SHHH

Hash Cheesecake - courtesy of BaliHite

Thai sex king sees staid new world
By Seth Mydans 
New York Times
July 31, 2003 

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 parlors 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 black 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, 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. 

"I have donated items for their comfort, including tables and chairs, not to mention computers and refrigerators," Chuwit told delighted local reporters. 

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. Holding news conferences, waving his arms, kneeling in prayer, sealing his mouth with masking tape, saying he had been kidnapped by police officers and then rolling on the ground to show reporters how it happened - Chuwit, it turns out, is a one-man entertainment venue all by himself. 

Chuwit may not be naming names - not yet - but he is tossing around broad hints in what one paper said had become 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 parlors, 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 Nos. 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 parlors in the past, but he gave that up long ago. 

All of this was pocket change compared with Chuwit's dealings with a police station in District H, where he said monthly payoffs followed a regular formula. 

About $2,000 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. 

Inspectors pocketed $85 and deputy inspectors $50, he said, which is not bad for a Thai civil servant. 

Altogether, Chuwit said, he was paying the police $300,000 a month to stay in business. "I was willing to pay, and they gladly obliged." People don't write receipts for this sort of thing and Chuwit admitted the other day that "I don't have any real proof." 

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 the prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, himself a former police lieutenant colonel who is now a 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 parlors. 

The national police chief, Sant Sarutanond, offered a curious defense of his officers, saying he was sure that "more than half" of them were honest. 

According to the National Police, there are 103 registered massage parlors in Bangkok, each employing 100 to 500 women, although in Thailand statistics like that often don't mean much. 

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. They discovered that many of the women who worked there - those with "beauty and erotic skills" - earned a great deal more than the reporters did. 

Among the people most upset by Chuwit's allegations was the deputy director general of the Excise Department, Wichit Wongwiwat. "The department cannot tolerate reports that the tax we collect is lower than the money paid to the police," he said. 

He said he would assign 13 teams of inspectors to investigate the city's massage parlors and, as he put it, "try the services offered."