Salzburg. He was in his late sixties and in my experience there’s no fool like an old fool, especially when there are Thai girls around. But Helmut had been a frequent visitor to the Land of Smiles over the years and from what he told me he knew how things worked. He’d picked up a Thai wife a couple of decades earlier and together they had set up a Thai restaurant. That was par for the course. Bargirls always seem to think that they can cook and half the Thai restaurants in Europe have been set up by girls who started life dancing around silver poles. In my humble opinion that’s the reason why Thai food outside Thailand is generally so bad. Helmut’s wife wasn’t a great cook, he admitted, and she wasn’t a fan of hard work. They’d soon separated and he hadn’t seen her for years but Helmut had been bitten by the restaurant bug and decided to stick with it.
He started to recruit chefs and waitressing staff from Thailand and with the missus out of the kitchen the food, and the takings, soon improved. Before long he had a chain of very successful restaurants in Austria and was making regular trips to Thailand to recruit staff. On one of his recent trips he’d met a thirty-something woman called Mem who had been put forward as a possible manageress. She was from Khon Kaen but her husband had walked out on her so she’d moved to Bangkok to work and support her daughter who was a student at one of the city’s universities. She’s worked in catering for almost a decade and Helmut didn’t think twice about hiring her to run one of his restaurants. She was an attractive woman and soon became Helmut’s live-in girlfriend and eventually his wife. He emailed me a picture and she seemed a good sort.
Over the years Helmut gave her more of his restaurants to manage and he started spending more time looking after his other business interests. Once Mem’s daughter had graduated, Mem started visiting her in Thailand several times a year. It was when she returned from her latest trip Helmut started to smell a rat. He found a receipt for a gold bracelet worth 50,000 baht. Helmut knew that she’d only taken a small amount of money with her and nothing had shown up on any of his credit card statements. Helmut asked Mem about the bracelet-she told him that it was a present for her daughter and that it had only cost 5,000 baht but that she’d asked for a receipt for ten times as much so that she could have it insured for much more. That sounded like nonsense to Helmut, so then Mem told him that the 50,000-baht receipt would give her more face with the staff in the restaurant. That made a bit more sense because face is hugely important to Thais, but even so it was a red flag that something might be amiss so he’d gone trawling through the internet and found my website. Helmut wanted me to pay a visit to the jeweller’s store to check how much his wife had paid for the bracelet. That’s what he wanted, but of course there was more to it. He wanted to know whether or not she’d lied to him. And if she had lied, that would open up a whole new can of worms.
Anyway, he sent me a scan of the receipt and wired a retainer to my bank account. The jeweller’s was a small shop in the Big C department store complex in Ratchaparohp Road. I paid the shop a visit and told the lady in charge that my Thai friend had brought a lovely bracelet there and that I wanted something similar. I showed her the receipt and the woman said that she remembered the sale. The lady had brought the bracelet for her daughter but it had been a one-off and if I wanted a similar one it would have to be made to order and that would take a few weeks.
I told her that I was still a bit confused by Thai money. Had it cost 5,000 or 50,000? The woman laughed and said it was definitely 50,000-the bracelet was solid gold with real diamonds.
I emailed Helmut with the news that his wife had indeed paid out 50,000 baht. He said he’d do a little auditing on the home front and get back to me. A week later he got back to me. There were discrepancies in the accounts of a couple of the restaurants that Mem was managing. And the takings of her restaurants seemed to be well below the levels of the others in the chain. He was pretty sure that she was skimming money, but he wanted to be one hundred per cent sure before he confronted her. He had the number of her bank account in Bangkok- would I be able to get a copy of her statement? I said that in Thailand anything was possible providing you had enough money. Helmut said that money was no object and he wired me the funds.
I had a good contact within the bank that Mem used and for half the money that Helmut sent I was able to get a digital photograph of the screen showing her account. It contained a very modest 30,000 baht, which meant that she was hiding her ill-gotten gains elsewhere.
Then I got another email from Helmut. He had spoken to a trusted member of his staff, who told him that Mem had mentioned building a new home in Khon Kaen. Helmut wanted me to carry on digging and he agreed to send me enough cash to cover me for two more days.
I took a plane to Khon Kaen and hired a taxi driver at local rates once I’d shown that I was fluent in his Isarn dialect. Our first stop was the area municipal office where all housing plans have to be registered. It didn’t take long for me to ascertain that Mem was indeed having a new dwelling built. The land ownership office was along the corridor and it only took another fifteen minutes to find out who owned the land where Mem was building the house. It belonged to Mem’s former husband. And that was most definitely a red flag that something was rotten in the state of Austria. Or Khon Kaen, anyway.
I got the driver to run me out to the site, expecting to see the usual Thai home being built-a slab of concrete acting as a foundation, a living room and a kitchen with one or two bedrooms and a bathroom, total cost about 100,000 baht. What I found was a mansion under construction with more than a dozen young workers scurrying around under the watchful eye of a middle-aged foreman wearing a Chang Beer baseball cap.
I wandered over and told the foreman that I was impressed by the quality of his work and that I was also thinking of having a house built. Thais are as susceptible to flattery as anyone and he was quite happy to tell me that Miss Mem’s mansion had a two million baht price tag. That was quite reasonable by European standards, but it would make it the most expensive house in the village by a long way. The foreman was busy and didn’t have time to chat, but he was happy enough for me to take a few pictures with my digital camera. I headed back into town, booked into a hotel and emailed the pictures to Helmut.
My driver picked me up at eight o’clock in the evening and we headed back to the building site with a couple of dozen bottles of Chang Beer and several bags of fried grasshoppers. As I’d suspected, the foreman had gone home leaving his workers camped around the site. My beer and snacks were well received and I sat down with them and started chatting in their native Isarn. They had seen the wealthy Thai woman who was building the house, but didn’t know her name. She lived abroad, was married to the village headman and would soon be returning to live in the house with her husband. It looked as if poor old Helmut was being well and truly shafted. I figured that as soon as the house was finished, Mem intended to take as much money as she could from Helmut and hightail it back to Khon Kaen.
I left the labourers with the beer and insects and went back to the hotel to send another email to Helmut. I didn’t tell him the bad news about Mem but asked him to email me with any bank details he had for his stepdaughter. I figured that Mem had to be getting Helmut’s money into the country somehow, and she clearly wasn’t using her own account.
I spent a very enjoyable evening in a local disco entertaining a bevy of beauties at Helmut’s expense, and woke with a major hangover at midday, too late to enjoy the hotel’s complimentary buffet breakfast. I wandered down to a Dunkin Donuts outlet, stocked up on coffee and carbohydrates, and then visited an internet cafA©. There was an email from Helmut waiting for me. He’d sent money to his stepdaughter’s account in Khon Kaen a few years earlier so he had her account details. I went to the branch shortly after they opened and played the part of a dumb farang. I spotted a rather plain middle-aged Thai woman, waied her and gave her one of my winning smiles and a box of imported chocolates. I asked her if she spoke English and she said a little. I said she spoke it really well and we were soon on great terms.
I gave her Mem’s daughter’s full name, address and account number and explained that my brother had just transferred a large amount of money to the account to pay for the construction of his new home. I said that I had spoken to the site foreman who had complained that his men’s wages hadn’t been paid. My new best friend dutifully keyed in the details and I saw her eyebrows head skywards.
‘How much he send?’ she asked me.
I shrugged and took a stab at one million.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘There is twenty million baht in the account but no transfer this week.’
Twenty million was a big chunk of change, all right. I gave the cashier another winning smile and said that there was no problem, that she was probably waiting to earn some interest before paying the workers, and that all was well with the world.
I didn’t tell Helmut how easy it had been to check his stepdaughter’s account, of course. There’s no point in letting the client think that the job’s easy. And besides, it had been a quiet month. I stayed in Khon Kaen for another day at Helmut’s expense and went back to see the cuties at the local disco, and then sent him a full report
