had been included in the enquiry was that there was an expectation that he would do a lot of the legwork to get the case moving. Panom was in on the search of the offender's premises, and it was The Grey Man who found a place for Wei to stay once it was confirmed she was an illegal. Without our contacts and facilitation she might have foundered in the system, and her guardian might have been able to escape the law.

  At the time of writing Wei is still doing well at the New Life centre, and is very happy. She is allowed to stay at the centre until she is eighteen, which is good, as she would be at risk if she was deported to Burma as a minor.

  I think the fact that we were invited to take part in the operation to save Wei and prosecute her guardian, and that we were able to oversee her placement into the right sort of care and support her showed what we could do right in Thailand.

  Peng's father had died and she was living with her sister and schoolteacher mother.

  With the loss of the father's income, Peng's mother could no longer afford to keep her in the good high school where she'd been studying and doing well. To further alleviate her financial burden, Peng's mother sent her to live with her grandmother, in an area where Peng would be able to attend a free school.

  Fourteen-year-old Peng didn't get on with her grandmother and hated her new school, so she ran away from home. She ended up crashing with a couple of older girls she knew, who were both seventeen. What Peng didn't know was that her friends, with their nice clothes, expensive mobile phones and fast lifestyles, were also part-time sex workers.

  Around the same time, myself and some other Grey Man operatives were working on bringing down a pimp who had promised to find us underage girls in Chiang Mai. I was coordinating the operation from Australia.

  The problem was that it looked like the pimp was more of a conman than a pedlar of child sex workers. On two occasions he'd promised to find and deliver underage kids to our hotels, but when he arrived the girls he brought were clearly of legal age. After we accused him of trying to scam us, he promised he would make good.

  I guess there is sometimes the risk that an operation such as ours might push a pimp or a petty criminal to cross the line into dealing with kids in order to satisfy a demand that we created, but we also had reliable intel that this guy had, in the past, been able to procure genuine underage kids. I was sure we weren't asking him to do anything he hadn't done before.

  As it turned out, it was one of the legal-age girls the pimp had shown us who gave us the lead that brought Peng to us. Panom was masquerading as our go-between and told the pimp that the girl he'd brought us was too old. When the pimp was distracted, the girl whispered to Panom that if he wanted a truly underage girl, she could find him one.

  ‘Okay. We'll pay big money,’ Panom said to the girl. She nodded.

  A few nights later the girl got in touch with Panom. ‘I have a girl for you. It will cost you 10,000 baht. She virgin.’ Panom and I discussed the offer. It seemed that perhaps we were on to the real thing. Panom got back to her and said he would see the girl, and pay the high price (around A$400) if he was satisfied she was young and a virgin.

  As we would learn later, the sex worker who'd approached Panom was a friend of the two seventeen-year-old girls Peng was staying with. Perhaps the girls had told their friend of the presence of the young runaway, or maybe they'd all done this sort of thing before – we never found out.

  As far as Peng knew, she was going out for a night on the town with her exciting older friends. You can only imagine how her excitement turned to confusion when the girls took her to a hotel frequented by foreigners. Peng had no idea what she had let herself in for.

  Panom was sitting in the lounge area of his hotel room, tapping his fingers on the armrest of his chair. Behind the closed door to the main bedroom was a police team, ready to pounce. The sex worker called again and said she was on her way over. When Panom heard the knock at the door, he got up.

  Panom let the girls in and it was clear, immediately, that the much younger girl in their company was completely at a loss as to why her friends had taken her to a hotel room with a hard-looking Thai man. She looked like a startled deer, trapped in the hunter's spotlight. She started to back into the corridor, but one of her ‘friends’ stood behind her, blocking her, and ushered her into the room with some rapid words of firm reassurance.

  There was no doubt that the young girl was underage. Panom took 10,000 baht out of a bag and handed it to the girl he'd been dealing with. At the same time he sent a secret signal and the police burst into the bedroom. The three older girls were arrested and a social worker who was with the task force took charge of Peng.

  The interesting thing about this case was that all of the girls were Thai, rather than being from the hill tribes or from other south-east Asian countries. Once the police identified them all, the girls were able to contact their parents. Peng's mother came to see the social worker and took her daughter back with her.

  Peng was incredibly lucky. She had no idea she'd been destined to be sold to a paedophile, and that she might have lost her virginity to a paying customer. We were elated at the result, but it showed that trafficking took many forms.

  We were concerned at what would happen to Peng, so we arranged for the social worker to make some follow-up calls. Through this process Peng and her mother were able to talk through their issues and Peng's mother agreed that her daughter would be better off with her rather than the grandmother.

  Afterwards, the mother contacted us and thanked us for our role in her daughter's rescue. She also asked if we might consider helping out with Peng's school fees so that she could go to a good school, where she would have a better chance to do well. Russell and I discussed it and decided that, given she'd had such a scare and seen how her life could have turned out, we would support Peng. We put out a r
equest for help and one of our supporters came up with the money for the girl's education.

  It had all the makings of that elusive fairytale ending that I thought we'd never see in this business. With the help of the social worker from the New Life Center we went through the laborious process of enrolling her in school. Peng's mother was over the moon and we took lots of photos of us all with Peng and her mother both smiling. All seemed to be going well, but when Peng turned sixteen she ran away from home and school with her new boyfriend.

  There are no Hollywood endings.

  NINE

  A Japanese Girl and a Pivotal Radio Interview

  By 2007 my personal life was a mess. I was working my day job for the public service five days a week and staying up until the small hours every night doing emails and trying to run a charity that operated thousands of kilometres away.

  My fitness had gone out the window. I'd had to give up my martial arts training and I was living on a diet of TV dinners. My relationship with Fon had ended amicably when I first returned from Thailand and I'd had no time for romance in Australia.

  I decided I needed a girlfriend. I'm a very mission-focused person, thanks to my military training and the experience I've had running The Grey Man, so I decided to attack the target of love in the same no-nonsense manner. I set aside some time to check out an internet dating site and found no shortage of women in my age bracket. I assessed them and messaged them, telling them that I didn't have time to beat about the bush, to-ing and fro-ing with emails, and that if they were remotely interested in me then I thought the best course of action would be for us to meet up for a cup of coffee and see how things went from there. In the first week after I logged on, I arranged to meet fifteen women – nine of them in the course of a single weekend, and the rest after work. Most of them were quite pleasant, although one talked incessantly about herself and then wanted to know what I thought of her.