>>44638“This is not an army we are fighting,” Koch went on. “This is a mafia. The Thai vowed eternal war against us. They excluded all amicable resolutions. Eternal war it is.”
Steyn’s responses would often simply join the flow of conversation sent by his client. On other occasions he would push back. In May 2021, for instance, Steyn fired off a 500-word note, concluding: “There is no police action against you or Ocean Builders for that matter. The main complaint was against [Elwartowski] and [Thepdet] . . . I also told you before that [Maskasem] was not the main architect of the events . . . He was an order taker and acted on instruction of his superiors.”
Despite cultivating the language of an international hitman, Steyn had never actually heard of people being “eliminated” in the private sector. No one had asked him to murder someone before. But, with Koch, he was actively discussing the pros and cons of various assassination plots. He estimated that a drive-by shooter would cost about $1,500. The texts and voice messages are peppered with references to armour-piercing bullets and the limitations of laser sights, as the two men apparently tried to impress each other. In retrospect, many of the conversations read more like the fantastical pre-mission briefings in the blockbuster Hitman video games than the dialogue of two adults.
Steyn, according to those who know him, says he never had any intention of carrying out such plans. But he has never clearly articulated why he engaged in the conversations, other than indicating that at some point he hoped to soften Koch’s objectives. Still, texts and voice messages show that, earlier that year, a price for Maskasem’s head had been fixed between the two men: the equivalent of $500,000 in crypto at the time.
Koch would later veto the idea of shooting Maskasem as he travelled by motorcade: “No high-power guns. No explosives,” he wrote in July 2021. “We can’t shred a car convo with an M2 in downtown [Bangkok],” before following up with a voice message: “We need to hurt these guys; we need to cause them pain.” On the messages, Koch’s voice comes through between breathy pauses, thickly accented and sometimes eerily deadpan. “Only then will they move to a reasonable stance. I will essentially own this country.”
Communications from around this time also suggest Koch was suffering paranoiac episodes. In Panama, an associate had reported to Koch that two unidentified men had been making inquiries about him and trying to find his home. When Steyn heard about it, he offered to put together a security team to travel to Panama. But Koch declared he was moving to a new location each night for his own protection, while also spiking his apartment with an unspecified lethal substance. “Anyone coming in here is going to die,” he told Steyn. The two men turned out to be legal couriers, trying to serve Koch papers as part of a dispute involving the MS Satoshi.
At dawn in Phuket, Steyn’s phone pinged with another message from Koch, who’d fired off something in anger at the end of the day in Panama. “We still have not dealt any measurable damage to the enemy,” Koch wrote in early 2022. “How long do you expect me to play this game? All I am doing is pumping money. Zero result.”