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.)