A Woman of Bangkok (49 page)

How I found a new life in Thailand

A
NDREW
H
ICKS

This is about how Andrew Hicks met Cat, a ‘Thai girl’ half his age and how they set up home together in her village out in the rice fields of North Eastern Thailand.

Andrew will tell you of toads in the toilet, of ants’ eggs for breakfast, how they took up frog farming and how he got married without really meaning to.

It’s also a book about the countryside, of the old Thailand where the rhythm of the seasons and belief in the spirits and Buddhism remain strong.

How could he, a greying English lawyer, ever fit into the lives of a Thai rice farming family? Can Cat and Andrew with their many differences really be compatible?

Escape

The true story of the only Westerner ever to break out of Thailand’s Bangkok Hilton

D
AVID
M
C
M
ILLAN

Klong Prem prison, Thailand. The “Bangkok Hilton”, where 600 foreigners among the 12,000 inmates of this walled prison city also wait and rot. Among the tragic, ruthless and forgotten, one man resolves to do what no other has done: escape. This is the true story of drug smuggler David McMillan’s perilous break-out from Asia’s most notorious prison.

“Breathtaking stuff”
News of the World
, UK

“Gripping”
Zoo Weekly
, UK

“Drug trafficker David McMillan … spent two years plotting his escape from a Bangkok jail”
BBC
, UK

“The jailbreak was straight out of a movie”
The Age
, Australia

“This is one of the world’s most notorious—and remarkable—heroin traffickers: Melbourne man David McMillan. Despite still being on the run, McMillan has written a book, Escape, about … his amazing breakout in Bangkok”
The Australian

Escape: The Past

Prequel to the international bestseller “Escape: The true story of the only Westerner ever to break out of Thailand’s Bangkok Hilton”

D
AVID
M
C
M
ILLAN

In this gripping prequel to “Escape”, drug smuggler-turned-bestselling author David McMillan tells it from the beginning. Throwing away an expensive education as a teenager then a promising executive career, McMillan hit rock bottom only to shake off the dust from the dirt-floor warehouse that was his home to make his first million dealing drugs at age 22.

McMillan peels away the layers of seedy Patpong’s massive candy-store brothels as he scours the Thai capital’s lowest dives seeking bosses with strong connections and weak ethics. He details what it took to arm himself and his teams of couriers with dozens of passports to tread the clandestine path that frustrated international border guards for years.

Memories of the New York highlife, London’s Mayfair townhouses and Concorde’s soft landings soon fade, however, when the law eventually catches up with the young villain in Australia. Following a six-month Supreme Court trial with 126 witnesses, McMillan is sent down for a long stretch yet he still hits the headlines from behind bars with a failed helicopter breakout.

Bangkok Hard Time

The surreal true story of how a Western teenager came of age in 1960s Bangkok, turned international drug smuggler and walked the prison yards of Thailand’s notorious “Bangkok Hilton”

J
ON
C
OLE

It is 1967 Bangkok, the Summer of Love, and for teenager Jon Cole, son of a US Green Beret colonel serving in the Vietnam War, life as a young Westerner in the City of Angels is sweeter than mangoes on sticky rice with coconut milk … until he is introduced to the infamous House of Lek. Drawn to the underbelly of Bangkok, the International School Bangkok pupil soon discovers ganja, opium and the two-dollar bordellos.

What follows is a surreal but true story of one Westerner’s relationship with Thailand spanning four decades. A drug habit picked up at the House of Lek with schoolmates and GIs on R&R from Vietnam leads to a career as a drug smuggler, a nasty smack habit and, ultimately, a long stretch inside Bangkok’s notorious prison, the “Bangkok Hilton”.

Nightmare in Bangkok

The incredible true account of survival in a Thai prison

A
NDY
B
OTTS

Andy Botts began his criminal activities as a young “car banger” in his native Hawaii before graduating to drug-dealing and trafficking. After a number of successful and highly lucrative drug runs to Asia (though not without some chillingly close calls), Botts was betrayed by a close associate. Arrested in Bangkok’s Don Muang International Airport with 114 grams of heroin in his possession, he narrowly escaped execution by firing squad.

But his “reprieve”—a prison sentence of life plus two years in Bangkok’s most notorious prison, dubbed the Bangkok Hilton’—threw him into a nightmare world where the only rules were no rules. Nightmare in Bangkok is Botts’ all-too-true account of how he managed to survive this ordeal and emerge a very changed man at the end of a fearsome journey through hell.

“In Thailand, Botts gets jailed for heroin smuggling, but not before being incarcerated in his native Hawaii”
TIME
, USA

Confessions Of A Bangkok Private
Eye

True stories from the case files of Warren Olson

W
ARREN
O
LSON
& S
TEPHEN
L
EATHER

‘Two-timing bargirls, suspicious spouses and lesbian lovers – it was all in a day’s work for Bangkok Private Eye Warren Olson.’

For more than a decade Olson walked the mean streets of the Big Mango. Fluent in Thai and Khamen, he was able to go where other Private Eyes feared to tread.

His clients included Westerners who had lost their hearts – and life savings – to money-hungry bargirls. Nobody knows more than Warren Olson about the tricks that bargirls can use to separate Western men from their hard-earned money. But he had more than his fair share of Thai clients, too, including a sweet old lady who was ripped off by a Christian conman and a Thai girl blackmailed by a former lover.

The stories are based on Olson’s case files, fictionalised (to protect the innocent, and the guilty) by bestselling author Stephen Leather.

Thai Private Eye

W
ARREN
O
LSON

For more than a decade, the intrepid Warren Olson trawled the mean streets of Bangkok and the lesser-known corners of the Land of Smiles. His brief? To uncover unsavoury truths about Thai bargirl lovers, philandering spouses, insurance fraud and scam artists of various stripes. He was a private eye prying into nooks and crannies few dared to explore and, along the way, he uncovered fascinating secrets of Thais and foreigners engaged in no good.

This volume—the follow-up to Stephen Leather and Warren Olson’s bestselling
Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye
—serves up more juicy portions of what goes on under the veneer in Thailand and includes stories deemed too hot to include in the first book for fear of repercussions. It also includes recent cases, where state-of-the-art surveillance devices and other advances in the dark arts of private investigation have made it easier to uncover dirt deep below the surface. This is a book that reads like exciting fiction, with one big difference: every story is true. Only the names and related identifying details have been changed to protect the innocent along with the guilty. These chronicles of a decade lived dangerously in the Land of Crooked Smiles will, by turns, entertain, shock, inflame and inform you.