Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson Read Online Free PDF Page A

me he was going to visit his mia noi—a minor wife, or mistress—in Thailand and offered to take me with him. We flew into Bangkok and it was an eye-opener. While my client enjoyed himself with his mistress, I made full use of the city’s go-go bars, massage parlours and nightclubs. After almost forty years in New Zealand and Australia, I was like a kid in a sweetshop.
    In between watching girls dancing around silver poles I decided to take a look at the local horse scene. My client took me to a huge stable in Siricha owned by a wealthy Thai who, as it happened, had gone to university in New Zealand. He loved horses but spent so much time building hotels and office blocks that he had no time to manage his stock and they were a pretty rough collection of horseflesh. In no time he offered me a job, and I moved to Thailand.
    I hit the ground running. I trained during the week, we went to the Bangkok racetracks every Sunday, and on Monday—my day off—I stayed over in the Grace Hotel with a succession of temporary girlfriends plucked from the hotel’s disco. Spending so much time with jockeys and bargirls, neither of whom spoke much English, my Thai language skills improved by leaps and bounds.
    The client’s horses were okay, but in most cases were just a few generations removed from Mongolian ponies and they weren’t a patch on the thoroughbreds I’d worked with in New Zealand. The problem was, for a horse to race in Thailand, it had to be born in the country. It didn’t take me long to spot the loophole in that regulation, so I flew over a pregnant mare and trained up her foal. She was a little beauty and on her first big race she was a firm favourite. Then, in typical Thai fashion, disaster struck. A jing jok, a tiny lizard that loves to climb across ceilings, fell on top of our jockey. The Thais regard that as just about the worst possible bad luck, equivalent to a farang breaking a mirror or walking under a ladder. The jockey rushed of to the local temple on the back of a motorcycle but crashed on the way back. He was still able to ride but crashed his horse into the back of one of the front runners and shattered her knee. She had to be put down and my client came in for all sorts of flak from his friends along the lines of ‘you’ve got an expensive farang trainer but your horse still dies’. Needless to say it was a massive loss of face and the only solution was to let me go.
    By then I was pretty much addicted to the Thai nightlife so decided that I’d stay in the country. I decided to put my newly acquired Thai language skills to use and landed a job as marketing manager of a hotel in Surin, a largish town not far from Cambodia. I was mainly teaching the staff basic English, updating brochures and menus, and marketing the hotel around the world. It was a monster of a hotel, the biggest in Isaan, with 600 rooms, a ballroom, a nightclub, karaoke bar, three restaurants and two enormous conference centres, where most regional government and police meetings were held. And the kicker for me was the massage parlour with eighty beautiful girls. Forget the sweetshop. Now I was the kid in the sweet factory.
    The Surin job meant that I also picked up Khamen, the Cambodian language spoken in the Thai border provinces of Surin, Buriram and Si Saket, and that came in handy when I started working as a private eye as many bargirls come from those provinces, and it’s a big advantage being able to speak to them in their own language. Then, once again, disaster struck, in true Thai fashion. My employer’s family were openly known as Isaan mafia and had a nice sideline importing Russian prostitutes with the help of the local head of police, who had his own suite at the hotel. Back then middle class Thais had money to spend and they’d only ever seen big blonde women on the movie screen. The girls were charging 3,000 baht for short time and there were queues down the corridors all day. My bosses were planning to bring in