The amazing thing about the MPC scam—you could not get busted or go to jail. “Two guys came to Bangkok from Spain.” Burch explained. “I didn’t know them, but they began going back and forth between Bangkok and Saigon and dealing in MPCs. They were not careful and carried some really bad looking fake IDs. They went to a post office in Saigon to exchange the MPCs for money orders one day, and the postal clerk became suspicious when he saw their military IDs and called the military police. They were arrested. One of them had a friend or relative who worked on one of the San Francisco newspapers. A reporter from the newspaper wrote a story about how ‘Americans were starving in Vietnamese jails.’ There was a lot of antiwar sentiment in the U.S., so Uncle Sam pressured the Vietnamese government to release all Americans in Vietnamese jails. After that, we couldn’t get busted. The U.S. and Vietnamese authorities were both too scared to do anything.”

  In 1967, the Overseas Weekly, an alternative military newspaper, did an exposé of the MPC scam and identified Atkinson, Burch, Jackson and Johnson as “The Bangkok Four.” Even with all the negative exposure, nothing happened to the Bangkok Four. It was business as usual and none of them had to pay anybody off to stay in the country.

  LIKE IKE, BURCH was making thousands of dollars, but while Ike seemed content to play life by ear, Dan had a plan. “I thought I had arrived,” Burch recalled. “That’s why I was in such a rush going back and forth between Bangkok and Saigon. Before too long, I had close to $100,000 stashed away in a Swiss bank. My goal was to salt away a quarter of a million dollars, buy an annuity, and then draw a monthly stipend. I would have it made for the rest of my life. But my trouble over MPCs with Jack ended my dream. I knew I couldn’t make as much money gambling as I could have with MPCs, so I turned to drug trafficking, which made me a potential felon and exposed me to a life of crime.”

  During his first trip to Saigon after arriving with Ike from Madrid, Burch was not impressed with how Jack had responded to a friend in need. He, Jack, Ike and Johnson had gone to the Plaza Hotel’s mezzanine where they got into a craps game with some GIs and contractors. Ike lost all his money and asked Jack to loan him $300 so he could get back into the game. Jack said he didn’t have any money, but Ike knew Jack was carrying some money orders and asked him what happened to them. “I sent them to the U.S.,” Jack said. About two hours later, Jack had lost all his money in the craps game, but he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a $100 money order. Losing that amount, he reached again and pulled out another $100 money order. In all, Jack pulled out 12 one hundred dollar money orders and lost them all.

  It was in the wee hours of the morning, and since all four brothers were cleaned out, they returned to Ike’s hotel room. Ike was livid. He swore at Jack and demanded: “Why did you lie to me about the money, man?” All Jack could do was look sheepish and say; “I don’t know, man. I don’t know.”

  Yet, Burch did not foresee any problems with Jack even when mild-mannered John Roy, the White brother who had migrated from Germany, called a meeting of the brothers who were in Bangkok at the time. Roy was staying with Ike and Dan, who lived together on Sukhumvit Road when they first came to Bangkok. At this point, Ike had returned to Goldsboro, North Carolina, for an extended visit. Atha and the kids had initially followed Ike to Bangkok, but as was the case in Germany, Atha did not like living overseas and quickly returned home. Ike, who was on a financial roll with the MPC scam, nevertheless had taken a break and returned home to keep his marriage together.

  “I can still see the scene as if it was today,” Burch recalled. “Roy, Johnson, George Pratt (an ex-GI, now retired, who had recently come to Thailand from Germany) and I were inside the house. The front door was open and Jack was sitting on the steps. He could look into the house and see Roy talking to us. Roy said: ‘I’ve called you guys together to tell you I’m going back to Spain because Thailand isn’t big enough for me and (pointing to Jack) him. Jack is a low-down son-of-a-bitch and he’s not worth two dead flies. I’d rather see an ashtray at a card game than Jack. Jack doesn’t want to see anybody with anything. If he sees you with two cents, he’s going to try to figure out a way of getting it from you. Then even if he gets it, Jack’s such a fool, he’ll blow it and then try to get some more money from you. Jack is no good!’

  “We could see Jack sitting with his head down, not saying anything. I said to myself: ‘Jack’s not like that.’ At the time I respected Jack. Then John Roy said: ‘I’m leaving this country because it’s not big enough for Herman Jackson and me. What good is it to stay in Thailand when, whatever you have, Jack is going to try to get it away from you. I like you guys, but I don’t want to be around that bastard any longer!’”

  John Roy did leave Bangkok. His plan was to save $100,000 and return to New Orleans and buy a car lot. Ike and Burch never did see Roy again, but as far as they know, he fulfilled his dream. Roy’s tirade shocked the brothers, and they wondered what had gotten into him. Burch was early into his relationship with Jack, but eventually he would view Roy as a prophet. Little by little, Jack’s actions would chip away at his best-laid plans.

  One time, for instance, Burch, Johnson, Ike and some of the brothers were at Shorty’s Place, a bar in Da Nang, Vietnam, owned by a man whom Jack had known from his service in the Triple Nickel. Jackson fancied himself a master chess player and challenged Burch to a game of chess. He went ballistic when Burch beat him easily. Jack angrily swept the chess pieces off the board, and they went flying in all directions. “I started laughing,” Burch recalled. “At the time, I didn’t think Jack would take it out on me.” But troubled by Jack’s changing relationship with him, Burch had begun observing Jack more closely when he was in the company of other military veterans and noted the deference with which he treated them. Burch eventually concluded that Jack did not respect him and was jealous of him because he was nearly two decades younger and had served only two years in the military service, yet was doing well in Thailand.

  On another occasion, Burch met a GI named Jackson who had taken the Embassy Flight to Bangkok. Jackson was on his way to Saigon, but decided to lay over. Burch invited Jackson to stay at his house until he was ready to resume his trip. Jackson was tired from his trip, so after getting him settled, Burch headed for La Fee’s to check out the scene. “I picked up a nice-looking Thai girl and took her back to the house for some fun. After we finished, I took her back to the bar. When I returned to the house, Jackson (the traveling GI) was there waiting for me. He looked puzzled.

  “Man, something strange happened to me tonight,’” he said,

  I asked: “Like what?”

  “He said. ‘I had the sheets up over me and I was sleeping good. I heard somebody comin’ up the steps. I didn’t move because I thought it was you. Then all of a sudden this guy jerked the sheets off of me. It scared the shit out of me! I said: ‘What the hell is going on?’”

  “It was Jack. He apologized to Jackson and told him that a man fitting my description had left the bar with one of his girlfriends. Jack didn’t catch me, but I know he held it against me.”

  And he held a grudge against anybody else close to Burch. “Jack was even jealous of Claudia, my girlfriend who had joined me from Spain,” Burch said. “Jack told Pratt Benthall that Claudia was buying too many clothes, and that she was even learning how to speak Thai. Jack thought he was ‘Mr. Thailand,’ and he didn’t want anybody to be more familiar with the country than he was.” Jack eventually banned Burch and Claudia from La Fee’s, no explanation given.

  BUT LIFE WAS good for Dan Burch, so he ignored the slight and focused on the MPC scam. On one of his MPC trips to Bangkok, Burch was standing in line ready to exchange dollars for MPCs with an Indian exchange merchant. Ahead of him was a retired first sergeant named Guieppo, whom Burch had not seen in some time. He noticed that instead of giving the merchant dollars, Guieppo was writing out a check. “It hit me,” Burch recalled. “I realized I didn’t have to go back and forth between Bangkok and Saigon, hauling U.S. money with me. The Indian exchange merchants were trusting souls, if you did regular business with them. I could stay in Saigon, write checks and let the money accumulate. That is what I did. I returned to Bangkok and put everything in order and came back to Saigon. But then Jack messed everything up.”

  Rather than use the tried-and-true U.S. military post office in Saigon to ship money orders back to Thailand, Burch decided to give Jimmy Smedley, who had moved from Germany to Bangkok and who was also in Saigon hustling MPCs at the time, $40,000 in money orders to bring back to Bangkok for him. When Jack learned who had Burch’s money orders, he sweet-talked the easy going Smedley into giving the money orders to him to hold for Burch. Realizing how much money Burch was sending from Saigon, Jack went to the Bangkok post office and explained that Burch had moved, and Burch wanted him to pick up his mail. When Burch returned from Saigon and went to the post office to pick up his mail, he was told: “Your friend got your mail for you.” Once the clerk described the friend, Burch wondered: What the hell was going on? Then he got nervous. In the mail that Jack picked up was $40,000 in money orders. All Jack had to do to cash them was to forge Burch’s name.

  Thoroughly pissed, Burch confronted Jack. “Why did you take my money orders?”

  Mr. Thailand had an explanation. “(Ellis) Sutton has your money, man. When he came to Bangkok recently, he came by my house and stole a lot of money from me.”

  “Where is he?” Burch demanded.

  “Well, he’s gone back to the U.S. God knows where.” Jack replied.

  Later, Burch caught up with Sutton, who confirmed that, yes, he did get some money from Jack when he was in Bangkok, but he did not steal it. Jack owed him the money.

  Burch was now convinced that Jack was up to no good and out to destroy him. He would have to watch his back.

  A couple of months later, Burch found out that Jack had sent $38,000 of Burch’s money orders to his sister in California. The U.S. Customs officials in Hawaii, however, had apparently randomly selected Jack’s package to inspect, and when opening it, they found the money orders. Jack’s sister denied that she had anything to do with the package, so Customs confiscated the money orders. “Jack was never prosecuted,” Burch explained. “I don’t think he ever got the money orders back, but I can’t be certain. I didn’t know what to do. The other $40,000 was still missing. I should have killed Jack. I thought about it, but I needed to stay in Thailand.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Switching Gears

  HERMAN “JACK” JACKSON always wanted to own a bar, and he got his wish when Luchai (Chai) Ruviwat sold him a part interest in La Fee’s. Business boomed, and by 1967, the bar had become a must visit for the many American Black GIs flocking to Bangkok on R & R at the height of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was much different for Blacks than the one their forefathers had served in during World War II. Blacks were fully integrated into the Armed Forces now, and no one questioned their fighting ability. They made up 9.8 percent of the U.S. military force in Vietnam, but close to 20 percent of the combat troops and 25 percent of such crack army units as the paratroopers. And despite the racism prevailing in America, Blacks were as patriotic as ever. The vast majority of Black soldiers were low-ranking enlisted men, but the Black enlistment rate in the U.S. military was three times greater than for Whites.

  The Bangkok entertainment scene reflected the tense racial situation in America and Vietnam at the time. Whites and Blacks tended to hang out at bars whose clientele was drawn predominantly from their own race. “The bars were strictly segregated by music,” recalled Pete Davis, a retired Black DEA agent who came to Bangkok in 1971 to work. “You would have country music in one bar and soul music in another. If you were Black and wanted to go into a country music bar, even the girls would give you attitude. They would look at you as if to say—what are you doing here?”

  The segregation could lead to racial tension, especially over Thai women. “Many Thais considered any Thai woman who went with an American GI, Black or White, to be a whore,” said Steve Jarrell, a former U.S. airman stationed at Utapao Air Force Base at Sattahip in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “But those same Thai women who went with White GIs held their noses up when they saw Thai girls with Black GIs. The vice versa was also true. So the Thai women were as segregated as the American GIs.”

  But few bars in Bangkok catered exclusively to Black GIs. Soul Sister was a big place with a live band and a coffee shop upstairs. The Whiskey Jazz also had two floors but it was small. La Fee’s had become one of the more popular places, but it too sometimes gave patrons the feeling of being packed in a sardine can. Jack and Chai recognized a business opportunity, and they renovated a building on Petchaburi Road and opened it as a bar in June 1967. To massage Jack’s ego, the bar was called Jack’s American Star Bar. Both Ike and Jimmy Smedley became partners, with each of the four partners investing about $8,000 in the venture. Ike became a silent partner and Jimmy Smedley worked as the manager, a good fit despite Smedley’s fondness for alcohol, because everybody seemed to like the retired U.S. military man who always wore a nice smile.

  Peter Finucane, a journalist with the Bangkok Post newspaper since 1967, remembers Smedley as a congenial man with a shoulder twitch and a pocked-marked face adorned with a permanent smile and lots of laugh lines. “Jimmy would sit at the bar facing the door so he could see everybody coming in,” Finucane recalled. “He always had a drink in his hand, and nobody could figure out what kind it was. He wouldn’t tell any one. It was like a classified military secret.”

  Finucane and John McBeth, a friend and fellow journalist, were two of the few Whites who frequented the bar. ”Sometimes we would get a little aggravation and a few stares,” McBeth explained “But Jimmy would always take care of us and seat us at the bar. He kind of presided over things at Jack’s.” Smedley told everyone he met that the opening of Jack’s American Star Bar had given him a niche in life. No way would he ever go back to Saigon and exchange dollars for MPCs.

  While Smedley played genial host, Luchai kept an eye out for potential trouble and hired the girls. It was a requirement to include a local Thai partner in a business arrangement. The Thai partner, as was the case with Chai, would also have the local contacts and could serve as a buffer in case the partners had any problems with the authorities. Mr. Yeung and another Thai named Mr. Udong took care of the bar’s legal matters.

  For Ike, the investment and money he made from Jack’s was pocket change, because he was still going full blast with the profitable MPC scam. Yet being a business partner gave him a legitimate reason—a front, if you will—for being in Bangkok. Ike would not have to worry about being summarily kicked out of Thailand.

  Patrons of Jack’s American Star Bar would enter through a heavy creaking front door that had a large red tinsel star on the right. On the bar’s ground floor was a dance area where Thai girls, some of them sporting elaborate afros, danced with Black male patrons to the funky sounds of such popular tunes as “Funky Chicken,” “Rubber Legs” and “Mechanical Man.” Anybody could stand up and sing, if they had the desire or the nerve. “One of the funniest things I saw at Jack’s was a small Thai man who weighed about 90 pounds, singing James Brown’s ‘Hot Pants,’” Davis recalled “He’d screech: ‘Hot Pants!’ and then shout: ‘Yeow!’, trying to imitate Brown.”

  On the second floor was a restaurant with the best soul food east of Harlem. A patron could feast on Bar B-Q ribs, pork chops, pig’s tails, feet and ears, chitterlings, fried chicken, black-eyed peas, grits and collared greens until the wee hours of the morning. Smedley would boast: “We sell everything on the pig from the tail to the ears.”

  The partners would stock the liquor supply with booze purchased from the local U.S. Army PX. With Ike, Jack and Smedley being retired military, they could buy it cheaply and in quantity and avoid the steep tax the Thais put on booze. They bought cigarettes and food items cheaply from the PX as well. The bar had no problem recruiting pretty young Thai girls or getting them to become part of an internal spy network that reported on what the GIs patrons were saying.

  Finding girlfriends was easy for Ike or his buddies, most of whom liked to play the field. Ike’s wife Atha had come to Bangkok with the kids for while, but, as was the case with Germany, she did not like Thailand and returned home quickly. Ike never liked to mess around with a lot of women, so he settled into relationships with two pretty Thai women, one who worked in the American commissary and another who worked at Jack’s American Star Bar.

  Terry Nardi and Steve Jerrell were two White airmen who worked in the field maintenance service at Utapao Air Force Base and organized “Salt and Pepper,” a six-member band that played during their off duty hours and included two Black airmen. In late 1969 and early 1970, Salt and Pepper played every second weekend for six-months at Jack’s Star Bar. “ The band got along fine in Jack’s because we had a good appreciation of Black music,” explained Terry Nardi, Salt and Pepper’s founder. “We played the songs of such musicians as Wilson Picket and Otis Redding—the music the crowd wanted to hear—and once we started, the crowd really liked us.”

  Daniel Burch was not invited to join the Jack’s American Star Bar partnership, so he opened his own bar. Burch and his girlfriend Claudia rented some space at the First Hotel on Petchaburi Road away from the strip and called it Chez Moi. Seating about 60 patrons, Chez Moi started off well, but after about seven months the bar began losing money. “ Back then, the Thais viewed Americans who opened businesses in (Thailand) as cash cows,” Burch explained. “I was still doing the MPC thing, so I hired a Thai manager and a Thai bartender to take care of the bar for us. It was a bad mistake. They robbed us blind. By the time we figured it out, it wasn’t worth the hassle. So we decided to close the bar down.”