Crime
Terry Stark, Founder of Carolina Skiffs, Dead at 68 in Cambodia
Terry Stark pursued a simple but adventurous life.
CAMBODIA – US National Terry Stark, a restless genius who never finished high school but invented a simple, every man’s skiff that grew into the nation’s biggest-selling fiberglass boat brand, has died in Cambodia. Terry was 68
It was the last of many places he called home as he pursued a simple but adventurous life in latitudes where the climate let him live in shorts and flip-flops
“He wanted to keep things simple and to enjoy a simple life,” said a former girlfriend and business partner, Karen Williams. “He ended with a bicycle, a motorcycle and a rented apartment.
Terry Stark and the simple, robust boats he created at Carolina Skiff
“He didn’t require a lot,” she said. “His motto in life was, it’s easier to do less than to make more.”
Stark founded Carolina Skiff in Newport, near Morehead City, in the early 1980s, then moved it to Jacksonville. It eventually moved to Georgia, but Stark is still responsible for the Carolina name appearing in distinctive, large letters on tens of thousands of boxy, open boats that are spread across the country, the Caribbean and elsewhere.
He sold his share of the company in 1998 – apparently the earliest point that he believed the price would let him live on his terms.
Which is what he proceeded to do.
Stark spent more time in North Carolina than just about anywhere else, but he was born in Pennsylvania and also lived in Georgia, Florida, Maryland, the Bahamas, Honduras, Guatemala, Thailand, Cuba, aboard ships while in the Navy, and sometimes for months on end aboard boats, rambling from one obscure anchorage to the next.
Urge to roam
He moved around so much that sometimes his friends and family lost track, but the basics of the Terry Stark trail goes something like this.
He was raised in Palmyra, Pa., a town near Hershey, where his father was a plumber.
It’s unclear even to his brother, Alan Stark, where Terry got his unquenchable urge to roam. He left home as soon as he was able, quitting high school and joining the Navy at age 17.
He served on aircraft carriers that were part of the U.S. force fighting in Vietnam, repairing the sophisticated electronics aboard the aircraft that were used for targeting, said his brother.
At age 21, his enlistment up, he left the service and worked in electronics factories briefly, before deciding to try college.
It was in an electronics lab at the University of Maryland where he met noted physicist Joseph Weber, who put Stark’s native intelligence and Navy experience to work building circuit boards for a device Weber hoped could detect gravity waves on the moon.
NASA put it aboard Apollo 17. Which is how the ever-rambling Stark came, in a sense, to roam precisely as far as any human ever has: The device, which failed to detect any waves, remains on the moon in the volcanic dust of a valley deeper than the Grand Canyon.
Stark couldn’t sit still long enough to finish college, and he and a then-wife took a boat south down the Intracoastal Waterway to Marathon Key, Fla., where he took a job running a motel while he built a better sailboat.
Stark had a way of infecting others with his approach to life, and after a visit to Florida, Alan Stark yanked up his own roots.
“He told me to come on down for a visit, and I did,” he said. “And I said, my God, I’m too young to settle down, too – I want to play for a while!”
He sold his house and also moved to Marathon.
Eventually, Stark washed up in Morehead City. By then, he had learned how to work with fiberglass and decided to start a repair shop in nearby Newport to work on boats and anything else made of composites. It was during this time he met Williams, who eventually became a partner in the business, she said.
A local businessman came in one day and asked if he could use the durable material to build several copies of a simple johnboat.
Fiberglass wasn’t inherently stiff enough, but using a method he had come up with for repairs, he glassed thick beams of foam on the inside of the hull, essentially building up a slablike floor that was thick, light and lent stiffness with little material.
Company photos include one of a semi-truck with its front wheels on one of the hulls, and another boat sawed into chunks, all of them floating jauntily.
“To him, it was like the Volkswagen of boats, just plain and simple and affordable,” Williams said. “The average everyday person could have a boat and get on the water.
“He didn’t want to be a boat builder,” she said. “He just wanted to make enough money to get another boat and get back on the water, and that was the dream. It didn’t really work out, but that was the idea.”
After he sold his share of the company and he and Williams split up, he mainly lived in Honduras, in large part because the interest rates there were good, said his brother. When rates fell, he moved to Southeast Asia, where they were better, and eventually settled in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.
The Terry lifestyle
Wherever he roamed, he kept in touch with a growing army of friends, in recent years mostly by email, though some regularly flew around the world just to spend time with him.
The Terry lifestyle wasn’t just about him; it was about that crowd of friends whom he showed, however briefly and sporadically, that life could be lived outside the rut.
“I’ve got some incredible memories, thanks to him,” Williams said. “He always challenged you, and made you push yourself more than you thought you could. But in the end you realized how much you were able to do and you lived a better life because of being around him.
As he approached his eighth decade, Stark was feeling the aches and pains of his hard miles. His knees were giving him trouble, making it harder to get around on his bike, and it finally seemed as if he had settled in one place for good.
Many of his friends probably would struggle with that. Certainly, his brother said, no one could imagine him ending up in assisted living.
He didn’t. On Aug. 15, his girlfriend found him slumped over, dead of an apparent heart attack while making a smoothie.
A memorial website set up by buddies in the United States and in Cambodia includes a gallery of photos depicting an easygoing lifestyle and many friends, particularly women.
It also attributes a quote to Stark: “Contrary to popular belief, you can run away from all your problems.”
His view of life, though, was much more than simply figuring out a way to take it easy, said Williams, who had been in regular contact with him for the past 15 years.
“Think about the skiff,” she said. “Someone came to him and said, can you build it? And he could have said no, there’s no way to build them. Because there wasn’t.
“But he said, I’ll give it a try, and he came up with a method of construction and went even further and said, ‘Hey, I can do this for the everyday person, make an inexpensive boat so everybody can have a boat in their driveway,’ ” she said. “And that created happiness for how many people?”
On Sunday, Terry Stark’s friends in Phnom Phen plan a memorial. They’ll give him one last boat ride, out onto the faintly mysterious swirls and up swellings of the Mekong River, where they will spread his ashes. And Terry Stark will be headed for the ocean.
On the move again.
Police in Northern Thailand have arrested a fellow officer as he was being ordained at a temple in Ngao district of neighbouring Lampang province.
Pol Lt Col Bandit Khonkan chief inspector from the Hang Dong police station was disrobed and taken to the Chang Puak station in Chiang Mai. He was arrested on charges of running a call centre scam gang in Chiang Mai Province.
According to Thai Media Chiang Mai Provincial Police Region 5 obtained an arrest warrant for Pol Lt Col Bandit on Friday from the Chiang Mai Provincial Court for procuring illegal telecom equipment, setting up a station and using public airwaves to run a telecommunications business without permission.
Pol Lt Col Bandit reportedly told investigators that he was not the ringleader and was only a member of the gang with Chinese partners.
His arrest followed the apprehension of his 26-year-old daughter, Miss Wanuchapond, 26, and three others during raids at three housing projects in Chiang Mai on Friday, Pol Maj Gen Weerachon Boontawee, deputy chief of Provincial Police Region 5 told Thai media.
During the raids police police discovered around 12 GSM gateways, or SIM boxes, which are devices used for converting cellular networks into mobile phone numbers used domestically.
The chief inspectors daughter Miss Wanuchapond told the arresting officers that she was paid 8,000 baht a month at each of the three locations for renting thr rooms and monitoring devices.
She claimed she had no idea what the devices were and accepted the job because the pay was attractive.
Police investigators working with telecom regulators used a special tracking device to monitor the gang’s communications and learned that its base was in Myanmar opposite Mae Sai district of Chiang Rai.
The call center gang used the GSM gateways to make calls over the internet to scam people in Thailand out of million of baht.
The GSM gateways transmitting signals via SIM boxes to convert them into domestic phone numbers, duping victims into thinking they were being called from Thai government agencies.
Pol Maj Gen Weerachon said that each SIM box held 32 SIM cards, with a capacity of up to 300,000 calls a month. The seized devices had made fraudulent calls over 3.6 million times.
He said the their investigation is ongoing and they are working to track down the remaining conspirators, including Chinese and other Thai suspects.
Authorities are still deciding whether Pol Lt Col Bandit will be dismissed from the force, he said, adding that so far, no other officers are known to have been involved.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Settha Thavisin has authorized the establishment of an emergency cyber center operated by the Royal Thai Police to combat transnational crimes committed by call center gangs along the Thai border in Chiang Rai province.
On July 19, Prime Minister Settha Thavisin directed the Center to combat information technology crimes. The Royal Thai Police (Royal Thai Police) will crack down on call center gangs in Myanmar, Laos, and along the border.
His directive comes as call center gangs ratchet up their scams to defraud people of their money, causing concern among Thais and jeopardizing the country’s economic and social stability.
Related Police News:
Machete Wielding Man Shot an Killed by Police in Chiang Rai
https://www.chiangraitimes.com/chiangrai-news/machete-wielding-man-shot-an-killed-by-police-in-chiang-rai/
Immigration police officers have arrested four Colombian nationals in connection with a series of home burglaries at luxury housing complexes in the Bangkok metropolitan area and Chiang Buri Province.
Pol Maj Gen Panthana Nuchanart, deputy commissioner of the Immigration Bureau, told a press briefing that three of the suspects were apprehended in Nonthaburi Province and the fourth in South Pattaya, Chon Buri Province.
According to the Bangkok Post, the Colombians were charged with stealing conspiracy and seized around 3 million baht (US$82,500.00).
According to Pol Maj Gen Panthana, the criminals rode motorcycles through housing estates, scoping out the properties and waiting for the owners to depart before committing their crimes.
He stated that all four of the accused denied any involvement in the home break-ins, but the arresting squad discovered evidence that implicated them.
Police called to home invasion
Meanwhile, police were dispatched to a luxury housing development in Tambon Nong Prue, Chonburi Province, after a Chinese man was attacked during a house invasion.
When they arrived, they discovered the house owner, Mr. Qian Peng Yi, visibly scared and with marks from being tied up with a cable. He informed police that three Chinese males broke into his home at 9 p.m., one of whom brandished a gun at him and directed him to his bedroom.
They bound his hands and feet, gagged him with fabric, taped his head, and forced him into the bed. The intruders then attempted to compel him into transferring 10 million baht in cryptocurrencies to them, endangering the life of his 33-year-old cousin who was in a second-floor bedroom.
While they scoured the house in search of riches, Mr. Peng Yi managed to flee and hide; he subsequently observed them leave with his cousin. Officials investigated the property and analyzed security camera footage from the incident and surrounding areas.
Around 9 p.m., a 30-year-old van driver came at the Bang Lamung police station after being contacted by an agency to carry Chinese customers from Pattaya to Suvarnabhumi Airport.
The driver informed authorities that he was supposed to pick them up at a motel about a kilometer from the Chinese businessman’s home. He then drove them to Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport, arriving at 1 a.m. and receiving 1,800 baht.
The driver took a snapshot of the group smoking at the airport gate and identified one of them as the victim’s cousin. Police suspected coordination between her and the three suspects in her cousin’s heist, who all departed Thailand on the same aircraft.
Other Bangkok News:
Police in Bangkok Discover Six Vietnamese Tourists Dead in 5 Star Hotel
Police in Bangkok Discover Six Vietnamese Tourists Dead in 5 Star Hotel
Crime
Son of Thailand’s Leading Legal Scholar on Corruption Arrested for Running Online Gambling Network
The son of a former senator and leading economist and expert on corruption and gambling in Thailand has been arrested for on charges of running an online gambling network and its payment system.
Police from Thailand’s Technology Crime Suppression Division (TCSD) have confiscated assets worth more than (US$ 11.1 million) 400 million baht.
Narote Piriyarangsan, 33, was arrested following crackdowns in three sites around the city, according to Pol Maj Gen Athip Pongsiwapai, commander of the police Technology Crime Suppression Division (TCSD).
Mr Narote’s father, Sangsit Piriyarangsan, is an economist who has written articles and books about corruption and gambling. He was one of the appointed senators that were investigating the government’s intention to legalize casino gaming before their terms expired.
Police also detained 39-year-old Narayut Narakaew, the owner of the gambling website 69pgslot.com. The Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the couple for operating an internet gambling service and money laundering.
According to the Bangkok Post, police seized two desktop computers, one laptop computer, 14 mobile phones, 21 bank passbooks, 53 ATM cards, and four high-end cars — a Ferrari 926 GTS, an Aston Martin, a Lexus, and a Subaru — totaling more than 400 million baht.
Police launched the inquiry after discovering the online gambling site, which accepted funds via an automatic deposit-withdrawal system through bank accounts and deposits in the AskMePay system. Players scanned the VPay QR code as well as the QR codes for Heng Online 888 or Heng Pay Company.
Police also discovered that payments received via QR code scans were transferred to the account of Heng Pay Co and then to the gambling website’s mule accounts using AskMePay, which did not use banks’ face recognition scanning. An inquiry indicated a monthly turnover of approximately 5 billion baht.
According to investigators, the website has been up and running for around four years, with the payment mechanism in use for roughly eight months.
According to Pol Maj Gen Athip, Mr Narote owns the gaming website’s payment systems and is the director of Heng Pay Co. After gathering evidence, authorities requested arrest warrants for 14 people.
Thailand does not allow almost any kind of gaming. Even though the law doesn’t say anything specific about online gaming, it is still considered gambling. The country has pretty strict rules about gambling. Thai punters can bet on the national lottery and horse races, but they can’t bet on any other types of games.
But it’s not a secret that there is a huge illegal gaming business in Thailand, even though it’s illegal.
The illegal casinos, online betting shops, underground lotteries, and pop-up bookies that take bets on everything from cockfights to Muay Thai make a shadow economy that is worth billions of dollars every year.
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Thailand’s Cyber Crime Police Raid Top Cops Home Over Gambling Websites
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