Send Lawyers, Guns and Bodybags.
I am standing on Ekamai Road in Bangkok where four years ago Thai Tourist Police stopped a British National and asked the gentleman for his passport. The Brit, a big boy, politely told the cops he would have to retrieve his passport from his nearby apartment. One of the police officers accompanied the Brit to his apartment.
While our large stalwart Englishman was looking through his stuff, searching for his passport, the Thai Tourist Policeman became curious about the presence of a commercial grade freezer in the apartment. Upon opening the freezer, the surprised policeman discovered a dismembered human corpse within the ice box. All hell broke loose.
The big Brit overpowered the diminutive Thai lawman, disarmed him and shot the policeman in the hip with his own gun. Hearing the gunfire, the three other policeman waiting outside came to their comrade’s relief and arrested the gun grabbing expat. But that’s not what I am here to talk about.
The story about the dismembered body and the injured policman made international news. I put a link at the end of this essay to one of the news stories if you are interested.
I am here to tell the story of Bob the baker and Stanley the bookie. But Bob and Stanley’s life may have taken a different path were it not for the big Brit gun grabber and the curious Thai policman.
“By the time I arrive here at your pizza place Stanley, I really do feel like a handsome man” I said to Stanley sardonically.
“Six massage shops and a pizzeria” replied Stanley without irony.
For those uniformed about Bangkok’s backstreets, a common inquiry used by Thai massage girls to get the attention of passing expats is “handsome man, where you go”? Stanley’s newly opened pizzeria was at the dead end of seedy alleyway in Bangkok containing six massage shops, and oh yeah, now too, a pizzeria.
“Why on earth would you open a pizza shop here”, I asked? Stanley smiled and began telling a story of how seemingly unrelated events cause unpredictable consequences.
Stanley is from New York City. While Stanley had a respectable day job back in the nineties, he was also a bookie, that’s a New York colloquialism for someone who facilitates illgal gambling. Stanley first visited Thailand with his day job in the mid nineties. Stanley fell in love with Thailand for lots of reasons, the food, the girls, the friendly culture, the low cost of living and, yeah, lots and lots of gamblers. When Stanley retired from his day job, he moved to Bangkok bringing along his unique skill set to a city with a somewhat small and highly corrupt police force. Did I mention lots of gamblers?
I met Stanley in 2016 when I stopped into his sandwich shop in Bangkok. Stanley’s resturaunt was a little overpriced. But Stanley served New York style cuisine, well, cuisine sound a bit fancy. Stanley served stuff like Ruben Sandwiches, comfort food for a New Yorker like myself.
I visited Stanley’s shop weekly. It was a congenial place. The same patrons seemed to always be present, a circumstance I simply thought to be a desire on the part of Stanley’s customers to be around other expats. One day while chatting with Stanley I used the word “vig” in a sentence. Vig is slang for interest a borrower would pay to a loan shark. While often heard outside of New York City, vig is very much New York street slang. Stanley took my use of the word as a signal that he could tell me about his real business, gambling. Suddenly the similarity amongst Stanley’s patrons, along with the several large TV monitors all tuned to sports channels in the small restaurant made sense.
I’m not a gambler. But I do not object to it. I found it fascinating that a New York, street wise bookie would be able to transplant himself successfully into a foreign city and thrive.
Let us returnt to my tale of Stanley’s new pizzeria. I had come to wish him well on this new venture. Enthralled, I was about to learn how Stanley came to be the proprietor of a pizzeria in Bangkok on a dead end street with six massage shops.
Bob was one of Stanley’s regular customers. He used to buy sandwiches too. Bob came to Thailand from the United States and had been in Bangkok for six months. Like many of us, he had fallen in love with Bangkok and was trying to figure out a way to stay, make a living, and live comfortably in Thailand’s City of Angels. Noticing how difficult it was to find New York style bagels, Bob decided to open a bakery, a bagel shop. Bob’s intended customers were resturaunts. Given his target market was commercial, Bob could seek out a less expensive shop away from the expensive main thoroughfares filled with tourists. He found the perfect place down a dead end back alley housing six other businesses, massage shops.
Opening a small business in a country where you are a citizen is challenging. Local zoning, permits, health and safety compliance are a few issues that come to mind. In Bangkok an American can add to that list of issues things like immigration laws, visas and work permits all needing to be acquired in a land where the officials speak a tonal Asian language with several dialects. Contracts are written in a script with forty-two vowels and twice as many consonants, all of which evolved from ancient Sanskrit.
Bakeries also need equipment, big, expensive things like commercial ovens, mixers and stuff. And while I am no expert in the global specialty-food supply chain, I suspect getting your hands on the ingredients required to make proper New York bagels is hard. That is most likely the reason New York bagels are scarce in Bangkok.
Bob was more a visionary than a details guy. After signing a lease for a space on a dead end street with six massage shops, the bagel build-out went down hill from there. Within six weeks, work on the shop had barely begun and Bob was out of money. Bob asked Stanley for advice and a loan.
Stanley introduced Bob to a Thai contrator who could complete the work and was willing to work for sweat equity. Bob took the contractor in as a partner. Stanley lent Bob enough money to get the job done, with a vig.
Another six weeks went by and the bagel shop was still a long way away from anything that resembles an enterprise with incoming revenue. Bob had become an ill tempered, demanding and an unreasonable manager of the build-out. The Thai contractor cut his losses and disappeared. Stanley began making inquiries regarding interest payments.
Bob, once again, was out of money and screwed.
No one knows for sure why the Thai Tourist Police arrived near Bob’s apartment above the nascent bagel shop. But arrive they did one day and stopped Bob as he was leaving his apartment asking to see his passport. In addition to an entitled and grumpy disposition and poor management skills, Bob did not like cops. Bob responded to the cops.
“Fuck off, I don’t have to show you shit”.
Ah yeah, you do. In Thailand it is perfectly legal, polite and routine for police to ask obvious foreigners for their passports. Sorry Bob. And while the cops may not have fully understood the meaning of Bob’s words, they could hear the music. And, there are few places in the world where “fuck” is not understood.
Thai police are not usually agressive. Thai people in general seek to save face and solve disputes without rancor. The gentlemen questioning Bob were, however, cops. Bob was quickly handcuffed and convinced producing a passport was his best option.
“ I don’t have my passport with me. I have to go back to my apartment and get it. You can come with me”.
Ah yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.
One can only speculate as to how things may have unfolded for Bob and Stanley if eighteen months prior to Bob’s encounter with the Thai Tourist Police, a Tourist Policeman had not been disarmed, shot and humiliated by a big bruiser of a Brit who stored body parts in his kitchen. And while disarmed and shot are not good, such actions can sometimes be overlooked by Thai Police. Humiliated is another affair.
Had visionary Bob simply responded politely, there may have been a different ending to our story as well. Bob was arrested and detained. Within forty-eight hours Bob found himself on a plane ride back to the United States.
Stanley became the owner of a partially completed bakery. Stanley doesn’t like bagels. He finished off the shop as a pizzeria with lot of TVs showing sports.
In February 2020, Stanley left Bangkok for a visit to New York, expecting to return to Bangkok within a few weeks. Stanley is still in New York. The massage shops and pizzeria are no more. The unknown and unanticipated vagaries of an apathetic Universe now have us all perplexed and waiting for the next surprise in this comedy of events called life.
