The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  “We’re going running,” he said. “Get your ass up.”

  It was bright daylight outside. I threw on my shorts, and we went for a six-mile run on the white-sand beach.

  Mike’s an accomplished distance runner. He was—and always will be—a stud. At the time he was about fifty years old and I was just thirty-two, but Mike was in absolutely peak physical condition.

  He had such stamina, but also a hell of a sense of humor.

  One morning, after our run, we went swimming in the ocean off Songkhla. Mike came out of the surf covered in petroleum spillage, which immediately formed tar balls from his neck down. His entire body was covered in apelike fur, and his body hair was now balled up with petroleum.

  We went back to Mike’s big house, and I watched in astonishment as he began washing his body with undiluted kerosene.

  “What the fuck!” I said. “Mike, you’re gonna kill yourself with that shit.”

  He shrugged and continued scrubbing.

  “Hell, Eddie, you gotta die from something.”

  • • •

  Our offices were located in this huge old house within a secure compound; I immediately saw I had the smallest room in the DEA headquarters—a bare desk and chair—and walked into Mike’s office to raise hell.

  “Look, Mike, this ain’t gonna work. I need a computer. I need at least a few hundred bucks. I need to be able to write.”

  Mike said, “Okay,” and it was done that very day.

  I saw we had bigger investigative issues, too.

  “Michael, the only way we will know what these southern Thailand criminals are up to is if we develop reliable informants. Or else we start invading their electrons. We can’t do all this on the street alone.”

  “I think you’re right,” Mike said.

  I got an inexpensive desktop computer, and we started a brand-new Consolidated Enforcement and Intelligence Program (CEIP)—which over time was to have a major impact on the success of our Shan United Army investigation.

  • • •

  A few weeks in-country, and I had become known as the Ghost.

  Everywhere I went in the south, every village and farm, every bar in Songkhla and Hat Yai, they shouted “Pii! Pii!”—the word for ghost in Thai. And there were days during my three-and-a-half-year stint in the Far East—especially deep in the jungles with Mike—when I started to wonder if I wasn’t some kind of walking specter.

  Very few other people in Songkhla besides Mike and me spoke a lick of English. It was true immersion. Mike spoke decent-enough Thai—a kind of “street Thai”—but I had become fluent.

  I adopted a rigid routine. After doing my six-mile run in the morning with Mike, I’d go to the wat—the monastery temple—right down the street, with one agenda: eating a breakfast of fish and rice with the Buddhist monks, conversing with them one hour each day before starting work.

  The monks were otherwise healthy and disciplined men, but one thing was odd: They smoked constantly. Almost to a man, they chain-smoked these cheap Asian cigarettes from sunrise to sunset.

  I didn’t want to be one of those Americans who could only rap a bit about girls. My Thai soon got so proficient that I could talk about politics, world affairs, economics, or religion.

  Ironically, when I got in the thick of things, it turned out that the Thai street guys and traffickers wanted to talk exclusively about girls.

  It cracked me up when the “Ghost” business kicked in. Soon as I’d open my mouth, people would burst into laughter: “Pii! Pii!” They couldn’t figure out how this pale-faced Irish white boy from St. Louis could be talking about the economy or the king or the corrupt local cops in their local dialect, as if he’d been born in Songkhla.

  • • •

  Our undercover roles were those of American criminal heavies—Mike was a New York heroin wholesaler, and I was his protégé from the West Coast. Again, you never have to get specific about your organization—it’s all unspoken—but it was clear to the Thai traffickers that we were connected to one of the five Mafia families in New York, and had a lot of money to back up our talk.

  • • •

  One spring morning I met this sweet-faced, diminutive Thai girl called Noi. She was in her early twenties. Noi was best friends with a woman named Lek-Lek who worked at the main telecommunications company of Thailand.

  Back then everything—especially a major heroin transaction—was done with pagers. There were no smartphones, of course—no cell phone industry at all.

  The criminals had no other option: They needed to communicate through Thai-language pages.

  Customers would call operators at the telecommunications company and leave a message, which Thai girls would type out and then send out by page. At any given time, there were about twenty operators and typists on call, and Lek-Lek was the boss. I got authorization from Mike to pay Noi and Lek-Lek close to $1,000 a month.

  As soon as the operators typed the message, they’d transmit it to the criminals’ pagers. And guess who else got every one of those message pages?

  In real time I knew every single thing that the criminals were doing.

  I didn’t have an eavesdropping or intercept warrant—in Thailand, I didn’t do it judicially—but I made sure I gave all the information I was gathering straight to the Thai cops who were our investigative counterparts.

  I called it Operation Malacca, after the strait between Thailand and Sumatra—seemed like a fitting name because, like Malacca, our intercept operation became a vital passage for information, much as the dope traffickers moved their heroin through that narrow South Seas waterway.

  • • •

  My life in Songkhla was so hectic, the work hours so long and adrenaline-filled, I never had much time for a social life. But within weeks of starting the pager investigation, I found myself falling hopelessly in love with a young Thai girl I’d met while on a brief sojourn in Phuket with Mike.

  Her given name was Auwarn Prachoop, but everyone simply called her Gay. In Thailand, as I said, hardly anyone uses his or her actual name: They all use a chue-len—the Thai word for nickname.

  Gay was special. Like Desiree, Gay was one of the best-looking women I’d ever seen. Her mind was razor-sharp: She was a trained accountant.

  But my primary relationship in Songkhla was with Bansmer. Mike and I were also becoming extremely close. As the resident agent in charge in Songkhla, Mike was formally my boss, but in our undercover roles, we were partners. Over the months in Songkhla, Mike and I were to become more than partners. Sounds strange, but working closely with another DEA agent overseas becomes much like a marriage. There are times you want to tear each other to pieces, but you learn to read each other intuitively, to complement each other’s strengths and compensate for each other’s weaknesses.

  I would’ve given my life in a heartbeat for Mike; he’d have done the same for me. Mike Bansmer is the most fearless man I’ve ever known—and when he wants to turn it on, some would also call him the most fearsome. Mike was a Special Forces Green Beret assigned to Project Omega (B-50) in Vietnam, went out on nine recon missions along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1967. He could find his way out of dense jungles in Burma and the north of Thailand without a compass—I saw this firsthand. The guy was blessed with inconceivable and innate directional skills.

  Funny thing: If you were to meet Mike today back home in the States—middle-class guy from Medford, Oregon—you’d pass him in the street without a second thought. Mike’s about an inch taller than me, five-foot-nine, a rail-thin marathoner, still does extreme hundred-mile bike rides now that he’s in his early seventies. He’s a warm, affectionate grandfather. You’d figure he was some retired cop and fitness freak with a lifetime subscription to Outside magazine.

  • • •

  Long before I came to Thailand, Mike was up in the north, bringing in US Special Forces to trai
n units of the Thai border patrol involved in some of the most intense counter-narcotics interdictions in US law enforcement history. The heroin epidemic created by the Shan United Army was so virulent that higher authorities often turned a blind eye on “extrajudicial actions”—which essentially meant the Thai cops and border patrol officers could take matters into their own hands.

  Mike Bansmer had two close DEA partners in Thailand in his previous tour in Chiang Mai, in the far north of the country, an important trading center and way station on the opium pipeline known as the Trail of the Horse, which runs through the dense jungles of Burma down to Bangkok. Ben Yarborough and Jim Matthews were two other DEA special agents going deep into the jungles with their contingents of Thai border patrol officers to eradicate the factories producing heroin for the Shan United Army and independent Thai traffickers. They would drive for hours through the mountainous jungles on Jeep trails, then disembark to be led by an informant into the dense jungle for up to eighteen hours of hiking before finally reaching the secret heroin refinery in the middle of the night. At daybreak, the force would use military raid tactics to attack the refinery, and the entire team would then be extracted by police helicopters.

  Due to a death threat against them from the Shan United Army, the agents were evacuated from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, and eventually back to other DEA postings in the States, though by 1990 Mike had returned as the resident agent in charge in Songkhla—that’s when he’d put in the call asking me to come join him in the south of Thailand.

  Before I’d arrived in-country, Mike and his partners were involved in a lot of heavy engagements and firefights with the insurgents. They had a kind of unique fraternity forged in those jungle raids, and had even designed a gold ring, shared only by the three of them: three Chinese characters that read “The Golden Triangle.”

  Mike, Ben, and Jim had gone deep into the jungles of Southeast Asia, doing some bold operations, but all those shootings were classified as “actions under the color of law.” This wasn’t typical DEA work, to be sure: They had done some spine-curdling eradication missions up in the north of the country and in neighboring Burma and Laos.

  I’ll never forget the night that Mike first showed me a photo album of all the Thai and Burmese drug dealers who were killed during operational raids on refineries. He had a handwritten epigram taken from Hemingway on the cover.

  There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

  I leafed through the album as he showed me all his operational engagements, organized in chronological order: fourteen corpses of drug traffickers.

  I’ve seen my share of gunplay—and been in plenty of morgues—but Mike’s photo album was pretty disturbing. In addition to the Hemingway quote, there were those three Chinese characters spelling out “The Golden Triangle.”

  Late at night, I’d sit flipping through the pages of the book by the open fire, wondering if all those missions into northern Thailand, Laos, and Burma with Yarborough and Matthews had sent Mike over the edge.

  • • •

  Mike was no stone-cold killer, simply a good American cop trying to operate in the crazy-house rules of the Golden Triangle. If the Thai border patrol discovered any jungle-cloaked heroin refineries, they’d simply blow the labs up. It was a different law enforcement mind-set: Nothing would be reported. No probable cause, no warrants, no paper trail.

  The minute we had a guy in cuffs, turning him over to our counterparts in the Narcotics Suppression Bureau, I wanted to get out of there as if my hair was on fire. With suspects in custody, Thai cops don’t interrogate like cops do in America. They’ll beat suspects, threaten them with guns, waterboard them—any kind of torture you can imagine, they’ve tried it.

  Thais would “incentivize” the traffickers like no other cops on earth. They’d take the dealers to their houses so that they could see their wives and kids inside.

  “Take a good long look. You’re seeing your family for the last time. Your life is going to burn to the fucking ground tonight unless you start cooperating.”

  Lawyering up? Like you’ve seen on Law & Order? That simply does not exist in places like Thailand. A trafficker falls into the hands of the cops—he gets an offer he can’t refuse. Often there’s no arraignment, no judges or defense attorneys. The suspect either goes straight to prison or gets coerced into cooperating, shoved back on the street as a police informant. In the years I was in Thailand, whenever I saw the NSB guys get their hands on a drug dealer, there was always a confession.

  • • •

  During his decadelong stint in Thailand, Mike had become quite expert in the nuances of corruption in Thai narcotics policing policy. We were almost always working in concert with the Office of the Narcotics Control Board. The ONCB guys are not street cops: They’re all well-educated college graduates. Mike told me a story that had transpired in the weeks before I arrived.

  “We were expecting forty blocks of morphine in two suitcases,” he said. “We’re waiting for the arrival via train. A Mercedes comes to pick up the load at the train station. The ONCB guys see the suspects grab the two suitcases, throw them in the Mercedes. The ONCB arrested the delivery guys, but meanwhile the Benz drives off with the dope—scot-free.”

  Mike told me that one of our DEA special agents, Bob Parks, chased after the Mercedes with the forty blocks of morphine—all the way across Hat Yai, blowing red lights the whole way, finally stopping the car.

  There was a regular Thai traffic cop on the corner. But it was Bob Parks—a white American guy—who jumped out with a drawn pistol and arrested the driver with the dope.

  He couldn’t speak Thai worth a lick, but he managed to convey his meaning:

  If you run, you die!

  The Thai traffic cops were standing there, watching all this.

  When it was time to go to court, the ONCB officers—who weren’t eyewitnesses, weren’t even on the scene, in fact didn’t arrive until after Bob made the arrest—took the witness stand.

  The defense attorney for the trafficker in the Mercedes was trying to trip them up, catch them in a lie.

  “So who was the white man who arrested my client?”

  The ONCB officer testified calmly:

  “What white guy? I personally arrested your client.”

  Mike smiled and shook his head as he related the story.

  “Ed, that’s the ONCB in a nutshell,” he said. “Those are the best of the best over here. The best of the best lie under oath.”

  Yet they do have their own “ethical” standards: They don’t think it is fair game to frame a guy outright—throw a bag of heroin or morphine into his car. In Thailand there are no conspiracy laws like we have in the United States. You have to catch the dealer red-handed, literally in possession of the bag of dope.

  If they do surveillance, listen to the Kel transmission sets, the main dealer may be waiting in a restaurant, not near the dope. But if the Thais make the arrest, they’ll force the “clean” guy to pose in an official photograph, pointing at the bricks of heroin—that’s their way of making the case stick in court.

  • • •

  Over the next two months, Mike and I started wooing informants, trying to get an introduction to one of the main “logisticians”—or lieutenants—in the Shan United Army.

  Mike taught me a hell of a lot about life in Thailand. He couldn’t speak educated Thai as fluently as I could, but he could communicate perfectly well—especially to conduct drug deals—in street Thai. Every few days I would drive up from Songkhla in my G-ride—a government-issue compact car—to Hat Yai. In contrast to most other provinces in the nation, the largest city in that province is not its capital, which is Songkhla. The much newer city of Hat Yai, with a population of more than 350,000, is considerably larger: Hat Yai is in fact now the third largest city in Thai
land, and the primary economic base in the south.

  Provincial capital or not, from a business standpoint—and, most importantly, from a drug-trafficking standpoint—Hat Yai was where all the action in the south happened.

  I had to make Hat Yai my backyard. I could negotiate the back streets there better than I could anywhere in the world, better even than in LA or Honolulu.

  • • •

  Mike was in Bangkok, and I went off solo to work another case. DEA agents like me, stationed abroad, will often work symbiotically with spooks on foreign assignments. Over in Thailand the CIA officers were known as the “American liaison” unit. Our “liaisons” would often provide us with “parallel probable cause”—nothing is attributed to an individual, implement, device, or technique.

  They whisper in your ear—often an invaluable piece of intel—and it’s solely on the investigator to go out and develop the case based on that tip-off.

  I was assisting the spooks with their own case. I went after this major trafficker named Muy Hein San Tai. That was his Chinese name—in addition to nicknames, almost all Thais in the south have a name too long and unpronounceable for everyday use. Muy Hein San Tai was by far the largest exporter of heroin in southern Thailand.

  When working a major trafficking organization, my philosophy was counterintuitive: Always start at the top, not at the bottom of the criminal pyramid. Working your way up from the bottom requires an investment of too much time, too much money; all it takes is one little nod from an underling or minor lieutenant, and the entire case is dead. The boss will be lost in the wind.

  Muy Hein San Tai purchased his heroin in volume from the Shan United Army. Virtually everyone in-country got smack from the SUA. He wasn’t political, wasn’t a separatist insurgent. He was an independent wholesale exporter. He was strictly about his profits. He was all about amassing more of a fortune—so he could lavish it on more of his girlfriends.

  Throughout the south of Thailand, local cops constantly told us that he was considered untouchable. His criminal tradecraft was superior to that of everyone else in the region. The Thai cops couldn’t build a solid case against him no matter how hard they tried.