Revolving-door Injustice

From The Sun today…

A PAEDOPHILE was finally found guilty of abusing two young boys yesterday – after years of evading justice.

Philip Thompson, 71, used booze, cannabis and cigarettes to lure dozens of youngsters to his home before raping his victims.

The two boys – regularly sexually assaulted from the ages of eight to 15 in the 1970s and 1980s – finally told police of their ordeal in 2002.

But by then Thompson had fled to Thailand, where he was caught having sex with another boy aged eight.

Thompson was bailed by the Thai authorities and fled again – this time to central America. He was finally arrested at Heathrow last November.

This space would like to take this opportunity on behalf of the children of Central America and their violated reproductive and digestive systems to thank the Royal Thai Police and the prosecutor’s office for their diligence and professionalism.

If you want the background, review the Pattaya Mail article from 08 June 2001.

Thompson’s neighbours had reported to police that they suspected Thompson of sexually abusing minors, as they often saw young boys being brought to his house.

Pattaya’s tourist police … staked out Thompson’s house, and on May 30 they observed an older Thai male delivering a young boy. As soon as reinforcements arrived, they raided the house.

When police burst inside, officers immediately started photographing the activities as evidence. At the time, Thompson was allegedly sodomizing the young boy.

Thompson was charged with sexually molesting a minor under the age of 15. The photos and the can of Crisco were recorded as evidence, along with the statements from the 12-year old boy. Thompson was later transferred to the Banglamung police station for further disposition.

Barry Kenyon, local correspondent for the British Embassy, told Pattaya Mail, “Lawyers acting for Mr Thompson obtained bail for him at Banglamung police station last Thursday (May 31). The matter is now in the hands of the public prosecutor.”

Please ask yourself how someone, caught in the act (at least once, perhaps twice if the age of his known Thai victim is not a mistake), suspected of being a serial child rapist, at the same time he was most likely named as a person of interest in the UK investigation, could fail to see the inside of a Thai prison cell.

Should you lack imagination, the correct answers are money and connections.

The Royal Thai Police have by all indications a standing policy that if a pedophile is arrested, the primary criteria regarding whether or not a prosecution will be able to take place is the media profile of the person in question and his ability to pay his way out of jail.

If you are known to the world media to be wanted for crimes against children elsewhere as with the “Swirly Face” case, your fate is sealed.

On the other hand if you are just the garden-variety John Q. Kiddiefiddler, a person of no real consequence on whom no promotion-making high profile arrest can be performed, your chances of release correspond directly to how much you can pay to make critical evidence disappear.

This is not entirely unique to the Banglamung, Pattaya, police but they are certainly among its most notorious practitioners. Even a cursory search of the back issues of the Pattaya Mail — itself unwittingly serving as a scoreboard for corruption — turns up many examples of pedophilia related arrests (often, as in the case of the Italian, Massimo Mannari, on multiple occasions) yet you will find very few reports of Thai prison sentences, extraditions or even blacklisting.

The amount of justice you get in Thailand is the amount of justice you can afford, or afford to avoid. And the currency of such transactions is not always cash; it can just as easily be information and connections.

If one is slipping it up the backside of the neighbor boy, cash is the only remedy. On the other hand if one is using the services of a procurer, then a different set of considerations come into play. What the RTP is desperate to keep quiet is their enduring financial interest in protecting the pedophile rings of Pattaya.

Certainly you want a full team on hand when making an arrest, certainly you can’t afford to waste the services of a police photographer on a stakeout when he might be needed elsewhere. But while waiting for back-up wouldn’t it be prudent to detain an “older Thai male” as referenced? It didn’t happen, and it almost never will — the exception being a pedophile gang who’ve fallen behind on contributions.

Just as with the trade in any contraband substance or service, if you want to do real damage to an on-going criminal enterprise you must go after the entire supply chain not only the end-users. To illustrate the nature of the problem, consider the remarks of someone in the private investigations field locally:

The rot starts in the deep and old links between the Pattaya cops and the commercial gay scene especially around Boys [sic] Town. It goes a lot further than the bribe a girlie bar has to pay. That just keeps the doors open and keeps the cops from finding technical violations. In the pedo scene which is almost exclusively gay down here and 100% in Jomtien the cops are actually providing protection.

It’s easy for a pedo to find what he wants out of most of the gay bars. It’s not always something that bar owners are involved in but the managers who are almost exclusively Thai. Just a casual remark about the age of the bar boys on display will usually bring someone out of the woodwork to help source a more youthful alternative. There are a couple of code words that can accelerate the process.

The managers are sometimes the procurers themselves but more often part of a small ring doing recruiting and delivery. The cops get a bag every month to look the other way and to keep the whole thing under wraps. Unless the press forces their hand they make sure the delivery man is off the scene when they make the bust. There’s protection on about a dozen houses with young boys and those aren’t ever going to be busted.

When a bust takes place at a pedo’s residence there’s always a reasonable level of documentation. Enough to make the charges stick if there’s any will for it. But there isn’t and the cops really just want to get paid. They can get career advancement if it’s an investigation driven by Interpol or the FBI but those are rare. More often its just about money. After they’ve bled the suspect evidence will get lost or a deal gets done between the cops and the prosecutors. The suspect is also told in no uncertain terms that if he goes to the press with details about that arrangement or how he found the procurer in the first place that he won’t be leaving the country alive.

“Shoot a cop, save a kid” is too extreme a mantra to adopt, but it seems a complete change of personnel in many police departments in Chonburi Province as well as the prosecutor’s office is the only thing that’s ever going to make a meaningful difference in stopping this despicable trade.

Keep that in mind the next time you causally give a few hundred baht to the same police over a littering, helmet or seatbelt “violation”, or when you a pay a barfine. (Barfine money goes into an off-the-books slush fund so bars can pay off the police without raising any accounting issues, but that’s a topic for another time.)

Professors Without Borders

An item that came in via the RSS feed a bit earlier today (italics our own):

Professors Without Borders

A new nonprofit group — Professors Without Borders — announced itself Monday, with the goal of sending faculty members abroad to promote public health and sustainability, and to build infrastructure that will help developing and disadvantaged nations. The idea grew out of the Fulbright New Century Scholars Program. A first on-the-ground project will take place in August in Thailand, and work is also being explored in Haiti and other nations.

You were expecting a cheap shot at the expense of Professor Kenneth Ng, admit it.

On Flare-Ups, Failures and Facts

This previous week marked the near-total implosion of Big Baby Kenny, both the dubious website and the author, Professor Kenneth Ng of California State University at Northridge.

The absence of the website is little loss and the general consensus is that the internet has gotten marginally smarter by its erasure. Although there are questionable retrospective-cum-appreciations already in circulation, one is left wondering why it’s worth anyone’s time to remark at length upon it.

BBK was a site with an abominable presentation, poor writing and a factual basis that varied from poor to so jaw-droppingly inaccurate it recalled the famous remark of Wolfgang Pauli: “it’s not even wrong”.

These defects would have doomed the site over the long haul, or at least confined it to the internet version of vanity press, but Ng unwisely accelerated the process with a very high-profile battle with the owners and manager of the Big Mango Bar and their blog.

Ng’s great mistakes were three: losing control of the scope of the argument and verging into manufacturing information rather than discovering it, failing to secure his own position, and letting his ego get in the way of prudent judgement.

For these reasons and more, the situation echoes the past contretemps between Keith Summers (his John Galt act and his website now on an apparently indefinite hiatus) and Paul Owen (whose Stickman persona and website have settled into an irrelevant senescence akin to a faded late-career Bernard Trink).

While this has been remarked upon elsewhere, the conclusion that Ng’s efforts were substantially similar to Summers’s (and as substantially ineffectual) can’t be supported.

Ng continues, by posting justifications for the former content of his website, to battle to save his job and substantial salary. CSUN administration for its part seems content to put the matter to rest, and absent a second wave of media coverage focusing on Ng’s documentable misuse of state resources, he will probably succeed. For the time being, Kenneth Ng still has his position, but his tilt with the Big Mango has had a very lopsided outcome (which is a sanitised way of saying abject failure) and may result in his dismissal.

By contrast, if indications are correct, Summers’s campaign seems to have struck the target. Word is that Owen is now poison in the educational community in Thailand, although if pressed the concern is usually phrased less in terms of his website content and instead focuses on the quality of his teaching credentials — some liken them to the sort of thing you get during a walk down Khao San Road or 4 to 6 weeks after sending a dollar and two box-tops to a post office box in Battle Creek, Michigan.

None of the four main parties in these two situations are without blame…

For their part Ng and Summers thoroughly failed at the tasks of information security regarding themselves and their real-life endeavours. And they committed the sin of letting themselves drift away from a factual, clinical approach into one of misrepresentations in service of personal vengeance. Summers ultimately went to court because of his indiscretions and Ng’s crucifixion in the court of public opinion may still intensify.

In viewing both Stickman and Big Baby Kenny it is perfectly correct that broader questions have been asked about whether it is appropriate for anyone involved with education (especially of minors) to be at the same time involved with the very adult nightlife scene here, and whether their behavior is in compliance with community standards and the terms of their employment.

And as for the Big Mango and Stickman as the putatively aggrieved parties, it really is difficult to feel at all sympathetic. When setting yourself up in business you must make certain factual disclosures on the public record. And when one becomes a celebrity — particularly when it is done voluntarily as a commentator or blogger — one must accept that fame comes with a price. And that goes beyond criticism right through to being named and enduring some ugly threats.

(In the Big Mango’s defense, they did attempt to “extend the olive” branch at one point, to quote one insider there. They were rebuffed as Ng took their efforts as a show of weakness. That however only covers the disinformation being spread about them, not disclosure of the factual essence of their ownership and management structure which some weak minds conflate with “outing”.)

With these thoughts in mind, and yet undeterred, in the coming weeks and months we’re going to be telling you a lot more than you ever thought you’d know about Thailand and especially the nightlife scene and the players in it.

It is never useless to repeat the words of Paul Fussell — “What someone doesn’t want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.” MongerSEA will put this principle into action.

Red vs Yellow = More Pink

When most people think of Thailand, the two things that come to mind first are golf and scuba diving. This is a fabrication of course, because if there’s two things Thailand has long been most famous for it is most certainly the ready availability of hookers and never-ending political unrest.

Now that the pro-Thaksin Team Red has been takin’ it to the streets for a few weeks — dragging the pro-power Royal Thai Army and pro-money Royal Thai Police around by the nose like a pet farang being led to some dusty Isaan village — and with the pro-themselves Team Yellow dogging their steps, another nail has been driven into the coffin of Thailand’s tourism industry.

With the decline in overall visitor numbers, this so-called “crisis” has hit the bars and the bargirls hard. Some of the ladies have called it quits and gone home, but among those who stayed behind, most have slashed their prices.

There’s no reason to bullshit you and suggest it’s the good old days of the Vietnam War era again, and that girls will be shagging you, cooking your meals and doing your laundry for a week and will be happy with a carton of Camel straights for their trouble.

But it’s a fact that many girls are now happy with half of their pre-crisis asking price and quality of service remains unaffected (though you may have to watch the Thai TV news in your room rather than the other sopa operas and fictional programs).

That’s fine on the face of it, but there’s no need to stop there. Why pay at all when a bit of creative thinking and a little sensitivity to the realities of life in Troubled Thailand can have you pulling virtual freebies?

Consider Red Team, spending day after day engaged in long marches alternated with hunkering down in their fortified compound. Among them are many of the same type of up-country farm girls you’d find in Bangkok’s gogo bars, but in this instance all hot and sweaty from their day-long reforming exertions.

Just imagine how well it’s going to play if you round up a passel of these sun-burnt, rustic firebrands and offer them the hospitality of your hotel suite. The enticements of a shower, clean towels, a soft bed (things you are paying for anyway and might as well leverage!) should prove irresistible.

And if you were to hint at a shoulder rub and maybe the use of your washer and dryer, the smart money says they’d be on you in a heartbeat. They can start the revolution without you! (Unless it’s the sexual revolution and this time they’ll be calling you Generalissimo as well as Daddy.)

(Bearing in mind that some of the readership might prefer a less time-consuming approach, other strategies can still be found. Consider that just dropping off even a few bottles of drinking water and a couple of bags of sticky rice and mango or fried insects might get you some discrete oral service in a quiet corner of the bunker.)

When it comes to dealing with the distaff membership of Team Yellow, please keep in mind that these are more urbane types, city folks with a modicum of taste and refinement. And among them you’ll find many fair-skinned beauties as well as some fine looking older women with gym-toned bodies.

But deep down they’re still women, and all the counter-protesting will have them rabid and randy and high as a kite with hormones. All you have to is present yourself smartly (and we mean without a beer gut protruding from a stained singlet as well as using a sensible approach) and the gals will largely take it from there.

Just apply the general PUA techniques of making the girls from Team Yellow feel you’ve got a common viewpoint with them: Brown people are supposed to be slaves, Thaksin is evil and sex is so much better when you might get your leg blown off by an RPG at any moment.

And speaking of appendages and appliances, the Yellow girls can be real wildcats in the sack despite their more sophisticated upbringings. So ask her to bring a few sets of those famous hand-clappers and be ready to experiment when the two of you hit the sheets.

Finally, this space would be remiss if we didn’t remind you to keep a thought for the green and brown teams and all those tasty army and police babes. While standing a watch over the disobedient little people might be morally preferable to servicing her boss to get her next promotion, it’s sure to be physically and mentally exhausting. So she’s going to be that much more suggestible to your offers of some TLC.

The Army and Police have fitness standards, and sensibly hire and promote based on looks like so many organizations here. You can be confident that there’s a body worth protecting under that body armor; she just needs your guidance to make her feel like a real woman again.

So many great opportunities can present themselves, even in the trenches. For example, not many days ago, Team Red sent many Buddhist monks to the front lines in response to a threatened baton charge. The authorities responded by sending female soldiers and cops to the front lines and the monks retreated because it’s not permitted for them to allow a woman to touch them.

Should a replay of this scenario occur, it’s a golden opportunity for the smart G-girler to step in and benefit when the monks step aside. As your target Thai Army girl or policewomen steps forward with her hands raised, it’s time to shove Phra Somchai behind you — elbow him in the face if you must, but preserve his mojo at all costs! Thai culture must be respected!

Then with your new paratrooper paramour in front of you, embrace her tightly and don’t let go. We all know how to cop a feel, but how would it feel to cop a feel from a cop? If she tries to cuff you, it’s just foreplay. Whisper sweetly in her ear to let her know exactly what you’ve got in mind.

This is a win for some many: those who like it a little rough, the uniform fetishists and particularly the exhibitionists because every camera will be on you. Just try getting that kind of ego boost and overall value anywhere on the Reservation with Big Whitey.

In closing we have to remind everyone that you need to be careful in what you do and say as you go mongering. And this is particularly true when passing barricades and checkpoints.

There’s no need to be cock-blocked just because you encounter someone with a badge, firearm or cudgel. Simply breeze by them with a smile (the essential currency of Thailand), a nod and a loud, proud statement: “I’m just here for the sex!”

That will let them know just where they stand — they’ll back down when they understand that you can be every bit as doctrinaire as they — gain you “face”, and admit you to a world of pleasures unknown to the benighted slobs in the farang ghetto.