Thailand's Daily Crime Pill #9: Hotels and Crime Go Together Like Peas and Carrots
And hotels have been the scene for some of my fondest memories.
Dear expats and readers,
Whether you arrive by foot, carriage, train, or plane, your hotel stands with arms open to give rest and refuge from your journey.
I remember travel destinations through hotels — even going back to when I was a kid I can tell you where I stayed when I first visited a city or country.
When I first arrived to Bangkok, I chose a cheap room near Swampy to flop for the night before heading into the city the next day. With a single search I was able to find that hotel even now, years later: the Thong Ta Resort & Spa.
I vividly recall checking in, getting my key, and my first night in Thailand here. The aircon didn’t work, the TV on mute gave off a fuzzy glow that lit the room as I slipped into a deep sleep only attainable after a trans-Pacific flight. At 3AM neighbors to the hotel were up drinking and singing karaoke — a proper intro to the country.
Nothing special, no frills, but it will always hold a special place in my memory, and when I need to stay overnight near Swampy in the future, I’ll choose Thong Ta.
The next week in Bangkok I splurged a bit for jazzier digs, an AirBNB at the State Tower, a majestic tower on the corner of Silom Road and Charoen Krung.
The room was a condo on the 41st floor, the balcony facing the Chao Phraya River. For a pleb like me, it was the highest floor I’d ever slept on, and the vistas of Krung Thep captured my imagination — from that high a massive sprawl unfolds below you, and I couldn’t help but wonder What goes on down there?
I found out in time, soi by soi, in my explorations of Bangkok — which really don’t end, do they?
I’m not in the Big Mango anymore, as I ended up sticking to the quite surrounds of the north, but I still remember that room and that building and everything I did there.
I’ve worked in the hospitality industry once as a front desk jockey at a budget road motel in the States. That gig lasted a couple years, and even with humble signage and foyer, the place was a constant circus of characters that gave me plenty of stories to go along with it.
I won’t bore you with them all, but the place had a bit of lore.
I confirmed 3 murders and a half-dozen suicides over the 60 years that hotel stood through newspaper archives. It’s why room 114 was never able to be rented out, I was told. No matter what we did to that room, guests always complained about something and had to be moved, so it was just used as storage.
One of our night auditors was robbed at gun-point once. When he told me about it the next day, I took special note of the way he relayed the event without a flinch of emotion or distress. The guy was morbidly obese, going through a vicious divorce where his old lady cleaned him out, and I just reckoned that maybe he wanted the guy to pull the trigger.
So I asked him what he told the gunman when he asked for the loot.
“Shoot me,” he said.
My suspicions, confirmed.
Needless to say, when it comes to the archives of true crime in Thailand, I take special interest in stories set in hotels.
Add hotels to Thailand in your mind, and the sum is sure to conjure something risqué. Let’s face it, most guys don’t stay in Thailand for the temples.
For most of us, those nights end happy — at least they do for me.
Some aren’t so lucky. Whether it’s a bit of bar-girl thievery or backpacker murder, the lore of hotels and crime in Thailand is legion.
In fact, I’m in the thick of curating true crime stories set in Thailand hotels for a non-fiction book.
One story that caught my eye comes from February 2012, when an American woman, Wendy Albano, aged 52, was murdered by her alleged lover Ritesh Singhvi, aged 25, in their room at Bangkok’s Fraser Suites Sukhumvit.
Wendy was a successful interior designer, having worked on New York Yankees star Derek Jeter’s 20 million dollar NYC penthouse at the Trump World Tower.
The two came to Thailand on a trip related to an export business they’d started together, which involved hand-made jewelry.
According to reports, Wendy and Ritesh had a fight on the night of February 12th, 2012, and it ended with Ritesh strangling and stabbing Wendy to death. Shortly after the murder, Ritesh checked out of the hotel, and was on a one-way flight to Mumbai.
It took two years for police in India to track down the killer. He was found in Parbhani, Maharashtra — about 500 kilometers from his family home in Mumbai — nearly two years later.
He’d grown a beard and started a cell-phone shop.
Ritesh was savvy while on the lam. He’d assumed a new identity, never used the same number twice to call family, and never received a single rupee from family. He used an intermediary for all communication and financial dealings with anybody from his past.
And that was Ritesh’s downfall.
Investigators traced a number of calls from Ritesh’s family to a number in Parbhani, and that number in Parbhani was in regular contact with another number — which ended up being Ritesh.
They nabbed Ritesh in September 2014, and by October he was out on bail.
And he walked free in India for nearly five years. Thailand worked to extradite the killer, but the case was stalled in sluggish courts in both countries.
An American Senator asked Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State under the Obama administration, to intervene on the case — but there’s nothing I was able to find that the long arm of Uncle Sam got involved or shaped the outcome in any way.
The jig was up after the Indian court rejected an appeal that Ritesh filed against a ruling for extradition. It wasn’t until February 2019 that he was finally rounded up and shipped off back to Thailand, where I assume he’s sitting today — rotting away in some Bangkok cage.
I’ve a whole stash of Thailand hotel murders and shenanigans that I’ll share as time rolls on, but I’ll save them for another Crime Pill.
But it makes me curious — do you have any Thai hotel stories worthy of a share?
Other things I’m reading:
Zhao Wei, owner of the Kings Romans Casino on the Laos side of the Mekong in the Golden Triangle Economic Zone, is in the news again. This time not because the US State Department’s levied economic sanctions on him for international drug, human, and animal trafficking — but because his hotel’s a hot-spot for Covid (read story here)..
Does anybody else want to go back to the halcyon days when a Chinese gangster hits the headlines for smuggling heroin, and not because of this damn virus?
That’s all for today…
Until tomorrow’s Crime Pill, stay safe out there everybody.
- True Crime Thailand