America’s Sweetheart gets arrested
The line goes through my brain with absolute clarity:
“Joey, have you ever been to a Turkish prison?”
The line is from “Airplane!” and if a Turkish prison is meant to imply some sort of deviant sexual conduct of prisoners in remote parts of the world I can only imagine what Moldovan prisons have in store.
The morning after returning to Chisinau I wake up to return the rental. It’s about 9am, Javier is still asleep. Why shouldn’t he be, he only slept for 6 hours in the car the day before and another 11 since we’ve been back at the apartment.
A little sleepy myself I head downstairs to Andy’s Pizza for an Americano and a little morning placinta. This is our first morning back in Moldova so I need to stock up on lei; I draw out 1000 (about $70) at an ATM. Once my coffee and breakfast are downed I grab the car from the apartment parking lot and begin to proceed to the rental location.
I make it less than two blocks. Coming out of the parking lot, I come to a T intersection, and want to make a left hand turn. There is a sign with a right hand arrow and I wonder if that means right turn only. Based on the number of cars in front of me that are turning left I figure a) the sign is not implying the only type of permissible turn is right or b) no one is enforcing traffic rules anyway. I turn left.
Almost immediately I hear a siren behind me. So immediate that I pull over only for the purpose of letting the cop car that appeared behind me pass, because surely I’ve done nothing wrong in the past 50 meters to warrant police attention. No such luck, the cop pulls up in front of me (interesting twist) and an officer gets out.
Cops in Chisinau look like American postal workers that haven’t slept in weeks. The cop comes to my window, I roll it down and proceed to make several mistakes:
1) When he asks me something I say I’m American. I don’t so much say it, as I try to say I only speak English but when that gets me nowhere I show him my passport. He magically speaks English after that. I immediately regret the decision. Annual training in the Marine Corps had a block on foreign travel and a very simple lesson is to never relinquish your passport. I now start thinking about the possibility that the cop is going to steal my passport and pawn it off or something. I forgot to check in with the American Embassy when we arrived in Chisinau, I don’t know what I’ll do if I end up in a jam without my passport.
2) When he asks me how much I had to drink the night before I tell him I didn’t drink at all and he pulls out a breathalyzer. Shit, I start freaking out about the beers Javier and I had back in Husi before entering Moldova. I know that they have metabolized by now but that doesn’t mean I’m not worried. Before leaving Bucharest Clara had relayed a story about how serious the Romanians were about drinking and driving and even trace amounts of alcohol results in prison time there. What’s the BAC limit in Moldova?
I breath into the “breathalyzer” which looks more like the voice recorder in Home Alone 2 than a piece of forensic technology. There are two lights on the device, a green one and a red one. The green one lights up. The cop doesn’t miss a beat and says, “You see, it is red,” and puts it back in his pocket. I protest the light was green, but he tells me it wasn’t. So it’s like that.
He tells me to pull further over so that the car isn’t blocking the road more than it already is then to get out of the car. He asks to see my license, he already has my passport. “Ah, California,” is all he remarks before telling me to get in the squad car where his partner is waiting. He doesn’t cuff me, for reasons which become clear later.
In the squad car his partner puts on a show about how bad my breath smells of alcohol. It probably does stink, coffee and cheesy pastry on top of my existing morning breath probably isn’t pleasant. At this point though I’m just thinking about what the next steps are going to be and how to get out of this jam. We start down the road.
The partner speaks worse English than the first cop that breathalyzed me but for some reason he’s doing all the talking now. He wants to know what I’m doing in Chisinau. “Vacation.” Vacation? what is this word? “I’m just visiting.” Businessman? What business am I in? “Not a businessman, just a tourist.” He points at his bicep and says “Blood.” I have no idea what that’s supposed to convey. He does it several times, the first cop says, “Hospital then jail.” All I can respond with is, “Are you fucking serious?” Probably not the wisest response but it’s automatic and I can’t help myself. I consider following it up with a Raiders of the Lost Arc quote: “You can’t do this to me, I’m an American” but decide to bite my tongue.
The partner takes out a cell phone and calls someone on speaker phone, after the other side picks up there is a quick exchange and the speaker starts talking to me in English. “Ok, we take you to hospital to take a blood sample, then you go to jail, and we will take your car.” For a moment I consider asking that as long as they are taking the car, could they just drop it off at the rental place. Ya know, do me a solid as long they are on the road with it anyway? “It will cost 10,000 euros to get your car back, and 1,000 euros to get out of jail.”
I ask her to explain again. This time, though the numbers stay the same the quoted currency is in lei and she says the car will be impounded. I ask what’s going on. “You see, you are very drunk so we will take blood to see how much alcohol you have and then you go to prison.”
I think back to Weisberg…even though it’s American law surely there’s something from my Criminal Procedure class that will help me here. Shit, I really should have paid more attention in that class, but I when I did I had no idea what Weisberg was talking about anyway. Maybe Fisher and Evidence class has some nugget I can apply. Yeah right, I couldn’t focus for longer than twenty seconds at a time in that class, I don’t remember shit from it. Ok Jeff, looks like you are on your own to craft a legal reasoning defense in a foreign jurisdiction to avoid Moldovan prison.
“Really?” is all I can come up with.
The speaker explains the process again, but the numbers and currency change again. I consider two possibilities. The first is that something is getting lost in translation so consistency is elusive. The second is that I’m the middle of a shakedown. I take a gamble on the shakedown.
“Look, I’m leaving Chisinau tomorrow. How long will this take?” The mood in the car changes and the partner ends the phone call.
The first cop, the one with my driver’s license and passport says, “Jeffrey, this is big problem. Will cost a lot of money.” The partner says, “But we have to take you to prison.” The script is on. The first cop starts with a pleading voice to his partner, “but we don’t want to make this a big problem for Jeffrey.” Indeed. We seem to be driving around in a really big circles. Chisinau isn’t that big, the hospital/jail/police station can’t be this far.
We pull over, “Do you have money with you?” There is it. I tell them I have 1,000 lei (thank you morning ATM visit). “That’s not enough, do you have more at your apartment, what about friends?” I can only imagine waking up Javier to tell him that I need cash to bribe cops.
I tell him that my friends are at a funeral that morning and that’s why I’m by myself. It’s sort of true, one of our Moldovan friends from last week is indeed at a funeral that morning. Javier sleeps so heavily that he may as well be dead anyway, so the funeral theme may as well apply to him.
“Where can you get more money?” I play the last card I have. Literally the last card. The only things in my wallet at this point are 1,000 lei and my Stanford student ID. I pull it out and show it to them. “Look, I’m a student. I’m not a business person. I don’t have any more money.” God bless global renown, they recognize Stanford and ask what I’m studying. “Law.”
They talk to each other in Romanian, then just tell me “okay” and point to a cupholder in back where I’m sitting. This is why I was never cuffed, they wanted me to feel comfortable and have mobility to produce cash without them having to search themselves. I place the money in the cup holder. Later I learn that it amounts to about a week’s salary for cops, for which I can only conclude that corruption is necessary.
As they take me back to my car, the two are the nicest people in the world. They tell me what wineries I should visit, what the really good Moldovan wine is, the good nightclubs to party at. Considering their pretense about drinking and driving I find their choice of conversation topic curious, but I’m just happy to be getting off “easy.” Weeks later when I explain this story back in the states I learn that had I gone the contacting the Embassy route it would have been at least an overnight process if not longer since it was a Sunday that this all went down. So to be done with it for $70 in less than hour is sort of worth it to me.
They drop me off at my car (why? aren’t I supposedly drunk?), but rather than drive off immediately I go back up to the apartment to cool my nerves a bit. I wake up Javier and tell him I got arrested for drinking and driving and had to bribe the cops to get released.
He says, “No shit. Don’t suppose you brought me some coffee?”