To avoid being knocked out by a date rape drug, never take your eye off your drink
“I don’t mean to be rude,” says Simon Garcia, 36, as he declines my offer to buy him a coffee. “It’s just that my forehead gets clammy if anyone goes near my food or drink.” The Californian businessman buys his own coffee before he recalls the last time he let a woman he didn’t know get too near his drink.
It was in Wanchai.
Garcia, a Singapore-based executive for a luxury sports brand, had gone out for Friday drinks with colleagues. “The next thing I knew, it was 2am on Sunday, and I was lying on my bed, butt-naked,” he recalls. “My mobile phone, wallet and US$3,000 Omega watch were gone.”
So was all memory of the previous 24 hours.
Piecing together the events of that night in January 2008, Garcia believes a woman at the bar spiked his drink with the date-rape drug Rohypnol, and then accompanied him back to his hotel and robbed him when he fell unconscious. He’s not the first. Hong Kong police say 44 Western businessmen have reported similar date rape druggings by prostitutes in Wanchai in the past four years. The real number of victims is much higher, they believe, because few men report the crime if they are cheating on their wives or girlfriends. The US State Department deemed the trend serious enough to issue a warning in its 2008 Hong Kong travel report.
With good reason. The crime is potentially lethal. One high-profile case was that of Kari Juhani Koivuniemi, 45, a chief superintendant with the Finland police, who suffered a fatal heart attack in Hong Kong in 2003 after he was given Rohypnol and robbed by a prostitute.
“Guys who would never pick up hookers back in the States go out in Wanchai to drink, dance and buy sex and think they can get away with it because no one knows them,” explains Garcia. “There’s a free-for-all party atmosphere. It’s kind of orgiastic.”
Garcia insists he had no intention of hiring a prostitute on the night he was drugged – he was newly wed to a “stunning” fashion stylist and very much in love. “I wouldn’t talk about this if I’d been trying to cheat,” he says. “My only crime was having a drink in the wrong place.”
As his work colleagues hit the dance floor, a lithe Chinese beauty in a sparkling halter-top latched on to Garcia at the bar and he wound up chatting with her mainly “out of boredom,” he says. “The dumb thing was I felt sorry for her having to sell herself to loud, sweaty white guys every night.”
Garcia remembers being overcome with dizziness at the bar and his friends hooting with approval as he appeared to leave arm-in-arm with the sexy bargirl. “Everything else is blank until I woke up in the hotel,” he says. “I’d been stripped naked, and there was a condom wrapper and empty minibar liquor bottles on the floor. She’d tried to make it look like I’d had sex with her and then passed out blind drunk, probably to make me too embarrassed to go to the police. She was a real pro.”
Garcia knew instantly he’d been drugged – he’s a gym junkie who never touches more than two low-alcohol drinks a night. But the nature of date rape drugs such as the pill Rohypnol (flunitrazepam, as it is known generically) and its liquid cousin GHB (gamma-hydroxybutryate) means that hardcore partygoers might not even realize they’ve been targeted. The drugs diffuse quickly and are tasteless, odorless and colorless. They induce memory blackouts similar to those experienced by heavy drinkers and can become undetectable in the bloodstream in as little as 24 hours.
Rohypnol was originally produced to treat sleep disorders. Makers started adding a blue dye to render it visible in drinks after its use in date-rape cases made global headlines in the late 1990s. In Hong Kong, however, counterfeit versions minus the dye are available under-the-counter for less than $2 a tablet. Wanchai veterans say bar girls who succeed in drugging and robbing male customers often commit “the near-perfect crime,” as victims simply can’t remember what happened and blame their fate on their own debauchery and depravity – which they then try to conceal.
Not Garcia. He immediately called his wife Annabel on the hotel landline. “She yelled at me for getting robbed, but mainly she was relieved I hadn’t been killed,” he says. It was Annabel who persuaded Garcia to report the crime to the Hong Kong police and get a drug test. A tiny amount of Rohypnol was still detectable in Garcia’s urine. “That made the police take me a bit more seriously, but they didn’t react much. There was an air of routine as they took my statement,” he shrugs.
Wanchai insiders like Sophia Lim say most of the druggings are carried out by “freelancers,” particularly mainlanders who are often controlled by gangs back home. Lim is the bespectacled mama-san of a go-go bar on Lockhart Road. “I watch my girls like a hawk to make sure they don’t cheat customers. That kind of greed is very bad for business,” says Lim, a retired hooker in her late 30s who still has a girlish face behind her dark-rimmed glasses.
Lim misses the days when prostitution was tightly controlled by organized crime. Today’s sex trade is operated by an impossibly complex web of competing human traffickers, brokers, small-time gangs and independent outfits from across Asia and beyond. “In the past, everyone played by the rules and men knew it was safe to come here,” says Lim. “Now girls are committing crimes and it’s very hard to trace who’s responsible. It’s ruining our reputation.”
Across the street, a freelancer who calls herself Juli has no time to be nostalgic.
Juli’s been coming here from Thailand regularly for the past four years to make as much cash as she can. “Sex work is tough. You do what you can to survive,” she says in a steely, high-pitched voice.
In Juli’s case, this means wearing a skintight white dress and clutching a new Nokia camera phone, her latest weapon of mass seduction. “I show customers photos of me having sex,” she says. “And I have some live video clips, too.” Juli, who is in her mid-30s but looks 25, says she gets enough business from these high-tech tactics without having to resort to theft or deception. She charges from HK$4,500 per hour at the start of the evening to HK$2,000 near dawn, and averages three clients a night.
Like Lim, she says that the sex workers involved in using date rape drugs are mostly mainlanders controlled by gangs based in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Nevertheless, she adds that some Southeast Asian bar girls are increasingly tempted to carry out copycat drugging crimes, especially if they owe money to traffickers or brokers.
Juli lists a host of other scams and ploys that she says are routine among Wanchai bar girls. These include escorting clients to an ATM and “shoulder surfing” to see their PIN before stealing the card, and using a client’s cell phone to call themselves so the man’s number flashes on their caller ID. Once they have his number, they phone him to extort money. “This works best with married men,” Juli explains. “If he has a wife, he’ll often pay the girl to stop calling him.”
At one of Wanchai’s upmarket watering holes where bar girls are banned, US businessman Brook McConnell swigs a beer and confirms that men need to watch their backs – and their drinks. “It’s a deceptive place,” says the fund manager from New York who has lived in Hong Kong since 1992. “Compared to red light areas in large American cities, it’s very safe. There’s no violent menace here – you can walk down the street without getting mugged or stabbed. But the fun atmosphere often lures guys into a false sense of security.” Two of McConnell’s associates have fallen prey to date rape druggings and robbery, he says, and others have succumbed to petty bargirl scams. “When I bring out-of-towners here, they are amazed at how open it is. But I don’t take my eyes off them for a second.”
Meanwhile, down at the Wanchai police station, a chief officer admits that rescuing businessmen from dishonest hookers is not a top priority. “Of course we take suspected murders and robberies seriously, but overall, men have to accept there’s always risk in red light areas,” says the officer, speaking anonymously. “We have to strike a balance between law enforcement and the freedom Wanchai is famous for.”
Oddly, prostitute and policeman agree on this: men can’t have it both ways.
As another night falls, bar girl Juli says she’d never report one of her fellow hookers to the police if she found out they were using date rape drugs to rob customers.
“I don’t have any pity,” she says. “Of course it’s bad news if a guy dies or loses his marriage because his wife finds out, but nobody forces them to come to Wanchai.”
She snaps open her Nokia and checks for calls from clients before having her last uncompromising word: “We’ve always had to protect ourselves from men. Maybe now it’s their turn to start protecting themselves from us.”
