ON A TYPICAL day, the Private House Buddhamonthon development on the western edge of Bangkok offers a quiet respite from the traffic jams and diesel fumes of the city's central neighborhoods. The cul-de-sac where Alexandre Cazes lived in that semi-suburban enclave was dotted with yellow trumpetbush blossoms. The only sounds were of palm fronds and banana trees rustling in the breeze and the chatter of tropical birds. But on the morning of July 5, that street would have seemed unusually busy to anyone paying attention.
At one end, a gardener was trimming the foliage, and an electrician was busy with a nearby wiring box. Inside the house at the street's dead end, a model home and sales office for Private House's real estate development firm, a man and woman were getting a tour of the property and inquiring about moving into the neighborhood. Their driver sat waiting in a car outside. Another car with two women in it was slowly pulling into the cul-de-sac, looking lost after taking an apparent wrong turn.
In fact, every one of the characters in this bustling scene was an undercover agent. Thailand’s DEA equivalent, the Narcotics Suppression Bureau, had assembled an entire theatrical production's worth of actors around the unwitting target, busily performing their roles and waiting for a signal for Operation Bayonet's takedown to finally begin.
The only non-Thai player in this pantomime was the DEA's Wilfredo Guzman. He stood inside the real estate spec house at the end of the cul-de-sac wearing a Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt and jeans, posing as a wealthy foreign buyer with a Thai wife. Guzman's primary job that morning was to distract the polite real estate agent, straining the limits of his Thai vocabulary to bombard her with questions about the layout of the spec house, the number of bedrooms, the size of the garage, and every other domestic detail he could think of. All of this was designed to allow the agent playing his wife to venture to an upstairs window and get eyes on Cazes' house and driveway next door, in anticipation of the action set to unfold there.Another group of NSB officers, along with the DEA's Miller and a group of FBI agents and analysts, was at the home of the NSB team leader, Colonel Pisal Erb-Arb, where the entire team had gathered that morning; the colonel happened to live a few miles away from Cazes' residence. Pisal himself and a group of uniformed officers had now parked several blocks from Cazes' house. Nearly an hour's drive to the northeast, on the eighth floor of NSB headquarters, yet another group, including Rabenn, Hemesath, Marion, and Sanchez, were assembled in a conference room, with portraits of the Thai royal family on one wall and a collection of screens mounted on another.
The war-room monitors showed videofeeds of the cul-de-sac, pulled from a nearby security camera and the dashcam of the car where Guzman's “driver” was waiting. At the center of the long table was a conference phone connected to both the Thai team on the ground and another team of agents in Lithuania, tasked with imaging the AlphaBay server—taking a snapshot of its contents and then, after Cazes' arrest, pulling it offline.
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