The Grey Man (27 page)

I actually didn't want to go to Cambodia by then. I was a bit over The Grey Man's constant demands on my time and I wanted a break from the incessant self-funded travel that came with the job of running the organisation, not to mention the continuing administration demands.

It was around this time that we employed a woman named Julie as our part-time admin person. She had already been a volunteer with us for a long while and could turn her hands to most things. She had taken about six months off, as The Grey Man has a habit of burning even the best people out, but now she was back. Julie handled a lot more than admin and wore many hats. She was a godsend, but even though she lightened my load immeasurably The Grey Man was expanding and so was the admin. In spite of the extra help I still seemed to be doing four hours a day of emails alone.

Channel Seven, like
Australian Story
before them, insisted on there being a ‘talking head' in the story – someone who could be interviewed on camera. I tried to convince Russell to take the team to Cambodia and to be our front man, but he had a health problem and had to go into hospital for an operation.

‘How about you?' I said to Tony.

‘No way.' He was too smart. Besides, as Tony pointed out, I had already been ‘outed' in the media and he wanted to preserve his identity for future undercover operations. We'd assembled a team of keen volunteers – largely ex-police – for the proposed foray into Cambodia, most of whom had been recruited off the back of the
Australian Story
program, so I wouldn't even need to go undercover if I didn't want to. Channel Seven offered to pay my airfares and accommodation if I went along and agreed to be the spokesman; that clinched it. My personal funds were so depleted that even if I'd really wanted to I couldn't have flown myself to Cambodia.

Tony worked closely with the Channel Seven guys in the lead-up to our departure. He'd come up with a good idea to hire a house in Phnom Penh which the TV people would fit out with hidden cameras. If we managed to locate some underage kids we would have the pimp deliver them to the house, where we could record the transaction happening and, hopefully, the arrest of the crims by Cambodian police. Channel Seven sourced a house for a two-week period, which wasn't easy, and organised a bank of covert cameras to be installed.

We had a team of eight volunteers, plus Tony and me, primed and ready to leave for Cambodia. For all the other guys this was their first Grey Man trip, but they were all keen and had a good range of experience in law enforcement and investigation. Some of the guys were retired, some were civilians and many were ex-cops. As usual, all of them were paying their own way.

When we arrived in Cambodia in May 2010, after transiting through Bangkok, Tony and I had a few days with Channel Seven before our people arrived. Once our guys turned up we took all of them for a familiarisation trip around the city and showed them the wired house where we would hopefully be making our busts. I was fascinated to see for myself the contrasts of rich and poor, and the boom town that was sprouting from the horrors of the Cambodian genocide.

Over the weekend after our arrival I sent our volunteers out in pairs to start scouting around and looking for underage kids. Tony and I met with Ron Dunne and Ron offered to brief all our guys about Cambodian law and order on the Monday after the weekend everyone had arrived. Things were looking good, but after the meeting I was with Tony in the lobby of the Raffles Hotel – a beautiful place, if not my normal standard of accommodation – when I received an alarming text message from Ron. ‘Have you guys been involved in anything that's blown up in your faces lately?' the text asked.

‘No. Why?'

‘Well, someone's been dishing the dirt about you.'

That wasn't new to me – people had taken pot shots at us before – but apparently someone had been making serious complaints about The Grey Man's operations in Thailand that had been picked up by IJM's head shed in America.

Tony knew Ron better than I did, so he called him. Ron told Tony he didn't have any further details, but the word had come down from his superiors that The Grey Man was not a credible organisation and that he was banned from conducting any operations with us. We arranged to meet with him in a hurry.

We asked Ron if he could ask around and find out who was maligning us, and he asked me, via Tony, if I had any idea.

‘Well, we recently sacked our director of operations in Thailand,' I said. I pleaded with Ron to find a way around his bosses' edict. After all, I said to him, IJM had been forced out of Thailand because of people criticising them and because they'd threatened to expose corrupt cops. We were all subject to the whims of people who would criticise us for petty reasons or their own self-interest. ‘Can't you explain all this to Washington?' I asked him again.

‘As far as Washington is concerned, you can't operate with us or under our MOU.'

We'd been in-country for two days. I had eight guys who had paid their own way to be there and were covering their own expenses to try to rescue kids, not to mention an impatient camera crew and a personality from a major TV network hanging around waiting for me to conjure a child rescue operation out of thin air.

‘What about the briefing you'd scheduled for tomorrow?' I asked Ron.

‘That's cancelled as well.'

Paul Waterhouse, the producer for the Channel Seven program, had also been in touch with Ron and had got wind of the problems we were facing. After the meeting he came to me and asked me what was going on. I told him of my suspicions, that we were the subject of rumour and innuendo resulting from sour grapes. Paul was sympathetic but he had a job to do, and he was following up another avenue, with Ron, in the hope of filming one of their operations with the local police. I understood Paul's position and bore him no ill will at all for trying to tee up something with IJM. TV needs colour and movement and action and we could supply Paul with none of those right then.

Paul met with Ron again – with the police present this time – and told them about the house that the film crew had wired up with hidden cameras. That turned out to be a problem as well, as under Cambodian law it was illegal to film someone without their knowledge and consent – not even cops could use covert video cameras in a police investigation without special permission from a ministry. Now Paul was pissed off. I was certainly learning a lot.

Meanwhile, Tony and I and our volunteers continued to look for kids to rescue, without official support. We had been introduced to a possible people trafficker and pimp by a tuk tuk driver with the nickname of Cousin. We told Cousin that we wanted eight underage girls to join us in a party. It was a big ask, and I doubted our chances of success, but the trafficker Cousin found us said that he could get the kids for us. We'd started negotiations before Ron dropped his bombshell, but on the Monday morning the pimp got word to us via Cousin that he'd sourced the girls.

I couldn't believe it. In the space of just over a weekend our main body of volunteers had arrived, we'd got a line on a trafficker who had a minibus load of underage girls – more than we'd ever been offered at one time in Thailand – and now we were technically out of business!

Tony and I desperately tried to stall the pimp, who we learned went by the apt name of Rong, while we sought another meeting with Ron in the hope that he could at least get us some form of temporary imprimatur to operate in Phnom Penh. IJM, however, continued to stonewall us, so we approached all the other NGOs we could think of to see if they would offer us some top cover, even on a temporary basis. Events were moving too fast, though, and I could sense this whole operation was about to come crashing down around my ears. We even tried to hand the operation over completely to IJM – we didn't have to be mentioned as long as they rescued the kids – but Ron wouldn't touch it.

Rong was getting impatient. He was on the phone to Tony several times a day, trying to organise a meeting and payment. He'd procured the eight little girls and, incredibly, he said they were staying with his mother. Rong was half-Cambodian and half-Vietnamese and his mum was in the trafficking business with him. It turned out that she was the kingpin and had been a mamasan in Phnom Penh before branching out into trafficking.

Even though we had no MOU and no licence to operate, I couldn't bear to think what might happen to those girls if we let them slip through the net. Tony and I agreed to meet with Rong at a restaurant on the river, just outside the main part of Phnom Penh. Cousin took us there and we drove through a cemetery to get to the place. It was spooky even in daylight. Over lunch, we negotiated a deal over the innocence of eight children.

Rong wanted US$3000, with a $500 deposit up front. He told us the girls he had found were mostly Cambodian, with a couple of Vietnamese to make up the numbers, and that all were between ten and twelve years old. Tony excused himself and headed for an ATM to draw out the deposit. While he was away I was chatting to Rong, and noticed the edge of a tattoo under his shirtsleeve. Telling him I was interested in tattoos, I asked if I could see what it was. In reality, I had an ulterior motive. If I hadn't learned that it was illegal to use covert cameras in Cambodia I would have been filming Rong and recording our negotiations. As that wasn't possible, I wanted to learn as much about the trafficker as I could in case we couldn't bust him – as was looking increasingly likely – and I had to pass on his description to the police. Rong was cagey and had made Tony and me turn off our mobile phones when we met him, in case we were recording his voice or filming him, but he couldn't resist showing off his tatt, which was of a tiger. I told him I thought it looked very impressive.

Rong was twenty-eight and he told me he was looking forward to getting married one day and having kids. It was surreal talking to him: almost like imagining yourself chatting to some Nazi war criminal who happily exterminated people all day at work and then went home to his family in the evenings.

I told Rong that we'd hired a house and wanted the girls delivered there as the eight of us westerners were planning on having a big party. I told him we went to a different country each year to have fun and get laid. It all seemed like business as usual for Rong, who said that he had done this plenty of times before and promised to bring the kids to us once he'd received his money.

We arranged to meet on Wednesday outside the hospital near the Russian markets. The plan was that Cousin would take us there in his tuk tuk and Rong would then follow us to the house, where we would pay him the balance owing. I assumed Rong structured things this way so he could watch for tails. If all went well, Rong would bring the kids the next day, in a van. I now knew that for a conviction to be watertight under Cambodian law the police, if we could somehow get them involved, would have to catch Rong in the presence of the kids. The pimp clearly knew this too, and therefore wanted the payment transaction to be separate from the delivery.

Tony came back with the cash and paid Rong the deposit. After he left, Tony and I talked through our options. We had the kids on the hook but, legally, we couldn't reel them in to safety.

‘Fuck IJM and fuck Cambodian law,' I said, thinking aloud. ‘Why don't we just do the deal and film Rong anyway? We can hold the evidence over him and turn him, or at least threaten him enough to force him out of business. Either way, we get the girls.'

Tony thought about that for a few moments and shook his head. ‘Too risky. We're operating outside the law, so if we buy a bunch of kids we could find ourselves being convicted as paedophiles. We're on the local cops' radar now.' We'd taken IJM's advice that we visit the AFP liaison officer in Phnom Penh, who promptly took our information and passed it on to the police general in charge of the area. ‘They might be watching the house already and if we went ahead we might all get scooped up.'

Tony was right, and he and I were both thinking of the other Grey Man volunteers who were part of this operation. We couldn't do anything that would put them in jeopardy, and time in a Cambodian gaol would be no fun. It was so much easier when it was just me to think about.

Our only real choice was to stall Rong some more while we kept trying with IJM. I called Rong and told him that we were having second thoughts about handing over the rest of the money before we even laid eyes on the girls. I said I was worried that he would just take our three grand and disappear. He sounded very offended that I would suggest such a thing. Great, I thought, I've just insulted a people trafficker and pimp with delicate feelings and a strict moral code.

‘I can't keep these girls at my mother's house for too long. People get suspicious. I show them to you, then you know I honest,' Rong said into his phone.

Rong the honest trafficker came up with a bizarre plan to give us a public look at the girls we were going to pay for. He said he would bring the girls to a school in Phnom Penh, dressed in uniforms, and we could see them from outside the school gates. He said that no one would worry about eight strange faces in a school. We would view the merchandise, as it were, then pay him, away from the school, and he would bring the girls to us at the house, as per his original plan.

‘Okay,' I said. Anything to buy us more time, I thought.

‘Okay, I coming now, with girls. Meet you at school in one hour.'

Tony got on the phone to Ron and told him the story. ‘We're going to be knee deep in kids soon,' Tony said to Ron, ‘so maybe you guys should just get on board with us.'

Ron said he wanted to help, but his hands were tied. I understood his position, but I also thought, hell, we've got a lead on a trafficker no one's ever heard of before and the future of eight little kids is at stake. Tony and Ron talked for a while and as a compromise, Ron offered to broker a meeting with the local police.

The meeting was convened at short notice, at the Raffles Hotel where the Channel Seven guys were staying, and where they'd put Tony and me up as well. It was a big do, with Ron and his people from IJM, the film crew, plenty of Cambodian police, and all of our guys floating in the background. Ron was selling this to the police as an IJM operation, which was fine by us. I doubt any of the police present realised who we were – they probably thought we were extra hands on the TV crew. Ron introduced IJM's surveillance person to us. He was a Cambodian guy named Luk and he reminded me of Panom: a middle-class ‘cool' guy. It didn't bode well. He had a trendy spiky haircut, designer sunglasses and expensive-looking clothes. I could only assume that he would change into something more casual and downmarket when he was on the job, in order to blend in with the vast majority of poor Cambodians.