Bizarre Thailand Tales of Crime - Bizarre Thailand : tales of crime, sex, and black magic

BizarreThailand

TALES of CRIME, SEX and BLACK MAGIC

byJIM ALGIE

Cover design by OpalWorks Pte Ltd

All photographs provided by Jim Algie

2011 Marshall Cavendish International(Asia) Private Limited

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To my mom, Patricia,
and my brother, Richard,
for putting up with me for so long.

Contents

Where else in the world could a womanisingblack magician become a political advisor and chat-show celebrity, or the abbotof a Buddhist temple try to construct a pagoda out of water buffalo skulls?Where else would a town be overrun with sacred tortoises that mate in thestreets, or the preserved corpse of a serial-slaying cannibal be on permanentexhibition in the most macabre of museums?

Where else but in bizarre Thailand? ATwilight Zone where nothing is what it seems.

In 1994, I started writing a series ofcolumns and feature stories for local newspapers and magazines that led tocontributions to a wealth of international publications such as the NationalGeographic Traveler and International Herald Tribune, regional papers like theJapan Times and Sydney Morning Herald, as well as guidebooks for majorpublishers in the United States and London, focusing primarily on the dark andexotic side of Thailand and detours off the well-rutted and over-glutted travelmap of hotspots. The inklings of a few other stories came from the pages ofFarang Untamed Travel magazine, co-founded by Cameron Cooper, Bobby McBlain andmyself in 2001.

There are hundreds of booksand tens ofthousands of stories, websites and blogsdevoted to the palm-fringed beachesand majestic mountains and delightful gastronomy of the kingdom. This isnot one of them. Beyond those obvious attributes, the country has many otherenchantments and enticements that can be enjoyed without bowing to the tyrannyof the politically correct, or snorkelling in a cesspool of vulgarities.

Starting off the collection with a bang isthe Crime Scenes section. Few people know life and death Behind the Bars ofthe Bangkok Hiltons like the countrys last executioner. Trading in hiselectric guitar for a machine-gun, former rock musician Chavoret Jaruboon sent55 men and women to the crematorium during his 18 years on the firing line.Interviews with convicted drug traffickers and prison authorities provide anoverview of crime and capital punishment in Thailand.

Only in the sea-straddling resort of Pattayaare you likely to hear stories of a middle-aged Scandinavian man running amokin a shopping mall, throwing bottles of acid in the faces of local officeladies, because he had been spurned and sucked dry of his life savings by abargirl. In Pattaya: The Vegas of Vice?, retirees on Viagra rub shoulderswith Russian gangsters and 10,000 marchers calling for an end to violenceagainst women as they parade down Beach Road, beside scores of streetwalkers inthe countrys most bipolar city.

For chills and blood spills, readers canride shotgun with Bangkoks rescue workers and corpse collectors. In Museumsof the Macabre: See Uey the Chinese Cannibal, the wretched life andunspeakable crimes of the forensic museums mascotwho is also the countrysmost infamous serial killerare autopsied.

From Ayuthaya to Bangkok: A Bizarre ExpatOdyssey looks at an astonishing spectrum of expatriates who have come hereover the past five centuries: pirates and samurai, writers and filmmakers,maverick entrepreneurs and mass murderers. Apart from that famous Thaitolerance of other cultures and nationalities, why do they keep coming here?The answers are as varied, and as eclectic, as the characters themselves. Alsodetailed are a few of the defining moments from expatriate history. Many willknow about the building of the Death Railway constructed by Allied POWs andAsian slave labourers at the behest of the barbarous Japanese Imperial Army.Few, I suspect, will be familiar with the most moving memoir of that tragedy,The Railway Man by Eric Lomax, which tracks the strange, five-decade-longrelationship that develops between the Scottish POW and a member of theJapanese secret police he longs to maim and murder.

In the middle of 2010, the carnage on thestreets of Bangkok during a series of showdowns between the military and thered-shirted protestors exposed more than a few fault lines running through Thaisociety and its long-standing love and loathing for the army. Those incidentsare flashpoints in Weekend Warriors: Military Tourism in Thailand, where thepresence of so many troops and bases has created what may very well be atourist phenomenon unique to Thailand: undergoing military training at realarmy bases scattered across the country. Despite finding it a challenge toarrange and endure, I did my basic training with the paratroopers from theRoyal Thai Airborne in Lop Buri province.

The overblown genre of what I normallyderide as Bangkok dicklit has mostly been neutered from The Sex Filessection. The only organisation Ive kept tabs on from that overexposed scene isEmpower, one of the few NGOs in the region that promotes sex work as a viableform of employment for women. That said, they have been lobbying the Thaigovernment for some two decades to get sex workers the same rights enjoyed byother members of the service industry, and they routinely deal with the Thaipolice in trying to get justice for women victimised by sadistic clients. Overthe last 10 years, they have implemented an incredible array of projectsaradio station featuring bargirls as DJs, setting up a miniature go-go bar at aninternational conference on AIDS and, more recently, setting up the only bar inthe country (possibly in the world) run by and for sex workers.

Cross-cultural relationships are alreadyweird enough without the presence of love charms, sex potions and phallicamulets. Yet they all play a part in the worlds oldest obsession as itspractised in Thailand. Stories like Erecting a Tribute to a Fertility Goddesslook at how the mystical flirts and fornicates with love.