WAR OVER PATTAYA 105 INTERVIEW

Then from North Carolina or Tennessee, take your pick, came his enemy Pattaya publisher Drew ‘Big Hat No Cattle’ Noyes, 55, who let fire with some language which would make a southern belle blush and warned the Yankee he’d better find a new place to live.

The best outcome, said Furstman, was to settle matter face to face at his home somewhere off Siam Country Club Road, in Pattaya.

‘Come alone you coward’.
 

Meanwhile running off the battlefield were Howard ‘The Fat Controller’ Miller and DJ Tommy Dee from Pattaya 105 Radio, a station which had been a point of their discussion.

Queue: Christmas music then jingle: ‘Pattaya 105 – where PattayaOne news comes first……….and all down your leg’.*

Furstman,(below) a publisher in New York, and latterly California, had leveled with Drew Noyes on Facebook and started by demanding the money back from Mr. Noyes which, he says, he had been cheated out of on a house deal. He was angry and out of pocket to the tune of US$9,000, he claimed.

PICTURE REMOVED AT REQUEST OF STUART FURSTMAN

Then he added that he knew just what of person Noyes was, he says, because he had listened to an interview on Pattaya 105, with ‘that English reporter’.

Well that had Noyes ‘a hootin and a hollerin’. ‘Andrew Drummond is being arrested for his bullshit’ etc, screamed Noyes on his keyboard, not bothering to mention I am actually Scots. 

Then it got more descriptive.

And dare I say it, when publishers clash, their choice of words is going to get more varied, especially when one thinks the sun comes up to hear him crow.  This is the sort of dialogue you won’t get down the Old Kent Road in London.

Well here’s how it went. The air was blue on both sides.

First of all Stuart Furstman starts in a conciliatory frame on the Pattaya Times website.  He gets angrier and angrier. The last few posts I cannot include even though Noyes allowed them on his newspaper site.

But this seem to be the only conversation on the Pattaya Times website during two weeks earlier this month. The posts below read from the bottom up

Then he turns to Drew Noyes’ Facebook, to which Drew himself ‘befriended’ me some time ago.  Cover your eyes and ears when reading this.

 God dammit. Its getting hotter than a goat’s behind in a pepper patch!

But did Pattaya 105 apologise to publisher Drew Noyes?  Certainly not, they say.  So why did they pull it from the site ‘Soundcloud’?  Er, ‘for review by our experts’. But DJ Tommy is slicker than snot on a door nob.

More to the point, why was Mr. Furstman so angry about this alleged US$9000? 

Well, he claims that when he arrived in Thailand and bought a 14 million baht house he went to Mr. Noyes for advice, at the suggestion of Brian Wright of ‘Mythaifiancee.com’,  a man who says he has a 100 per cent visa pass rate to the U.S.

Noyes, said Furstman, advised him to neither to put his house in the name of his girlfriend, nor of a company. ‘Put it MY wife’s name’, he said. 

That was no sweetheart deal.  Drew Noyes’ ‘wife’ is Wanrapa Boonsu, (above with Noyes) the registered editor of The Pattaya Times newspaper and managing director of PAPPA Law Office, which incidentally this week still did not have a licence to practice law.

As security, Wanrapa, borrowed 14 million baht (on paper that is – no money changed hands) and signed a loan agreement with Mr. Furstman.   She then also signed a Last Will and Testament leaving everything to………. Mr. Furstman.

For this service Noyes charged Furstman 120,000 baht – 20,000 of which would go direct to Wanrapa or ‘Kung’. 

Apart from its illegality it was a bit pricey of course, but then we are dealing with the most re-assuring, friendly, credible professional ever to have made Thailand his home. And he has nine children to feed.

Mr. Furstman was new to Thailand, ignorant in local ways, and needed advice.  And though Noyes apparently did not know his ass from his gin whistle,  even he eventually spotted the dangers of this little arrangement. 

His ‘wife’ had left her entire estate to Furstman, and Noyes had been putting other properties in her name under the same sort of agreement.

Panic stricken Noyes had Brian Wright call to cancel the deal. But it was Furstman who had to pay the costs to remedy the matter.  That cost him, according to bills he showed, a further 150,000 baht payable to a Bangkok law firm.

He was livid. Altogether meeting Noyes had cost him the best part of US$9,000 dollars. His demands for a refund went unheeded.

Recent revelations about other people who had been involved in business with Noyes had stunned him.  The Pattaya 105 Interview had put him over the top, even though Drew Noyes was not mentioned by name.

So what was so controversial about the programme?  Not a lot really.  Well first of all DJ Tommy Dee in his promo invited listeners to concur with the view that I was an alcoholic, has been journalist and criminal, living in a tin hut on the outskirts of Bangkok, which is what he claimed he had read in the newspapers.

DJ Tommy would not say that these accusations actually only came from Drew Noyes in his newspaper the Pattaya Times or in his other rants. 

But I laughed at the allegations, glad that my mother wasn’t listening, and after that the interview went fine.

That was because I was able to convey in conversations that allegations were patently not true and were in fact made in Noyes’ Pattaya Times and thus obviously written by him.

I mean I do like a drink once a week.  And, of course, I will be a has-been journalist when I retire soon. But don’t write me off yet.

But I was totally gob-smacked to find out that  the powers of be at Pattaya 105 seemed to be actually scared of Noyes particularly as they had been stalking me for months to get me to go on air. So I put my tape of the interview back up myself. 

Tommy then emailed me imploring me to trust in ‘the little people of Pattaya’  and ‘not assume’ they had dropped the matter asking me to take it down pending their action – which I did.

Unbelievably their action was to say they would put their interview back up in ‘my name’ …so obviously the cheese had slid off their crackers.

No I said I would put my recording back up in my name. So here it is again.

http://soundcloud.com/user2994535/

The good thing is that the interview is not now listed among interviews with a go-go bar owner and a go-go-girl called ‘Wan’.

*Howard’s PattayaOne news is actually streets ahead of other ‘media’ in Pattaya with the exception of Pattaya Today (a newspaper) so no insult intended.

But what I said in the interview that people in trouble in Pattaya had nowhere to turn to of course stands and is all inclusive.

And people should beware of these sort of deals.

As a guideline I paid US$150 to register a property in Thailand
 This piece has been lightened with a touch of well known southern usa expression. They are not intended to be taken seriously. I do not want to have to explain to a Pattaya judge what ‘slick as snot on a doornob means’