Big Mango Bar
drink and blog

Banglamung’s Pattaya Circus #4: Dumb Farangs & Crooked Thai Guys

Posted by Banglamung | Blog, Pattaya, Reader Submissions | Posted on September 9th, 2009

I’m baaaaak! Yes, returned from the “Land of the Lost” to the “Land of Smiles,” Banglamung is here to make fun of Pattaya once again. A lot sure has happened since I took off in June, so this post is a bit long, but there’s lots of good gossip and amazing news, including bits on farang drug dealers, animal acts, Thai thiefs masquerading as bar managers, coyotes and Coyotee’s, and one scary account of a farang getting the crap kicked out of him.

Farang Drug Dealers

You have to be a complete moron to come to Thailand and decide to take up drug dealing. Pattaya’s cops obviously have had enough of it, busting three farangs in the past week alone for slinging crystal meth, ecstasy and heroin.

Two of these clowns – 48-year-old Nigel Bickel and 21-year-old Julien Vignerow – earned their living selling to partiers in Walking Street discos. Bickel, an Englishman caught with 100 ecstasy tablets, had two Thai guys working for him. When busted with 6 grams of the same drug, they quickly dimed out the farang as the ‒brains” of the operation.

As for the young French guy, he was busted with 2.2 grams of ‒ya ice” in his parents’ Lion King guesthouse and beer bar on Soi 6 … for the second time! His parents had already bailed him out of jail after being arrested for selling crystal meth last year. We’ll see if they come through again.

As for the third guy – an ex-Foreign Tourist Police Assistant from Norway kicked out of the volunteer squad six months ago after a background check turned up a shady past – he was busted with 40 grams of heroin and a loaded gun, then hauled off directly to Bangkok.

John Johansen, who owns the ‒John in Pattaya” visa service and Ingo’s Restaurant on Third Road, tried to wriggle out of his arrest at the El Paso Steakhouse by saying he was still a foreign police volunteer and knew a lot of police bigwigs. But the real volunteer squad quickly put as much light between themselves and Johansen as possible.

FTPA group leader and Pattaya TV news broadcaster Howard Miller said in a statement that Johansen was kicked out of the Tourist Police assistants after the group’s background checks were overhauled about six months ago.

‒Unfortunately, with any volunteer organization, regardless of nationality, some will try and join for their own gain and others will use their position as a cover for activities outside of the law,” Miller said. ‒If he was a current member of the FTPA and had been caught, this would have been devastating for our group and its members who tirelessly assist tourists on Walking Street seven nights a week.”

Of course, there’s still that matter of the drug dealers in the discos…

Craving Attention

As we all know, Pattaya has no dearth of strange farangs. But among the strangest are the guys who think they need some gimmick to win the passions of a hooker. There’s the old guy on the Pattaya Secrets message board who thinks he’s Sammy Davis Jr. and has to play candyman and give lollipops to all the women he meets. Then there’s the sad sack American psychotherapist who strolls down Walking Street passing out roses to random streetwalkers.

Then there’s this. Yes, those are actually birds on his shoulder. And he is sitting inside a go-go bar where another species of bird flocks to his table … to ignore him. They love the avians. They can’t stand the guy.

Taking Sand to the Beach

When it first opened, Beach Club was the first table-dancing go-go and an immediate smash. Copied by just about everyone — until they began copying Jacuzzis — the bar was known to have fallen quite a bit since its heyday, but apparently things are tougher than thought. The bar now has put two sexy coyote dancers outside and pumped some of the high-emergy music inside to the outdoor patio. Not a bad sight to see while eating your chicken and rice at the plastic tables on Soi 15.

Sin City’s Top Sinner

The financial black hole on the first floor of the Covent Garden complex where no fewer than four go-go bars have tried their luck must be cursed, as only complete idiots have ever opened bars there. The latest of these is the French guy who runs the pathetic Sin City go-go, which has now lasted slightly longer than the two months X-Zone 2 lasted, but likely will never survive as long as the previously ill-fated Taboo and Babe Watch which used the same space.

The reason behind the prediction of certain doom is the unending faith and trust the frog has placed in his Thai manager, who he pulled out of Club Boesche across the corridor. Like most Thai guys, he has a warm welcoming smile and one hand holding a knife behind his back and the other hand in your wallet.

‒Kamoy,” as we’ll call him, first came into Sin City and quickly stocked up on staff, adding 60 people to the payroll. Great, right? Not really, considering 30 of them were service girls! This for a bar the size of The Big Mango’s first floor. Maybe smaller.

Then, once open, the bar started falling victim to the local plod. Frenchie, you see, didn’t know any local cops and refused on principle to pay any of them off. So Kamoy simply let the boys in brown know there were many sins being committed, such as a Jacuzzi lesbian show, naked showgirls and the like.

Very concerned, the boss turned to Kamoy who suggested he hire a ‒security manager” from a prominent police bar hangout. Great idea! Too bad the security manager was not one of the cop bar’s security guards or even an off-duty police, but, in fact, a singer in the bar’s band.. and one of Kamoy’s mates.

By now the first month is done and salaries are due: about 460,000 baht worth of salary. Of course, that’s on top of 70,000 baht rent, electric, water for the Jacuzzi, etc. With basically no one in Covent Garden these days, it’s not hard to imagine just how short the boss was.

To his credit, he fired all but four of the service staff, canned the security manager and started paying off the cops. But Kamoy is still running the ship, so the sinking won’t be long now, especially if he continues tossing customers to the wolves, as he did below.

Bubba Gets Blindsided

Late one night last month a friend was sitting with one of the few attractive girls in Sin City when Kamoy came up and told him police were coming and he had to pay the bin. The girl, who saw it wasn’t even 3 a.m. yet (the bar closes at 3:30) was miffed but Kamoy told her in Thai to shut up and that there were some guys who wanted my friend outside.

‒Bubba,” as I’ll call him, was quite intoxicated. He had no idea the fate about to befall him. Happy and ready for sleep, he strolled out the door and met a Thai guy who told him he’d take him back to his house. ‒Sure, no problem!” That was until, five paces up Soi 16, he was suddenly pounced and pounded on by four Thai guys.

Bubba sustained a blackened and swollen eye behind which blood has pooled and, weeks later, has not disappeared. He also got a cracked rib, badly bruised hand, knot in his lip and more bruises to the head.

He actually has very few memories of what happened, due in part to drink and in part to blows to the head. He only knows he woke up alone in his own bed with his wallet and phone undisturbed, but other items in his pockets broken. His pants and shirt were soaked, as if he fell into a puddle. But he has no memory of how the fight ended – other than him trying to run away – and who, if anyone, helped him and drove him home.

He found out later through his go-go girl friend that the Thai guy who came in the bar said Bubba has smacked around a girl in Insomnia disco. He swears that not only has he not even been in the late-night disco in more than six weeks that, in his life, has never hit a woman.

His only thought was that it’s either a case of mistaken identity by some Insomnia ‒security” thugs or the result of a tale of BS from a Sin City girl he’d previously had a financial disagreement with. But the girl in question was off that night, so she wouldn’t have known he was there. Maybe.

Not a word was said by the Thai guys, so he doesn’t know for sure. But what he does know is that no warning was provided by manager Kamoy, who had known Bubba for three years and always greeted with that same warm smile.

Pattaya’s ‘Jacuzzi Tax’

Times are tough not only for bars, hotels and other Pattaya businesses, but the cops as well. Police this past week have been stopping everything that moves on two wheels to ding people – mostly farangs – for driving without driver’s licenses and passports. It seems everyone pretty much wears helmets these days, so the usual 200 baht in fines has been drying up. Time for find new income sources.

Same goes with the boys in brown patrolling the nightlife areas. The Banglamung District cops, which outrank the local Pattaya city police through some convoluted system, have decided they’re not getting a big enough cut of the pie these days. As Pattaya Ghost reported last month, the Banglamung (no relation) plod was the ones closing bars for a week at 3 a.m. and fining violators. Now they’ve got new scheme, so far unseen in Pattaya: The Jacuzzi Tax.

You’d be kidding yourself if you thought the cops didn’t know what was happening in go-go hot tubs but, until now, they’ve been pretty lenient, as long as they didn’t see the action. The Banglamung cops have taken it to a new level, however, hitting all go-gos with Jacuzzis with a ‒one time” fee in order to keep the showers steamy.

Just in case you thought I was done with ‒Kamoy” over at Sin City, he’s got a role in this story too. Seems Kamoy was hit up by the Banglamung cops for the Jacuzzi Tax and told the boss he had to pay 30,000 baht. The boss went nuts and conferred with the head man at Club ‒we had the first Jacuzzi, so there” Boesche who told him he was an idiot (big surprise there) and that the fee can be negotiated down to 2,000 baht.

With Boesche help, Sin City’s French guy goes to the cops and finds out they told Kamoy the fee was only 20,000 baht. That’s right. The manager tried to take 10,000 for himself.

In the end, Sin City ended up paying 4,000 baht, about the same as the multitude of go-gos paid for a ‒one time” fee that likely will only be ‒one time” until the duty rotation changes at the Banglamung Police Station.

‘Child Prostitution’ and ‘Human Trafficking’

Scary terms in that subhead. Imagine you getting arrested and charged with both. That’s exactly what happened last month to Trevor James ‒T.J.” Hawley, co-owner of the Coyotee’s go-go bar. Lots of sources – news and self-proclaimed expert nightlife columnists in Pattaya and Bangkok – but none of them got the real story. That’s what I’m here for.

The facts are pretty simple. Cops raid bar, arrest boss, mamasan and a bunch of girls then invite in the Thai media at the police station while everyone shouts scandal and whispers bribe to settle the whole mess before the bar reopens the next day.

In the end, go-go raids are pretty common fare. Rocket go-go was raided the same weekend with much less fanfare. So what was special about Coyotee’s? It was an inside job.

A couple months ago Hawley and his partner sacked the then-mamasan and all their girls and brought in a new staff. Except for the Thai guy manager. (Sense a theme here?). Last month they realized the error of their ways and gave the Thai guy the boot as well. As payback, he went to the cops with some news they for once did not know: Coyotee’s has secret short time rooms.

Unlike Soi 6 brothels and some beer bars, go-gos are not supposed to have short-time rooms. Actually, no bars are supposed to have them, but the cops are particularly strict about go-gos having them. So while you’ll find some on Walking Street with bonking rooms on premises – I’ll let others name them – go-go owners (especially farang ones) get particularly upset at having that fact advertised.

Coyotee’s has operated a couple rooms for years. To get inside, you had to enter a stall in the men’s room and push on a wall which was, in fact, a small door leading to a stairway to heaven. (The cops know about it now, so I can tell you.)

Adding insult to injury, the Thai guy also let it be known Coyotee’s – like just about every go-go in town – employs some girls who’ve yet to reach their 18^th birthday. The cops nabbed two 17-year-olds – one whom they caught in the boom-boom room — and slapped down the ‒child prostitution” charge. They hit the trifecta when they found one of the girls they busted was actually an illegal Cambodian immigrant, so now comes the “human trafficking” allegation.

So, in the end, a pretty bad night for T.J., but despite some sensationalist charges, it was back to normal the next night.

Bonking Your Birds

Finally, did you ever wonder why some guys buy go-go bars? In some cases, it’s to secure a stable of new girls to bonk.

Sisterz go-go was recently sold to the owner of Living Dolls Showcase and Dollhouse along with a partner involved in one of those bars. While Tom and Greg, the former team at Sisterz, maintained a strict policy where they sewed their seeds in other bars than their own, the new regime doesn’t have the same ethics. And it didn’t take long. I asked one young lass what she thought of the new owner shortly after the handover and she promptly replied, ‒He boom boom me already! And my friend too!”