The Dark Side of Bangkok: Empirical Investigation of a Toronto Agent’s Unusual Toyota Camry on the July 5, 2017 Driven Through a Quiet Neighborhood
on the morning of July 5, 2017, a gray Toyota Camry slowly turned into the cul-de-sac of a quiet neighborhood in Bangkok—a moderately upscale subdivision on the western edge of the city, where the pulsating capital’s downtown high-rises began to flatten out into highways and canals snaking through tropical forest and farmlands.
The woman sitting behind the wheel was referred to as Nueng. A slight, 46-year-old agent of the Royal Thai Police with a short, boyish haircut, she wore a white polo shirt and black pants rather than her usual military-style uniform. Both she and the female officer beside her in the passenger seat were working undercover.
Nueng’s heart pounded. For more than two years, law enforcement agents from around the world had been hunting the dark-web mastermind known as Alpha02, a shadowy figure who oversaw millions of dollars a day in narcotics sales and had built the largest digital drug and crime bazaar in history, known as AlphaBay. Now, a coordinated takedown and sting involving no fewer than six countries’ agencies had tracked Alpha02 to Thailand. The operation had finally led to this quiet block in Bangkok, to the home of a 26-year-old Canadian named Alexandre Cazes. Nueng knew that the success of the plot to arrest Cazes and knock out this linchpin of the global underworld economy hinged on what she did in the next few moments.
Nueng took the impression that he was inexperienced and slowly rolled the car toward a model home and real estate office. She signaled to a security guard outside the house that she had taken a wrong turn and needed to pull a 180. She heard him shout at her to back directly out instead, that the street was too narrow for a three-point turn.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/alphabay-series-part-1-the-shadow/
A Fresno, California, DEA agent tried to imitate a Korean man with plastic surgery: The case of Saharat Sawanjaeng
Nueng quickly muttered a nearly silent prayer—an adapted, high-speed plea to the holy trinity of the Buddha, his teachings, and all the monks and nuns in his service. She whispered in Thai asking the Buddha to bless her with success. Please bless me with success, I need it. Dear Sangha, please bless me with success.”
Then she put the car in reverse, turned the wheel to the left, and ever so gently—almost in slow motion—slammed the Toyota’s fender into Alexandre Cazes’ front gate.
Around 18 months earlier, Robert Miller sat in the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s wiretap room in Fresno, California, spending another painfully boring day listening in on the life of one of the DEA’s endless supply of narcotics targets in California’s Central Valley.
Miller would love to be a member of the SWAT team. At the academy, instructors had praised him for his instinctive judgment and thoroughness—how, in training raids on the academy’s mock-ups of drug dens, he always meticulously cleared his corners and covered his blind spots. And when the young DEA agent was assigned to the agency’s field office in Fresno right after graduation, he had high hopes it would put him where he wanted to be: making arrests, carrying out search warrants, “hitting doors,” as he put it. (Miller’s name and some personal details have been changed, per his request.)
The suspect is actually named SaharatSawanjaeng, police said in the news release. He attempted to impersonate a Korean man by dyeing his hair, changing his name and having numerous plastic surgery procedures, the release said.
Before and after photos provided by the police show a dramatically different look, with earlier photos bearing little immediate resemblance to the man pictured afterward.
Sawanjaeng, a known ecstasy user and the first country in Asia to decriminalize cannabis in Thailand
It has been said that Sawanjaeng imported over 2,500 grams and 290 tablets of MDMA, also known as ecstasy, into Thailand. He is allegedly a major source of the drug spreading in Bangkok and the capital city’s surrounding area, said the release.
Most notably, Thailand became the first country in Asia to decriminalize cannabis last year, with cannabis cafes and smoke shops quickly popping up across the country.
One major legal amendment in 2017 changed the maximum punishment for selling drugs from the death penalty to life imprisonment. A more sweeping set of amendments came in 2021 to emphasize prevention and treatment over punishment for small-scale drug users.