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He’s been behind bars since August 31. He was arrested at the Bangkok airport as he was about to fly home to Australia. His mother back home has told her local paper that Nicolaides, 41, is appalled and terrified by conditions in his prison: he shares a toilet with 95 other brawling inmates, and after his calls for medical attention were ignored an ailing cell mate died before his eyes. His friend Scott Newton said visits were conducted in a “tiny, stinking hot room” where prisoners shout through a glass grille to be heard over “the fighting and wailing.” Newton said Nicolaides has broken down several times during visits. “He’s just desperate now. He’s afraid of just becoming another number, of being forgotten and being left there to rot.”
This article from The Age, an Australian paper, tells Nicolaides’s back story. A former hotel concierge, known to his coworkers as “Pinstripe Harry” for his dapper attire, Nicolaides went off to see the world in 2003. He wound up in the northern Thai city of Chiang Rai, teaching English, writing online columns about ex-pat life, and working on a novel. He called the novel, written in English, Verisimilitude, and he carefully sent the manuscript off to the Bureau of the Royal Household, the Ministry of Culture, and other Thai government offices for vetting. He received no responses.
Why? Because Thai democracy is constantly falling apart and being patched back together, and the near universal reverence in which the Thai people hold their King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 81, has been deemed indispensable to keeping the country in one piece. Here’s blogger Sean Nelson, an American who’s taught in Thailand, calling Nicolaides a “fool,” adding, “To openly publish such a book and remain in Thailand is asking for trouble.”
The Akha Heritage Foundation post says, “Write the Thai Government, the Australian Government, and demand his release.” That would be a welcome development, and I’m not sure their post brings it any closer.
