Flick open the menu at the "Barbara" in central Bangkok and a picture of a blonde woman unwrapping her dressing gown beside a picture of fried garlic prawns tells you it is no ordinary restaurant.
"Truth is often stranger than fiction," the menu reads -- a better description of Chuwit Kamolvisit, owner of the coffee shop and adjoining massage parlor, than of the dishes on offer.
An accountant who graduated from one of Thailand's most prestigious universities, Chuwit has made millions since hopping a decade ago from the property business to the sex industry, one of the few areas unscathed by Asia's 1997 to 1998 economic crisis.
After a series of publicity stunts to expose corruption, a short jail term and a kidnapping he blames on bent policemen, the self-styled "massage parlor king" is plotting to become Bangkok governor in August elections likely to center on morals.
Alarmed that nearly a third of Thais lose their virginity before they are 18, the government is ratcheting up a social order crusade popular with the middle class. It is considering a 10pm curfew for teenagers and whether to shut nightclubs two hours earlier at midnight.
Chuwit has led sex industry employees on protests against the plans, which he says will ruin Bangkok as a tourist magnet. He dismisses establishment politicians as hypocrites.
"We don't need dinosaurs," Chuwit said. "And I know secrets about them no-one else knows. They used to come here all the time before, but then suddenly they became family men overnight."
A musty office in a warren of bedrooms at the Copacabana, one of Chuwit's six massage parlors, serves as campaign headquarters for his First Thai Nation Party.
A golden Buddha image sits on one shelf and on another is a photograph of five women in evening dress draped over a portly, moustached Chuwit sporting a flowered Hawaiian shirt.
Windows are plastered with "We love Chuwit" stickers that will take an anti-corruption message to voters in the hope of upsetting candidates put up by the governing and main opposition parties.
The central plank of Chuwit's policy is to cut police numbers drastically to keep the men in uniform busy fighting crime rather than pushing paper.
He is undeterred by polls giving him just under 5 percent of public support. Chuwit's nemesis, Deputy Prime Minister Purachai Piumsombun, who heads the government's social order drive, leads with 36.7 percent.
"I'm in the massage parlor industry. I clean bodies," Chuwit said. "And in politics, I'm going to clean some dirty people. I want to make Bangkok a city of happiness, a city of joy."
But Chuwit now wants to get out of the lucrative massage business because he has fallen foul of the police and they are making life difficult.
Undercover police had sex with five masseuses at a club last September and arrested them for prostitution -- dubbed the "get laid and raid" sting by Thai newspapers. Another club was shut down because it had more rooms than its license allowed.
A bribe would have done the trick in the past, but the police now only take them from others and shun him, Chuwit said.
Chuwit's relations with the police began to deteriorate at the beginning of last year, when they arrested him for sending men to bulldoze bars on land he owns in central Bangkok.
He argues a company that sublet the land evicted the out-of-contract tenants. The case is still pending in court.
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