Flashermac Posted August 21, 2003 Report Share Posted August 21, 2003 Confessions of Sin Dubbed Thailand's 'king of commercial sex,' Chuvit Kamolvisit has a new role--exposing police graft By Rodney Tasker FEER, August 28, 2003 AT THE COPACABANA massage parlour in Bangkok, young women sit in tiers with numbers on their dresses, staring out blankly at punters through a plate-glass window. The customer chooses one (or more) of them by number, and spends the next two hours with her for a minimum 2,000 baht ($48). Just behind the Copacabana are the offices of the man who owns it, Chuvit Kamolvisit. Sitting in his cluttered office, the unsmiling accountancy graduate from Bangkok's prestigious Thammasat University admits the Copacabana's services don't end at massage. "Look," he says. "Here you have a man and a girl together in a room. I can't open the door and take a look every 10 minutes." To the Thai media, Chuvit is "the king of commercial sex." But to many middle-class Thais, he's become something else: An unlikely folk hero. For the past two months, Chuvit has been staging a one-man campaign to expose police corruption. How does he know about it? Because for almost a decade now, he claims, his 1.5-billion-baht massage empire has been lavishing bribes, gifts and free services on police officers: "I am a businessman," he says. "I always pay the police." Chuvit's relationship with the police turned sour in April, when he learned he was about to be arrested over the illegal demolition in January of a strip of bars and tourist shops on land that he owns in Bangkok. He was arrested, and spent May in jail. Chuvit, however, claimed he had been arrested for refusing to pay higher police bribes. By the time he got out of jail, he was ready to take some high-profile revenge. And, since early July, he's done just that, earning himself an almost permanent spot on Thailand's front pages. In July, for instance, he showed up at the residence of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a former police lieutenant colonel, armed with a list of 1,000 police officers, including 10 generals, whom he says he bribed with up to 12 million baht a month over the past eight years to keep them away from his six massage parlours. Why did he call on Thaksin? "I have no choice but to trust him," says Chuvit. "He is prime minister and an ex-cop." The prime minister wasn't in. Then, earlier this month, Chuvit hired a theatre in Bangkok for a sold-out one-man show. On stage, Chuvit talked about police bribery and his life, without so much as a joke, standing in front of eight girls posing as masseuses behind a glass wall. Other Chuvit stunts have included being photographed bare-chested to show his readiness for his fight with the police, and publishing books, including one about his jail stint, Confessions of Sin, subtitled One Day I'll Commit Suicide. But he's also had to face his own claims of wrongdoing. On top of the accusation that he masterminded the destruction of the bar strip in January as part of a revenge attack on lessees, he is accused of hiring underage workers for his massage parlours, and of lying over his claim that he was abducted for two days by police. For the Thai media, it's all amazing stuff. But Chuvit's campaign is also serving a useful purpose, comments Pasuk Phongpaichit, a professor of economics at Chulalongkorn University and co-author of the book Guns, Girls, Gambling, Ganja. "Everyone knows the corruption is going on. But Chuvit has been drawing more attention to it because he's so entertaining." Entertaining he may be, yet Chuvit knows that by taking on the police, he's flirting with danger--and possibly a "disappearance." That's why he's keeping a high profile. "I stay with the press, because I have to keep my life," says Chuvit. "If I stay in the news, the police don't protect me--the press protect me." As for claims he's being used by top military figures who want to get at the police, Chuvit says, "I don't think so." Asked how he sees the saga panning out, Chuvit is cryptic: "This a war movie, not a family movie, and someone gets dead at the end." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elef Posted August 21, 2003 Report Share Posted August 21, 2003 Hi, he must be a soothsayer "August 28, 2003"! :: elef Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yehtmae Posted August 21, 2003 Report Share Posted August 21, 2003 Hmmm.... Mr Tasker is playing with fire again. I thought he was still 'on probation' about his last article concerning things that upset 'the establishment' Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
limbo Posted August 21, 2003 Report Share Posted August 21, 2003 It;s very interesting indeed. He's naming people by name and a few policeman have been positioned in 'harmless' positions since he strated to expose them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted August 21, 2003 Report Share Posted August 21, 2003 Good for Mr. Tasker, although I suspect Shawn Crispin had more to do with this article. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mentors Posted August 21, 2003 Report Share Posted August 21, 2003 just a thai soap opera or better to say s(h)itcom :onfire: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
harlequinbkk Posted August 24, 2003 Report Share Posted August 24, 2003 Below is an article from the New York Times about Mr. Chuwit, similiar to the FEER article, but with a few additional interesting details. For example, you will all be relieved to know that over 50% of cops in Thailand are honest. ---------------------------- Sex tycoon tells (almost) all SETH MYDANS NEW YORK TIMES BANGKOK?The sheer injustice. Nobody had worked harder to pay off the police with wine, women, wristwatches and sacks full of cash. And now this. "I'm like a mad dog now and I'll bite anyone," said Chuwit Kamolvisit, the owner of six industrial-size massage parlours who is proud to be known as Thailand's sex tycoon. "I used to buy whole trays of Rolex watches for police officers," he said in one of his almost daily news conferences. "I used to carry cash in black plastic bags for them. But they are still harassing me." In the dim netherworld of Thailand's shadow economy, it is hard to know just who is doing what to whom. But somehow Chuwit seems to have lost his immunity and the tell-all ruckus he is raising has the country transfixed. All at once, after 10 years of bribes that he says added up to $2.5 million (all figures U.S.), Chuwit has been accused of involvement in the midnight bulldozing of a rival's entertainment plaza and of procuring underage girls to perform what is politely called massage. That is not how it's supposed to work. If a corrupt society is to function smoothly, each party has to do its part. The protectors have to protect. Play fast and loose and a sex tycoon with bright shirts, a thin moustache and darting eyes could start shaking out your pockets. "I have donated items for their comfort, including tables and chairs, not to mention computers and refrigerators," Chuwit told delighted local reporters at a recent scrum. Also car maintenance, home repair, boxing tickets, golf memberships, bowling and, of course, free pleasure at Victoria's Secret, Honolulu, Hi-Class, Emmanuelle, Copacabana and Sea of Love. None of this comes as a surprise to anybody. Corruption is so thoroughly entwined in public life here that, if it were pulled up by the roots, society might fall apart. "Most Thais, from the wealthiest businessman to the poorest street beggar, have close personal experience of police corruption," the daily Bangkok Post said in a recent editorial. Scholars who study this kind of thing say the country's illegal economy ? drugs, gambling, prostitution, protection and human trafficking ? is as much as one-third the size of the mainstream legal economy. So the daily Chuwit show is not so much a scandal in Thailand as an entertainment. Holding news conferences, waving his arms, kneeling in prayer, sealing his mouth with masking tape, claiming to have been kidnapped by police officers and rolling on the ground to show reporters how it happened ? Chuwit, it turns out, is a boffo entertainment venue all by himself. "He's selling a lot of newspapers," wrote a columnist with the pseudonym Chang Noi in the English-language Nation daily. "He's raising the ratings on the evening news. We want to know what he'll reveal next. We want to know if he's still alive. This is one helluva show, folks. This is reality TV, Thai style." Chuwit may not be naming names ? not yet, anyway ? but he is tossing around broad hints in what one paper calls a sort of national quiz show. There is the greedy police station commander whose name begins with T, the "tall commander" who owns stakes in two massage parlours and the man named S who took $5 million to gamble in Macao and turned up dead. There are Inspector T, Captain S and Deputy Noon, who took regular kickbacks and there are the four unidentified police colonels who visited the Copacabana and enjoyed the free services of masseuses Numbers 107, 130, 137 and 299. By the way, there are also three cabinet members ? whose names begin with S, P and P ? who are regular visitors and receive expensive cases of wine. Not me, the deputy interior minister, Pracha Maleenont, quickly said. He may have visited massage parlours in the past, but he gave that up long ago. All of this is pocket change compared with Chuwit's dealings with a police station in District H, where he says monthly payoffs followed a regular formula. Two thousand dollars went to the superintendent, he said, $1,250 to deputy superintendents in crime suppression, $500 to deputy superintendents in investigation and $250 to deputy superintendents in the traffic division. Lower down the food chain, he said, inspectors pocketed $85 and deputy inspectors $50 ? which is not bad for a Thai civil servant. Altogether, Chuwit said, he was paying the police $300,000 a month so he could stay in business. "I was willing to pay, and they gladly obliged." People don't write receipts for this sort of thing and Chuwit recently admitted that "I don't have any real proof" ? Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss without a little black book. But that didn't seem to matter. The time had come for government leaders to voice their shock at this evidence of corruption. "I will give them my final word: Shape up or ship out," said Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a former police lieutenant-colonel turned telecommunications tycoon. If there is not enough evidence to prove legal guilt, he said, he will discipline the accused officers on the basis of Chuwit's allegations. Furthermore, he said, the entire force at police station H should be transferred to what he called "lower income stations," presumably in districts with fewer massage parlours. The national police chief, Sant Sarutanond, offered a curious defence of his officers' probity, saying he was sure that "more than half" of them were honest. In this see-no-evil society, where prostitution is illegal but ubiquitous, it is common for men to sit back after a good meal, stretch and say, "Let's go have a bath." According to the national police, there are 103 registered massage parlours in Bangkok, each employing 100 to 500 women ? although statistics like this often don't mean much in Thailand. In all the current fuss, the actual goings-on inside Chuwit's pleasure palaces have not become an issue. But some reporters from the Bangkok Post were assigned to take a look. What they discovered is that many of the women who worked there ? those with "beauty and erotic skills" ? earned a great deal more than they did. Two hours in a mid-level parlour might cost $30 to $40, they found. Upscale parlours charge $85, with half the money going to the masseuse, plus tips. Among the people most upset by Chuwit's allegations is the deputy director general of the tax department. "The department cannot tolerate reports that the tax we collect is lower than the money paid to the police," Wichit Wongwiwat said. Evidently taking a page from the police playbook, he said he would assign 13 teams of inspectors to investigate the city's massage parlours and "try the services offered" therein. "I must admit, this is new for the department," he added. On one recent Saturday, desperately seeking ways to get Chuwit to stop talking, officers from the police crime-suppression division tried without success to have him arrested for slander. Chuwit, who is becoming an expert at the game, fired back immediately. Every month, he said, he was paying the crime-suppression division $400 in bribes ? and he gave the initial of the lieutenant-colonel he said had been taking the money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted August 27, 2003 Report Share Posted August 27, 2003 I just got back from NYC, and to think that I missed this article. This is prime material for a posting on the 'fridge. There is alot of good stuff in the article, but there are two comments I like best. The first is the quote from Khun Pracha: Not me, the deputy interior minister, Pracha Maleenont, quickly said. He may have visited massage parlours in the past, but he gave that up long ago. In my office, I am convinced that virtually every male visits massage parlours; many on a weekly basis. Second, there is this gem from the PM: Furthermore, he said, the entire force at police station H should be transferred to what he called "lower income stations," presumably in districts with fewer massage parlours. Who says the New York Times doesn't have a sense of humour. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mentors Posted August 27, 2003 Report Share Posted August 27, 2003 I think chuwit and a lot of Thai Godfather listen daily a song from the Rock poser US-Band RATT. The song call "Money talk" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WarHammer Posted August 28, 2003 Report Share Posted August 28, 2003 Mentors - "I think chuwit and a lot of Thai Godfather listen daily a song from the Rock poser US-Band RATT. The song call 'Money talk'" Hmmm. I don't know a RATT song with that title. Are you sure about this? AC/DC has a song called Money Talks which I believe is off their CD called The Razors Edge. Pretty good song actually, at least in my opinion. RATT has a couple similarly themed songs such as "Body Talk" and "She Wants Money", but I can't remember a song by RATT called Money Talk? I dunno. Perhaps I am mistaken. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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