Private Dicks Spying on Bar Girls: Ladies Account

Let‘s consider the cases now of a bar girl who was hunted down by the private investigator for doing what comes naturally. I actually know people who were on both sides.

The first was an investigator who I’ll call Bert, who’d come to Thailand and had run out of money; largely having spent it in bars on booze and ladies. He was a cruiser of Bangkok venues like Nana Plaza, Thermae, Soi Cowboy, The Grace Hotel, Hard Rock Cafe, Novotel, Spazzo’s, Riva’s, The Soi 7 Beer Garden, and the beer and go-go bars in Patpong, so he was well versed in all the right places to find girls-on-the-game.
One day, bemoaning his lot, he was approached by a gay in a bar and asked if he’d like to spy on “errant girls” (his phrase) for their absent boyfriends who were sending money back to them from overseas. The idea was to find out if they’d kept their agreement not to return to the bars and if they went “off”. It was money for old rope, so obviously he agreed to become what he called a “ferret”, which is an animal that’s particularly good at hunting in secret places, so I’m told.
He apparently did 3 stages of checking-up. The first involved being equipped with a photo of the girl in question and then going around the bars she’d previously worked at and if she was found, actually visiting the girl’s bar in person to find out if she was bar-fineable. The investigator, let’s call him a Private Dick, goes back twice and takes photos with his phone to prove she’s working.
The second was for the Private Dick to actually pay the bar-fine and take the girl to a hotel. He told me they were supposed to make an excuse and leave before it came to sex, but quite often he did actually have sex. The Dick is also supposed to take photos inside the hotel, too.
The final stage was to discover whereabouts the girl lives and if she lived with anyone, not a friend which many do, but a Thai boyfriend, or even another farang. There are some around who are quite happy to live off the Thai girls and the money sent to them by the foreign lover, the same as Thai men. The Private Dick had a “whale of a time”, getting expenses, free drinks and sometimes getting sex for free by promising not to expose the girl to her foreign absentee boyfriend. He was doing what he’s always done, except this time he didn’t have to pay one baht. And he and the detective agency were ripping of their clients, charging on average about 15,000 baht a time. And they call Thai bar girls corrupt!
The next little story is about a very enterprising bar girl who had to “run the gauntlet” (a Private Dick’s phrase) of a private detective. Her name for this story is Daeng and she had a farang boyfriend from the US, Bill, who was sending her 25,000 baht a month to keep out of the bars, keep herself and send money home for her family. Daeng actually lived with a Thai man, Lek, who didn’t work himself, but lived off her earnings, any earnings. When her boyfriend Bill phoned her she’d make sure only she answered the phone and that Lek shut up when she was on the phone. However, Daeng had a heavy Yah Bah and Ice habit and effectively spent all her money, to the extent that she had to pawn her phone. Lek had already made her pawn all the gold that Bill had given her. Inevitably, when Bill couldn’t contact her, he started to get suspicious. She told him she’d lost her phone and would he mind sending her more money to buy a new one, which he did, but he then started to phone her at bar times from 7.30pm to 2am. Obviously, this was a slight problem, involving her having to go into a relatively quiet side room, put a blanket over her head and speak softly, making sure no one came in.
Daeng had heard of farang absentee boyfriends hiring private detectives to investigate the Thai girlfriends and she had a pretty shrewd idea of how they might operate. She happened to spy one, one night, thankfully he wasn’t looking for her, but he was very obvious. For a start he spoke very good Thai and was with a Thai lady that it was obvious wasn’t his girlfriend because they weren’t “lovey-dovey” at all. The Thai lady went round all the girls and kept showing the “victims” photo to all the girls, asking if they knew her. They all did because the girl in question was a favourite of them all, who wasn’t actually working at the bar that week because she’d gone to Koh Samui with another farang client. However, they were all loyal and didn’t give the game away.
Daeng began to take precautions in case Bill sent the ferrets out after her. She told all her sisters-in-charms not to speak to strangers about her and to tell her if anyone came in the bar asking after her. She even dyed her hair blonde, using a lot of make-up so she wouldn’t look like her photos that she knew Bill had of her because she’d given him several. Her life became a true ordeal where she had to interrogate all the guys that wanted to take her “off” to make sure they weren’t ferrets. If they were over-inquisitive, she just refused to go “off” with them. This meant her weekly average really declined and Lek started to get heavy, beating her up because she wasn’t bringing in enough money to support his drug habit. He’d already spent almost all the money Bill sent every month, leaving very little for Daeng to send home or live on. She tried to get rid of him, but he had all the characteristics of a leach, bloodsucking and was difficult to throw off; she didn’t attempt the tried and tested way, trying to burn him off with a cigarette-end though for fear of what he’d do to her.
One day, the inevitable happened and a guy came in the bar that actually looked like a ferret, so she knew right away he was a Private Dick. She tried hiding but the Mamasan told her to go out on the floor and despite the fact she’d tried to disguise herself, the ferret saw through her; there weren’t enough girls for her to hide effectively. She got a phone call from Bill two days after, accusing her, but after all the stress he’d put her through, she couldn’t maintain the pretence and told him the truth. Obviously, Bill dropped her, but then Daeng told me, there are plenty more fish in the sea, right?
Now you might be very righteous about bar girls who do this sort of thing, but you have to understand where they’re coming from. And Bert, the ferret, told me he’d also been hired to spy on farang men who were short timing around the favourite venues. They were total idiots when it came to trying to disguise their deceits. So, at the end of the day, let’s give them both, the bar girls and the straying farangs a bit of rope. They are only doing what comes naturally after all and if you’re foolish enough to lavish vast sums of money on bar-girls, what do you expect?
Written by Warina Punyawan