The Grey Man (26 page)

‘Don't try to cut someone else's line – make yours longer.' This story has been a guiding influence in my life, and it's still the philosophy Russell and I use for The Grey Man today.

THIRTEEN

Cambodia: From Triumph to Tragedy

After the drama over Panom in Thailand, and The Grey Man's drift into chasing western paedophiles, we decided it was time to get back to our roots – rescuing children – and maybe start afresh in a new country.

Russell came up to Thailand in April 2009 for another trip to see how things were going and decided to carry on to Cambodia to see if it would be possible and worthwhile for us to expand our operations into that country.

Cambodia had been devastated by years of civil war and the murderous excesses of the Khmer Rouge. Millions of people had been killed or displaced and the country plunged into economic ruin. Countless children had been orphaned and all that was left of the fabric of a normal, ordered society were the massive piles of bleached white bones and skulls of the killing fields. Anecdotally, we'd heard time and again that Cambodia was a fertile hunting ground for sexual predators and traffickers. With child prostitution moving underground in Thailand, paedophiles had been drawn to Cambodia, which had everything they needed – local children living in poverty, an endless supply of kids being trafficked from even poorer Vietnam across the border, and entrenched corruption.

To try to get the lay of the land, Russell and I had been emailing a few organisations already operating in Cambodia. In particular, we'd been talking to a woman by the name of Somaly Mam, a Cambodian who'd been trafficked into sexual slavery when she was just twelve years old. She'd written a fascinating, terrifying book,
Road of Lost Innocence
, and set up a foundation dedicated to the protection of women and children in her homeland.

On his trip Russell met with Somaly's country director, the Australian Federal Police representative in the Cambodian capital (Phnom Penh), and the local head of IJM, an Australian named Ron Dunne. He returned from the trip fairly positive that we could do some good in Cambodia. The problem of child prostitution seemed as bad as people made out, and it looked like we could work under the umbrella of IJM, which had an MOU with the Cambodian police and government. While I had my reservations about IJM's hardline Christian morals and their heavy-handed way of doing things, I thought that it would be easier, initially, to dovetail in with an established organisation rather than try to tackle the Cambodian bureaucracy on our own. I wanted to get back to our core business, of rescuing kids, and I was in a hurry to do so.

In January 2010 we sent Tony, our director of operations, on a fact-finding and liaison mission to Cambodia. Tony met with Ron Dunne and was also out on the streets each evening, talking to tuk tuk drivers and mamasans and bar girls, trying to get some leads on the illicit sex industry. He wasn't in full-on investigative mode, but he was trying to get an understanding of how tuk tuk and moto drivers facilitated a connection between western men on the streets and the pimps who held the kids. (A moto is a small motorcycle whose rider you pay to take you places – with the fare-paying passenger riding on the pillion seat.) Tony was also trying to find out if there were particular cities, towns or districts where western sex tourists were finding child sex workers.

Phnom Penh is a fascinating city, as I later learned on my first visit in May 2010. I'd expected it to be drab and run-down, still shell-shocked from the Khmer Rouge days, but instead I found a city that was skyrocketing – rather than merely rising – from the ashes. There's development and signs of new wealth everywhere – wide new roads, high-rise office and hotel buildings sprouting like concrete and glass weeds, casinos and shopping centres, and sleek, shiny new cars bobbing in the sea of mopeds and small motorcycles. A good deal of the development is being financed by other Asian countries, particularly Japan and Korea, and there's the unmistakable whiff of organised crime beneath the shiny façade of progress.

Outside of the capital, as Tony found on his visit, there was still heartbreaking poverty, and it is these contrasts – rich and poor, haves and have-nots – that were fuelling the sex trade and other criminal activities. After years of death and penury, everyone wanted to get ahead as quickly as possible. Panom had told
Australian Story
how he'd been solicited by five-year-olds in Cambodian bars a few years back, and Tony was reporting seeing gangsters living it up like latter-day Capones and Scarfaces, quaffing Johnnie Walker Blue Label and smoking fat Cuban cigars in Phnom Penh's high-roller bars.

As we'd found in Thailand, it seemed the problem of child trafficking and prostitution was not solely there to feed the lusts of western sex tourists and expats. Wealthy Asian investors doing business in Cambodia were in the market for children; so too were well-off Cambodian men, who believed that sleeping with a virgin child was both a sign of status and a means of enhancing their personal esteem and power – they also believed they were less likely to contract AIDS. Those children came from poor Cambodian families or, like many of the country's adult sex workers, from neighbouring Vietnam.

A moto driver Tony had been cultivating told him that he could arrange contact with someone who had what he was looking for – underage girls. Tony let the guy take him to the place, but when he got there he found that girls were probably about seventeen, and seemed to be there of their own free will. He blew the moto driver off and told him to stop wasting his time, making it clear that he was interested only in younger girls; he was fairly certain that if the would-be pimp was serious he would come back to him again.

Later that night, at about 10 pm, the moto driver arranged for Tony to meet with a pimp who then took him to the backstreets of Phnom Penh. The place they went to wasn't a brothel as such, more a small hotel-cum-residence. Inside, the pimp introduced Tony to a young girl and a woman who was watching over her.

‘She only thirteen – she no do boom boom, only yum yum, okay?' the pimp said. He wanted Tony to be clear that the girl was not available for penetrative sex, only oral sex.

Tony knew he'd be overstepping the mark so early in Cambodia if he tried to rescue the girl then and there. In playing the part of a paedophile, he had to act like one, so he told the pimp that the girl was too old and insisted that he take him back to the moto driver.

The moto driver made some phone calls and then took Tony to a well-known red-light district where an array of girls on the backs of motorbikes were paraded before him. Most of them appeared to be in their late teens. Again Tony declined, saying they were too old, and had the moto driver return him to the riverside tourist area.

A day later the moto driver rang Tony again and assured him that this time he could definitely get what he was looking for. Not one but two girls, aged ten and fourteen, and he would take Tony to see them at a nice hotel. Tony suspected that the moto driver thought that he did not like brothels and so he'd made an arrangement to provide the girls to him in a cleaner, more pleasant environment. The pimp selected the hotel, possibly because he had an arrangement with the owner there.

Tony contacted IJM about the offer that had been made to him and they agreed to make the necessary arrangements to provide surveillance, backup and police support.

Later that day, Tony met again with the moto driver and was taken to another location where he introduced Tony to yet another pimp, who appeared to be no older than twenty. He insisted that Tony hand him US$50 so he could book a room in the hotel he had in mind. About twenty minutes later the pimp returned and told Tony and the moto driver to follow him. They set off, with surveillance teams from IJM and the Cambodian police secretly in tow.

They stopped behind the pimp outside a hotel. ‘I want to see them first, before I pay anything,' Tony said. The moto driver had let him down a couple of times already, and before calling in the cavalry behind him, and tipping off the pimp to the operation that had been put in train, Tony wanted to make sure that he wasn't being offered girls of a legal age.

The pimp agreed and Tony was taken to a room on the second floor, paid for with Tony's deposit money. While Tony waited in the bedroom the pimp produced two Vietnamese girls from the bathroom, the door of which was closed when he first entered. The kids seemed quiet and compliant, rather than frightened or confused. They were clearly underage, as the moto driver had promised, and were from Vietnam.

‘Which one you like?' the pimp asked, adding that the elder of the two was suitable for ‘boom boom', the younger for oral sex only. Tony said that he would pay for both of them. He now needed to get a message to Ron from IJM, and the following police, confirming that the girls were underage and the operation was good to go.

‘How much?' he asked the pimp.

‘For two is six hundred US dollars,' said the pimp, smiling in anticipation.

‘That's more than I expected, but I'll get it. I need to find an ATM.'

The pimp was fine with that arrangement. He could see his day's profit rising nicely, and he had the girls safely stowed in the hotel room. He had no idea he was being set up.

The moto driver took Tony to a nearby cash machine and while he was there, Tony called Ron and confirmed the presence of underage girls, who had been offered to him. The surveillance men stayed on Tony's tail. The plan was that they would follow him into the room, about thirty seconds after he entered.

Tony had the moto driver take him back to the hotel, and wait outside for him until he'd finished his ‘business'. Tony went back up to the second floor and knocked. The pimp opened the door and ushered him inside. When the pimp opened the bathroom door the ten-year-old girl was topless, probably assuming she needed to be ready for Tony. Just then there was a polite knock on the door. Again, without suspecting anything or even caring about the show that was unfolding in the room, the pimp opened the door, only to be confronted by officers from the Cambodian National Police.

The investigating police had cameras; seeing them, the girls tried to hide, brushing their hair over their faces. The younger girl tried to cover herself and the older girl put her arms around her friend in a gesture of protection. Both of them were terrified of the commotion, and when the pimp was led away there was no one at first who could communicate with them in Vietnamese.

The girls were taken into IJM's care, and subsequently placed in a Christian-run shelter. Although we attempted to follow up on the girls, IJM were never forthcoming with the information. There was nothing sinister in this, but it was an example of the attitudes we often encountered from other organisations and the police. I never found out what happened to them after that, but what we did learn was that in a chilling rerun of Peng's story, this would have been the first time the ten-year-old Vietnamese girl had been offered to a man for oral sex. Sadly, the fourteen-year-old had already been abused.

The pimp was convicted and is currently serving 25 years in a Cambodian gaol. There, unless he has friends or relatives who can supplement his meagre daily ration of rice, it's likely his physical and mental condition will deteriorate rapidly. The prison system in Cambodia is indifferent to its inmates' privations – just as the pimp had been towards those two little girls.

Mindful of keeping up our fundraising activities in Australia, I gave the details of Tony's amazing impromptu operation to a journalist friend of mine. He'd worked on my local paper and had long had an interest in The Grey Man, and had recently started working for the news wire agency Australian Associated Press (AAP). I underestimated the power and reach of AAP, for very soon after he filed his story I found myself doing close to twenty follow-up media interviews and fielding dozens of phone calls. It was a great story, and the bust had taken place on 26 January, Australia Day, so it was a nice tale of Aussies doing good overseas on our national day.

I'd made a point when releasing the information about the girls' rescue to talk up the involvement of IJM and stress that this was a joint operation, as I didn't want to offend them and make it look like we were seeking all the glory. The truth was that without IJM there was no way Tony would have been able to get the police involved in time to save those kids. I also gave IJM a big rap on our blog. I thought I was doing the right thing, but it turned out I wasn't.

When the news went national, and international, IJM's head office in the States picked up on it and it seemed Ron Dunne was on the receiving end of a rocket. The senior people at IJM wanted to know who The Grey Man was, and why Ron was supposedly running joint operations with us without their authority. To make matters worse, it seemed IJM's press office also had its nose out of joint as the release of all information about IJM to the media was supposed to go through them.

I explained to Ron that we had mentioned IJM's involvement out of courtesy. I don't think he had a problem with it, but an NGO populated with lawyers will have problems with just about anything, even if it is good. Ron promised that when we came back to Cambodia – as we fully intended to, given Tony's success – he would organise a full briefing for us on the local situation and the finer points of Cambodian law. It seemed that the next time we operated in Cambodia we would be doing so under IJM's MOU with the Cambodian authorities.

Back home in Australia the news of the rescue was greeted overwhelmingly positively by the media and we received another rush of messages of support. Some members of the Vietnamese community in Australia were particularly pleased that we'd rescued the two little girls and highlighted the problem of child trafficking from their home country. They organised a huge fundraiser for us in Melbourne, involving famous Vietnamese entertainers and personalities, and that one dinner raised more than $8000. The Cambodian operation also gave us an entrée to the Vietnamese embassy and we subsequently met with some of their senior people and discussed the possibility of future operations in Vietnam.

Just as my first radio interview with Richard Fidler had prompted interest from
Australian Story
, the latest round of media coverage over the rescue of the girls in Phnom Penh sparked interest from Channel Seven's
Sunday Night
program in Australia. Veteran reporter Mike Munro wanted to do a story on us and accompany us on an operation in Cambodia. I was reluctant. We didn't yet have our own MOU with the authorities, so if we went back into Cambodia we would still be beholden to IJM. Plus, I'd never been there myself at that stage. I didn't know the lay of the land or the people, or any of the local cops, as I did in Thailand, and it had all the makings of a media disaster. I talked it over with Tony. He was still buoyed by his success and was sure we could find some more underage girls to rescue. ‘All right, let's go with it,' I said. ‘If nothing comes of it, at least we'll have learned some lessons.'