On October 16, Bangkok was awash in a sea of red umbrellas. Thousands of “Red Shirts” loyal to the newly elected prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, had amassed in the city despite the torrential rains that were flooding the country. The protesters were honoring the victims of the violence that had gripped Bangkok in the spring of 2010.
Surely the most improbable keynote speaker at this political funeral, held at the Buddhist temple of Wat Bumpennua, was Robert Amsterdam: a loudmouthed lawyer born in the Bronx, educated in Ontario, and resident in London when he’s not jetting around on behalf of billionaire dissident clients. The billionaire dissident who brought him to Bangkok was Thaksin Shinawatra, the populist prime minister who was deposed by the army in 2006, and is widely seen, despite his continuing exile in Dubai, as the power behind his sister Yingluck. She defeated the military-supported Democrat Party last summer.
