The Grey Man

by John Curtis

  Later that night, at about 10 pm, the moto driver arranged for Tony to meet with a pimp who then took him to the backstreets of Phnom Penh. The place they went to wasn't a brothel as such, more a small hotel-cum-residence. Inside, the pimp introduced Tony to a young girl and a woman who was watching over her.

  ‘She only thirteen – she no do boom boom, only yum yum, okay?’ the pimp said. He wanted Tony to be clear that the girl was not available for penetrative sex, only oral sex.

  Tony knew he'd be overstepping the mark so early in Cambodia if he tried to rescue the girl then and there. In playing the part of a paedophile, he had to act like one, so he told the pimp that the girl was too old and insisted that he take him back to the moto driver.

  The moto driver made some phone calls and then took Tony to a well-known red-light district where an array of girls on the backs of motorbikes were paraded before him. Most of them appeared to be in their late teens. Again Tony declined, saying they were too old, and had the moto driver return him to the riverside tourist area.

  A day later the moto driver rang Tony again and assured him that this time he could definitely get what he was looking for. Not one but two girls, aged ten and fourteen, and he would take Tony to see them at a nice hotel. Tony suspected that the moto driver thought that he did not like brothels and so he'd made an arrangement to provide the girls to him in a cleaner, more pleasant environment. The pimp selected the hotel, possibly because he had an arrangement with the owner there.

  Tony contacted IJM about the offer that had been made to him and they agreed to make the necessary arrangements to provide surveillance, backup and police support.

  Later that day, Tony met again with the moto driver and was taken to another location where he introduced Tony to yet another pimp, who appeared to be no older than twenty. He insisted that Tony hand him US$50 so he could book a room in the hotel he had in mind. About twenty minutes later the pimp returned and told Tony and the moto driver to follow him. They set off, with surveillance teams from IJM and the Cambodian police secretly in tow.

  They stopped behind the pimp outside a hotel. ‘I want to see them first, before I pay anything,’ Tony said. The moto driver had let him down a couple of times already, and before calling in the cavalry behind him, and tipping off the pimp to the operation that had been put in train, Tony wanted to make sure that he wasn't being offered girls of a legal age.

  The pimp agreed and Tony was taken to a room on the second floor, paid for with Tony's deposit money. While Tony waited in the bedroom the pimp produced two Vietnamese girls from the bathroom, the door of which was closed when he first entered. The kids seemed quiet and compliant, rather than frightened or confused. They were clearly underage, as the moto driver had promised, and were from Vietnam.

  ‘Which one you like?’ the pimp asked, adding that the elder of the two was suitable for ‘boom boom’, the younger for oral sex only. Tony said that he would pay for both of them. He now needed to get a message to Ron from IJM, and the following police, confirming that the girls were underage and the operation was good to go.

  ‘How much?’ he asked the pimp.

  ‘For two is six hundred US dollars,’ said the pimp, smiling in anticipation.

  ‘That's more than I expected, but I'll get it. I need to find an ATM.’

  The pimp was fine with that arrangement. He could see his day's profit rising nicely, and he had the girls safely stowed in the hotel room. He had no idea he was being set up.

  The moto driver took Tony to a nearby cash machine and while he was there, Tony called Ron and confirmed the presence of underage girls, who had been offered to him. The surveillance men stayed on Tony's tail. The plan was that they would follow him into the room, about thirty seconds after he entered.

  Tony had the moto driver take him back to the hotel, and wait outside for him until he'd finished his ‘business’. Tony went back up to the second floor and knocked. The pimp opened the door and ushered him inside. When the pimp opened the bathroom door the ten-year-old girl was topless, probably assuming she needed to be ready for Tony. Just then there was a polite knock on the door. Again, without suspecting anything or even caring about the show that was unfolding in the room, the pimp opened the door, only to be confronted by officers from the Cambodian National Police.

  The investigating police had cameras; seeing them, the girls tried to hide, brushing their hair over their faces. The younger girl tried to cover herself and the older girl put her arms around her friend in a gesture of protection. Both of them were terrified of the commotion, and when the pimp was led away there was no one at first who could communicate with them in Vietnamese.

  The girls were taken into IJM's care, and subsequently placed in a Christian-run shelter. Although we attempted to follow up on the girls, IJM were never forthcoming with the information. There was nothing sinister in this, but it was an example of the attitudes we often encountered from other organisations and the police. I never found out what happened to them after that, but what we did learn was that in a chilling rerun of Peng's story, this would have been the first time the ten-year-old Vietnamese girl had been offered to a man for oral sex. Sadly, the fourteen-year-old had already been abused.

  The pimp was convicted and is currently serving 25 years in a Cambodian gaol. There, unless he has friends or relatives who can supplement his meagre daily ration of rice, it's likely his physical and mental condition will deteriorate rapidly. The prison system in Cambodia is indifferent to its inmates' privations – just as the pimp had been towards those two little girls.

  Mindful of keeping up our fundraising activities in Australia, I gave the details of Tony's amazing impromptu operation to a journalist friend of mine. He'd worked on my local paper and had long had an interest in The Grey Man, and had recently started working for the news wire agency Australian Associated Press (AAP). I underestimated the power and reach of AAP, for very soon after he filed his story I found myself doing close to twenty follow-up media interviews and fielding dozens of phone calls. It was a great story, and the bust had taken place on 26 January, Australia Day, so it was a nice tale of Aussies doing good overseas on our national day.

  I'd made a point when releasing the information about the girls' rescue to talk up the involvement of IJM and stress that this was a joint operation, as I didn't want to offend them and make it look like we were seeking all the glory. The truth was that without IJM there was no way Tony would have been able to get the police involved in time to save those kids. I also gave IJM a big rap on our blog. I thought I was doing the right thing, but it turned out I wasn't.

  When the news went national, and international, IJM's head office in the States picked up on it and it seemed Ron Dunne was on the receiving end of a rocket. The senior people at IJM wanted to know who The Grey Man was, and why Ron was supposedly running joint operations with us without their authority. To make matters worse, it seemed IJM's press office also had its nose out of joint as the release of all information about IJM to the media was supposed to go through them.

  I explained to Ron that we had mentioned IJM's involvement out of courtesy. I don't think he had a problem with it, but an NGO populated with lawyers will have problems with just about anything, even if it is good. Ron promised that when we came back to Cambodia – as we fully intended to, given Tony's success – he would organise a full briefing for us on the local situation and the finer points of Cambodian law. It seemed that the next time we operated in Cambodia we would be doing so under IJM's MOU with the Cambodian authorities.

  Back home in Australia the news of the rescue was greeted overwhelmingly positively by the media and we received another rush of messages of support. Some members of the Vietnamese community in Australia were particularly pleased that we'd rescued the two little girls and highlighted the problem of child trafficking from their home country. They organised a huge fundraiser for us in Melbourne, involving famous Vietnamese entertainers and personalities, and that one dinner raised
more than $8000. The Cambodian operation also gave us an entrée to the Vietnamese embassy and we subsequently met with some of their senior people and discussed the possibility of future operations in Vietnam.

  Just as my first radio interview with Richard Fidler had prompted interest from Australian Story, the latest round of media coverage over the rescue of the girls in Phnom Penh sparked interest from Channel Seven's Sunday Night program in Australia. Veteran reporter Mike Munro wanted to do a story on us and accompany us on an operation in Cambodia. I was reluctant. We didn't yet have our own MOU with the authorities, so if we went back into Cambodia we would still be beholden to IJM. Plus, I'd never been there myself at that stage. I didn't know the lay of the land or the people, or any of the local cops, as I did in Thailand, and it had all the makings of a media disaster. I talked it over with Tony. He was still buoyed by his success and was sure we could find some more underage girls to rescue. ‘All right, let's go with it,’ I said. ‘If nothing comes of it, at least we'll have learned some lessons.’

  I actually didn't want to go to Cambodia by then. I was a bit over The Grey Man's constant demands on my time and I wanted a break from the incessant self-funded travel that came with the job of running the organisation, not to mention the continuing administration demands.

  It was around this time that we employed a woman named Julie as our part-time admin person. She had already been a volunteer with us for a long while and could turn her hands to most things. She had taken about six months off, as The Grey Man has a habit of burning even the best people out, but now she was back. Julie handled a lot more than admin and wore many hats. She was a godsend, but even though she lightened my load immeasurably The Grey Man was expanding and so was the admin. In spite of the extra help I still seemed to be doing four hours a day of emails alone.

  Channel Seven, like Australian Story before them, insisted on there being a ‘talking head’ in the story – someone who could be interviewed on camera. I tried to convince Russell to take the team to Cambodia and to be our front man, but he had a health problem and had to go into hospital for an operation.

  ‘How about you?’ I said to Tony.

  ‘No way.’ He was too smart. Besides, as Tony pointed out, I had already been ‘outed’ in the media and he wanted to preserve his identity for future undercover operations. We'd assembled a team of keen volunteers – largely ex-police – for the proposed foray into Cambodia, most of whom had been recruited off the back of the Australian Story program, so I wouldn't even need to go undercover if I didn't want to. Channel Seven offered to pay my airfares and accommodation if I went along and agreed to be the spokesman; that clinched it. My personal funds were so depleted that even if I'd really wanted to I couldn't have flown myself to Cambodia.

  Tony worked closely with the Channel Seven guys in the lead-up to our departure. He'd come up with a good idea to hire a house in Phnom Penh which the TV people would fit out with hidden cameras. If we managed to locate some underage kids we would have the pimp deliver them to the house, where we could record the transaction happening and, hopefully, the arrest of the crims by Cambodian police. Channel Seven sourced a house for a two-week period, which wasn't easy, and organised a bank of covert cameras to be installed.

  We had a team of eight volunteers, plus Tony and me, primed and ready to leave for Cambodia. For all the other guys this was their first Grey Man trip, but they were all keen and had a good range of experience in law enforcement and investigation. Some of the guys were retired, some were civilians and many were ex-cops. As usual, all of them were paying their own way.

  When we arrived in Cambodia in May 2010, after transiting through Bangkok, Tony and I had a few days with Channel Seven before our people arrived. Once our guys turned up we took all of them for a familiarisation trip around the city and showed them the wired house where we would hopefully be making our busts. I was fascinated to see for myself the contrasts of rich and poor, and the boom town that was sprouting from the horrors of the Cambodian genocide.

  Over the weekend after our arrival I sent our volunteers out in pairs to start scouting around and looking for underage kids. Tony and I met with Ron Dunne and Ron offered to brief all our guys about Cambodian law and order on the Monday after the weekend everyone had arrived. Things were looking good, but after the meeting I was with Tony in the lobby of the Raffles Hotel – a beautiful place, if not my normal standard of accommodation – when I received an alarming text message from Ron. ‘Have you guys been involved in anything that's blown up in your faces lately?’ the text asked.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Well, someone's been dishing the dirt about you.’

  That wasn't new to me – people had taken pot shots at us before – but apparently someone had been making serious complaints about The Grey Man's operations in Thailand that had been picked up by IJM's head shed in America.

  Tony knew Ron better than I did, so he called him. Ron told Tony he didn't have any further details, but the word had come down from his superiors that The Grey Man was not a credible organisation and that he was banned from conducting any operations with us. We arranged to meet with him in a hurry.

  We asked Ron if he could ask around and find out who was maligning us, and he asked me, via Tony, if I had any idea.

  ‘Well, we recently sacked our director of operations in Thailand,’ I said. I pleaded with Ron to find a way around his bosses' edict. After all, I said to him, IJM had been forced out of Thailand because of people criticising them and because they'd threatened to expose corrupt cops. We were all subject to the whims of people who would criticise us for petty reasons or their own self-interest. ‘Can't you explain all this to Washington?’ I asked him again.

  ‘As far as Washington is concerned, you can't operate with us or under our MOU.’

  We'd been in-country for two days. I had eight guys who had paid their own way to be there and were covering their own expenses to try to rescue kids, not to mention an impatient camera crew and a personality from a major TV network hanging around waiting for me to conjure a child rescue operation out of thin air.

  ‘What about the briefing you'd scheduled for tomorrow?’ I asked Ron.

  ‘That's cancelled as well.’

  Paul Waterhouse, the producer for the Channel Seven program, had also been in touch with Ron and had got wind of the problems we were facing. After the meeting he came to me and asked me what was going on. I told him of my suspicions, that we were the subject of rumour and innuendo resulting from sour grapes. Paul was sympathetic but he had a job to do, and he was following up another avenue, with Ron, in the hope of filming one of their operations with the local police. I understood Paul's position and bore him no ill will at all for trying to tee up something with IJM. TV needs colour and movement and action and we could supply Paul with none of those right then.

  Paul met with Ron again – with the police present this time – and told them about the house that the film crew had wired up with hidden cameras. That turned out to be a problem as well, as under Cambodian law it was illegal to film someone without their knowledge and consent – not even cops could use covert video cameras in a police investigation without special permission from a ministry. Now Paul was pissed off. I was certainly learning a lot.

  Meanwhile, Tony and I and our volunteers continued to look for kids to rescue, without official support. We had been introduced to a possible people trafficker and pimp by a tuk tuk driver with the nickname of Cousin. We told Cousin that we wanted eight underage girls to join us in a party. It was a big ask, and I doubted our chances of success, but the trafficker Cousin found us said that he could get the kids for us. We'd started negotiations before Ron dropped his bombshell, but on the Monday morning the pimp got word to us via Cousin that he'd sourced the girls.

  I couldn't believe it. In the space of just over a weekend our main body of volunteers had arrived, we'd got a line on a trafficker who had a minibus load of underage girls – more than we'd ever been
offered at one time in Thailand – and now we were technically out of business!

  Tony and I desperately tried to stall the pimp, who we learned went by the apt name of Rong, while we sought another meeting with Ron in the hope that he could at least get us some form of temporary imprimatur to operate in Phnom Penh. IJM, however, continued to stonewall us, so we approached all the other NGOs we could think of to see if they would offer us some top cover, even on a temporary basis. Events were moving too fast, though, and I could sense this whole operation was about to come crashing down around my ears. We even tried to hand the operation over completely to IJM – we didn't have to be mentioned as long as they rescued the kids – but Ron wouldn't touch it.

  Rong was getting impatient. He was on the phone to Tony several times a day, trying to organise a meeting and payment. He'd procured the eight little girls and, incredibly, he said they were staying with his mother. Rong was half-Cambodian and half-Vietnamese and his mum was in the trafficking business with him. It turned out that she was the kingpin and had been a mamasan in Phnom Penh before branching out into trafficking.

  Even though we had no MOU and no licence to operate, I couldn't bear to think what might happen to those girls if we let them slip through the net. Tony and I agreed to meet with Rong at a restaurant on the river, just outside the main part of Phnom Penh. Cousin took us there and we drove through a cemetery to get to the place. It was spooky even in daylight. Over lunch, we negotiated a deal over the innocence of eight children.

  Rong wanted US$3000, with a $500 deposit up front. He told us the girls he had found were mostly Cambodian, with a couple of Vietnamese to make up the numbers, and that all were between ten and twelve years old. Tony excused himself and headed for an ATM to draw out the deposit. While he was away I was chatting to Rong, and noticed the edge of a tattoo under his shirtsleeve. Telling him I was interested in tattoos, I asked if I could see what it was. In reality, I had an ulterior motive. If I hadn't learned that it was illegal to use covert cameras in Cambodia I would have been filming Rong and recording our negotiations. As that wasn't possible, I wanted to learn as much about the trafficker as I could in case we couldn't bust him – as was looking increasingly likely – and I had to pass on his description to the police. Rong was cagey and had made Tony and me turn off our mobile phones when we met him, in case we were recording his voice or filming him, but he couldn't resist showing off his tatt, which was of a tiger. I told him I thought it looked very impressive.