Andrew Drummond

This is a blog only
Soi Yodsak or Soi 6 in Pattaya is a small street but it has its named carved out proudly on the city’s stone of infamy.  Some say, with tongue in cheek, that is the British equivalent of ‘Lover’s Lane’.
It’s a street  of ‘short-time’ bars and always seems up for discussion on a website called ‘PattayaSecrets.com’ run by a Briton.

Sex tourists, or ‘mongers’ as they call themselves on the website,  photograph their ‘purchases’ and  post the pictures on the site’s ’Trip Report’ forum. Pattaya Secrets in turn is a major sponsor of ‘Pattaya One News’,  a local television news channel of sorts, which is run by another Brit who is in turn  the Group Leader (Gruppenfuhrer) of the black clad westerners in the Pattaya Tourist Police Volunteers, who in turn have been used to investigate Uzbeki prostitutes breaking Thailand’s strict indecency laws.  Oh, anyway I think we all get the picture here…

Like the building society Halifax bar's motto is a 'Little Extra Help'

Now and again the Pattaya Police raid Soi Yodsak, ignoring the girls saying: “Come inside me please!”,  and exclaim in apparent shock that sex-bars are operating there. The items of proof, they declare, are the mattresses, condoms, etc in the rooms upstairs.  The bar owners put up with the raids stoically, pay their dues, and its back to business as usual, as they lay out the mattresses again.
Anyway it is to this street in 2002 that Robert Henry,  42-yr-old British career villain, decided to set up a cover for his other businesses.
He invested in a skydiving company called ‘Siam Air Sports’ (SAS) with a ‘former SAS man’, Briton Ron Loveridge.
 Unlike a large number of foreigners in Pattaya who claim they are ex-SAS, but are really on UK social security payouts, Ron was actually appeared to be the full ticket at least according to ‘Middy’ Campbell, former head of security at the British Embassy in Bangkok, and a former Parachute Regimental Sergeant Major. (One reader of this site claims he was Royal Corps of Transport but they are not known for their parachuting skills).
Their ‘airport manager ‘was a chap called Paul Cryne, then 55, whom I guess mowed the grass and put up the windsock on a piece of farm land they were using out of town. It certainly was not one of the official airfields in the area.
Ron had acquired a Brittan-Norman Islander aircraft, but the business went flat after the plane crashed shortly after take-off on one of its early trips. Luckily no-one died.  The Thai pilot had taken off on full flaps, something not good if you are trying to attain airspeed.
Soon the directors of the plane-less company were at each other’s throats. The Skydive Bar which they had opened up in the soi was the scene of some volatile altercations.  Robert Henry, a career criminal, was not a happy bunny with his investment up in smoke. The insurance company would only pay half the claim and the plan was in Ron Loveridge’s name.
Back home in Coventry Henry had switched between credit card fraud and drugs. He was a member of a well known criminal family.  His stepson had been charged with murder and he himself was the suspect in the murder of a boxing coach, Joe Montague, who had been gunned down outside his home on the outskirts of the city.
But in Pattaya, where Robert Henry was about to die, he also had a violent reputation. He had on several occasions beaten up his wife Wilai Chiewcharn  and on October 4th 2003 just a few days before his own death he had beaten her up so severely that she had to be hospitalised. He also had many quarrels with local Thais, apparently severely biting the nose of one.

'Baileys'

(Wilai by the way was known as ‘Baileys’ among the British criminal fraternity, pronouncing it as ‘Byelees’ after the way she ordered her favourite drink).
Two days after she was hospitalised,  Henry’s body was found face down in a swamp in Jomtien. He had been shot six times in the head.  A set of motorcycle tracks led a trail away from the scene.
That’s how I came to know all these characters. Pattaya Police were, as usual and in their own inimitable way ‘hot’ on the case, which involved millions of Thai baht and they quickly pulled in the ‘airport manager’ Paul Cryne as being the most likely suspect.
Baileys claimed firstly that she had an affair with Cryne and that he was jealous of her husband. Then she claimed that she had received a call from foreigners to say her husband had been kidnapped.

Paul Cryne

Thai Police arrested Cryne. They said they had found DNA evidence linking him to Henry’s death in a BMW car which he had sent after the murder to be completely gutted and re-upholstered.
He seemed an unlikely suspect and the investigation was being conducted in part by a policeman I knew to be extremely suspect and greedy.  Meanwhile the wife took over the company and all its assets and the poor ‘ex-SAS man’ Loveridge was left fighting a case in which, to put it the Thai way, the sugar had already entered the elephant’s mouth.
Cryne pleaded his innocence. He was a trained life-saver and diver, and even had a good citizen’s commendation from the Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. He had an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for a 24 hour swim underwater, and he had certificates to show he had saved the lives of scores of people. 
But then again he did finally admit that had been in jail too, for an offence of violence.  Cryne did have a temper. Thai police said they believed the murder was orchestrated from England. Certainly a possibility but my money was on the wife.

Chief Constable's Award

 Pattaya or rather Sattahip police failed to put together a credible case. Police in the UK who knew that Henry’s credit cards were systematically milked after his death,  also thought he was probably a ‘patsy’ or ‘fall guy’..
When I went to Cryne’s trial, few of the long list of prosecution witnesses bothered even to turn up. Not even ‘Byelees’ their star witness. He was acquitted. He’s waiting to see if the prosecution will appeal -although, even if they do not,  its not going to get him out of trouble
The only winner was the wife who got just about everything.
I was pretty sure too that  Cryne was innocent and during the long process of Thai justice, when he could not leave the country and technically could not work, I even slipped him the occasional 1000 baht note, as did others.
(I am very cautious now about lending money to Brits in the sh*t.  The first was a former Merchant Navy officer who had built up a 200,000 baht bill in a Bangkok hotel and five or so of us chipped in about Bt37,000 each.  He no longer seems to recognise we even gave him the cash.  The second time was to a Briton wanted in Australia for murder. He said he wanted to give himself up (as he was wanted for jewellery robbery in London, but he preferred Aussie jails) I thought I was stringing him along for the Aussie Feds to whom he had agreed to surrender. He was stringing me along!)

Graham Birchwood

Anyway, to come to the point of this story, the few baht I gave Cryne was obviously not enough. He may well have been innocent of the murder of Robert Henry but now he is wanted for the cold-blooded contract murder of a British housewife, an offence he is said to have committed while on bail on the Pattaya murder charge.
Earlier this month Briton Graham Birchwood was jailed in Britain for 32 years for the murder of his ex-wife, purely for the proceeds of her will, which she had  made out to him and decided not to change.
Sharon Birchwood, a sufferer of ME (myalgic encephalopathy) was strangled with electrical cord at her home in Epsom, Surrey. Cryne’s DNA has apparently been found under her fingernails.

Sharon

Judge McKinnon at Croydon Crown Court said: “”There was a significant degree of planning and premeditation involved in bringing in a man from Thailand.”
Witnesses said that Cryne had arrived in Thailand and stayed at Graham Birchwood’s mother’s house then left again after the murder.

Paul Cryne has been banged up again in Thailand. If he is going anywhere it is to a British court on a murder charge, where the DNA evidence seems a lot more concrete.

So is there a moral here? I don’t know. But it has been a severe test of truth and judgment in Thailand and a filip for the ‘no smoke without fire’ school of thinkers.

More to the point. Have I paid a hired assassin?