A dying anti-corruption crusader reflects on his own misdeeds

His crusade against corruption has made him a household name in Thailand, but Chuwit Kamolvisit would be the first to tell you that his own life has been neither admirable nor one that anyone else should emulate.

A self-described “super pimp” – and known to others as “the godfather of sex” – Mr Chuwit, 62, once owned six massage parlors in Bangkok, where 2,000 women worked for him.

And he got his start as a whistleblower about 20 years ago by relying on his insiders’ knowledge of bribery schemes.

Prostitution is illegal in Thailand, and to get authorities to look the other way, he says he has given police officers cash in black bags, as well as Rolex watches and free services at his establishments.

He had liked the arrangement for years. But when he was arrested in 2003 on charges of hiring hundreds of men to raze dozens of bars and other businesses in central Bangkok, his detention was a clear signal that he had lost his police protection. That’s why he decided to speak out. He held a press conference where he revealed that he had a list of more than a thousand names of police officers he had bribed over the years.

In a conflict-averse society that has almost no culture of whistleblowing, Mr. Chuwit’s sensational descriptions of official crimes captured the nation’s attention, and he has largely held it ever since.

“When everyone is quiet, you just whisper and everyone can hear you,” he said.

Mr. Chuwit tends not to whisper; he growls loudly and literally smashes things. A thin man with slicked back white hair and sunglasses that he never took off during a two-hour interview. Mr Chuwit has captivated the Thai public for years with the litany of evidence he has presented against corrupt police officers and government officials.

His revelations were so compelling that two television channels each gave him his own talk show in 2017, including one, “Chuwit Smacks You In The Face.” where he would list all the ways the police were corrupt.

The other show, ‘Chuwit’s Got Stories To Tell’, ran for eight months on Thailand’s most popular news programme. His 20-minute segment began with him shouting into a megaphone, “Wherever there’s a problem, whatever problems you have, I’ll be there. Chuwit has stories to tell!”

But now his career of exposing abuse of power is coming to an end. Not because he thinks he has helped rid Thailand of widespread corruption. But because he is dying.

When diagnosed with stage 3 liver cancer in July, he was given eight months to live, although patients can live longer.

He spends his last days looking back on his past with some regret and self-recrimination, much of which has to do with his role in the sex industry, which made him rich but at the cost of human misery.

“The way they were talking to me so desperately, it’s like their backs are all against the wall,” he said, his voice growing weaker as he thought about the sex workers.

“He took advantage and took advantage of sex workers,” said Siri Ninlapruek, a transgender LGBTQ activist who campaigns for the welfare of Thailand’s sex workers. “They made him a lot of money so he could pay a lot of bribes.”

But it was not the pangs of a guilty conscience that led him to go public with his bribery claims. Instead, it was anger at what he saw as his own abuse.

Beginning in the early 1990s, he said, he paid law enforcement officials about $17 million in bribes over 10 years to keep his massage parlors in business.

Then, early one morning in 2003, a complex of bars and shops on a plot of land in central Bangkok was demolished by hundreds of men. Mr Chuwit became the prime suspect after it emerged that he had bought the land a few weeks earlier and applied to build a luxury hotel on it.

He was arrested and although he was soon released on bail, he knew he had lost his bribe-bought immunity. He was also accused of hiring underage girls to work in his massage parlors, although he was later acquitted on these charges.

Twenty years later, when he complained that the police were turning against him, he compared his situation unfavorably to that of the drug lords from “Narcos: Mexico,” the Netflix series: “When they paid the money, they were in charge, they could do anything. !”

The same year as his arrest, Mr. Chuwit formed his own political party and made an unsuccessful bid to become Bangkok’s governor. In 2005 he became a member of parliament. In 2008, he ran for governor again but lost after punching a reporter in the face for “humiliating” him. In 2011, Mr Chuwit formed another political party, Love Thailand, which campaigned on an anti-corruption platform.

In 2015, after years of denying that he masterminded the 2003 devastation, Mr. Chuwit pleaded guilty, telling reporters: “It was a huge relief to tell the truth.” He said he destroyed the buildings because he had to deal with tenants who didn’t want to leave.

In January 2016, he was sentenced to two years in prison. He was released under a royal pardon in December of that year, but the imprisonment shocked him.

“You’re like a dog in a cage,” he said. “It’s not like in a Hollywood movie: one cell room with two people. No, no, no, this is Thailand. You have to sleep a hundred, all in all.”

Although his evidence of official misconduct was initially gathered through his own complicity, he now says he is having information sent to him on Facebook, where he has more than 2 million followers.

Last year, Thailand’s Justice Minister praised Mr. Chuwit for providing the government with information about the companies run by Chinese triads in Thailand.

In January, he said he had video evidence of police officers extorting a Taiwanese actress, resulting in four police officers being sentenced to five years in prison. In February, his revelations saw six senior officers fired for their involvement in online gambling.

Despite these successes, Mr Chuwit is pessimistic about his efforts making a dent in Thai corruption. “What I do for this country, for the people, is useless,” he said. “To change this country you need more than one.”

His opponents roll their eyes at these statements. They see him as an attention seeker, based on his own political and financial self-interest.

“There are concerns about whether he is doing it out of personal aspirations,” said Cod Satrusayang, editor-in-chief of the Thai Enquirer news website. “I’d like to believe it’s altruistic, but given his past, there aren’t that many Thais willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Mr. Chuwit grew up in Bangkok’s Chinatown, the 13th of 15 children born to a Thai-Chinese businessman who owned a department store.

About 40 years ago, he enrolled at Campbell University in North Carolina to study business administration, but eventually gave up odd jobs. At the age of 21, he met a 19-year-old American woman, married her and had two children.

When his father asked him to return to Thailand, he did so alone, and he remained there for the next fifteen years.

“I told her I would come back after three months, and after fifteen years I went to see her,” he said of his American wife. “She was so angry.”

Mr. Chuwit says he is now paying a price for his past behavior.

“Even my second wife never wants to talk to me,” he said. ‘I’m going to be the old man who dies alone. I think I deserve that.”

After his cancer diagnosis, Mr. Chuwit did not immediately end his fight against corruption.

In August, he accused Srettha Thavisin, a real estate magnate and then front-runner for the prime minister’s post, of conspiring to commit tax fraud during a land sale.

Mr. Srettha sued Mr. Chuwit for defamation and accused him of blackmail, a charge Mr. Chuwit denies. That same month, Mr Srettha was elected Prime Minister. Mr Chuwit has sued Mr Srettha for defamation; the next hearing is in January.

Mr. Chuwit said he still has a lot of dirt to uncover, “but there is no time for that.”

And he discourages anyone from tapping into his whistleblowing legacy.

“I realize this is a big mistake,” he said. People, he added, should choose an easier path. “That will be a smart way – this is the stubborn way.”

Ryn Jirenuwat And Muktita Suhartono reporting contributed.