Bangkok Babylon. Jerry Hopkins

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СКАЧАТЬ said a story about how Hollywood movies got made in Thailand, he said, “So that's why you're here?”

      “No,” I said, “I came for the bean soup and corn bread.”

      “You don't know who I am?” I said I did not and he laughed so hard he knocked over his beer. (This was in the pre-Klausthaler days when he drank Singha.) For the next two hours, he talked, skipping over the entire war–and the stories I'd hear later–to tell me how he earned thousands of dollars from Hollywood producers and never left his stool at the Madrid, using a cell phone to call his old cop friends, many of whom were now generals, to get permission to bend if not totally ignore the law in the interest of getting the movies made.

      There was the time, he said, when Jean-Claude Van Damme wanted to blow up and sink a boat in the Chao Phrya River. That was a tricky one, he said, because he had to get approval from the cops on both sides of the river and get the maritime police to stop traffic on the river itself. After some special “fees” were paid, the boat was exploded and sunk. Another time, Oliver Stone wanted to shut down traffic on a main thoroughfare during rush hour. Occasionally, someone else needed a bar- or drug-related infraction overlooked.

      Jack got his start as a “fixer” in 1977, when a Hollywood producer named Bob Rosen hired him to find locations and “grease the reels” for a Steve McQueen film. The story was based on a real one dating to World War II, when America's famed Flying Tigers, were being out-flown and out-gunned by Japan's newest contribution to aerial warfare, the Zero; McQueen and his Burmese sidekick (to be played by Charles Bronson) were to steal one of the enemy planes. John Frankenheimer was to direct.

      The Deerhunter had been filmed in Thailand recently and the producers had been ripped off. Bob says now that it was because the film company didn't have anyone working on the inside. Jack took Bob to the Laos border, considered a prime site for filming, where he met top officers of the Border Patrol Police, who said they'd heard McQueen was fat, a side effect to cancer treatment that Bob didn't know anything about. Jack then took Frankenheimer to meet the prime minister, who gave the director permission to use the former U.S. air base in U-tapao, from which much of the bombing of Vietnam had been staged. Then McQueen revealed that he did have cancer and the part was offered to Clint Eastwood, who liked the script but didn't want to go to Thailand, so the movie was never made.

      Impressed by Jack's access that went all the way up to the prime minister's office, Rosen returned to Hollywood and when he signed on to produce Prophesy, a horror movie, and he needed a chief of security, he invited Jack “to come and do something stupid.” His job: keep anyone outside the camera crew from seeing the monster.

      Bob called Jack again when he made The Island, Peter Benchley's follow-up to Jaws. This film, which was shot in Antigua, told the story of a band of modern pirates–the descendants of real pirates from three-hundred years before–who preyed on yachts. Centuries of inbreeding had resulted in a band of “freaks,” so only the truly deranged and handicapped were cast. Jack's job was to keep them in line.

      Ironically, he also was charged with keeping them sober. By then, Jack was methodically drinking himself to death. Rosen said he finally talked Jack into coming to the States to dry out. For three months, Jack lived with the Rosen family in Seattle, experiencing what Bob called an “amazing” recovery.

      Back in Bangkok, he met a young Thai girl named Pen–in time, he would marry her–and for a while he dutifully drank the Klausthaler he had learned to hate. In time, he returned to the real thing and Pen accompanied him back to Seattle to dry out again. “His liver was pretty shot,” Bob Rosen said, “but, again, when he stopped drinking, he got better.” Bob said he also tried at this time to get Jack to make peace with Tony Poe, but when he called Tony in San Francisco, it wasn't long before they were threatening to kill one another.

      Rosen was so entranced by Jack, he hired a screenwriter to write a treatment for a film based on his life. The way Bob tells the story, John Frankenheimer showed some interest for a while and so did novelist Joseph Heller, but at the time the project was presented, the CIA was “all short haircuts and James Bond, and to do Jack's story right, it had to be about a guy who drank too much and fucked up. In other words, a human.” Other friends say Jack didn't like the treatment because Tony Poe played a role in the story that diminished his.

      Unlike Tony–whose alcohol-fueled violence eventually led the Thai government to deport him (in 1991)–Jack was an amiable drunk. He enjoyed meeting new people, laughed a lot, and always deferred to anyone of superior rank or standing. When William Colby, the former head of the CIA, was in Bangkok and addressed the Foreign Correspondents Club, one of Jack's friends– a former university professor–tore into Colby verbally, attacking some of his tactics and policies. Next day, when the friend told Jack what he'd done, Jack was aghast, accusing his friend of a breach of authority and propriety.

      For the media, however, he held only the highest disdain, blaming them for “losing the war at home” and for calling America's efforts in Laos a failure. “Tell me,” Jack asked, “how was a handful of CIA with a bunch of Air America pilots going to win against the goddamned Vietnamese army? We weren't the U.S. Army! We were a supportive side action to the main war. We kept tens of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers tied down in Laos, damaging the enemy's effectiveness in South Vietnam. We cut into their movement of supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and we kept the commies from moving into Thailand. We never lost Laos by a military action. It was signed away by treaty after the fall of Vietnam!”

      That more bombs were dropped on Laos than on Nazi Germany, and that the CIA left behind a country full of bomb craters, amputees on crutches and antipersonnel bomblets that still kill hundreds every year, was beside the point. Jack believed the cause was just. His hands were untainted, his conscience clear.

      “Some people don't realize the CIA was created to do the things the country couldn't do out in the open. Absolutely nothing we did was legal,” he said. “I don't feel bad or any remorse whatsoever about zapping those guys. It didn't feel any different than shooting all those deer.”

      As the drinking continued, in 2002, Pen thought a move two hours away to Pattaya might help, by distancing him from his drinking buddies. It didn't even slow him down. Nor did a big sign that was hung in his favorite bar: “ JACK 1, COMMUNISTS 0... SINGHA 1, JACK 0.” Now he visited Bangkok only to see his doctor. Yet, his health continued to fail. He started talking about cremation, calling it “my barbecue.”

      The “barbecue” was held in Pattaya in April 2003. Nearly two hundred friends came to the send-off, including an emissary sent by Thailand's royal family, bearing the flame to light Jack's pyre in gratitude for his work on Thailand's behalf. He was seventy-six.

      Jumbo Shrimp

      I started hearing stories about a man called Patrick “Shrimp” Gauvain long before I moved to Thailand, and I'm still hearing them. Complete strangers seem anxious to pass along the lurid anecdotes in the fashion, I suppose, that tall tales were once spun about figures in ancient epics and myths.

      Had I heard, I was asked in near worshipful tones, about the time that Shrimp paid the bar fine for fifty bar girls and had them delivered in a fleet of taxis to a friend as a birthday present? Or the time he took a dozen home for himself?

      Then there was the time that he somehow dipped his penis into Kurt Waldheim's drink when the German diplomat wasn't looking. Or so I was told, but years later he corrected me, saying “actually, it was dipped into the soup of the lady sitting next to me at dinner, the Korean wife of a well-respected English expat who inquiringly asked, ‘Is this the inter-course?'”

      Another time, someone said, Shrimp saw a woman without arms selling flower garlands at an intersection, bought all of her flowers and took her home.

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