Jack, those are very good stories of trying to do the right thing but being stuck in a rather dubious situation. Here’s one for you along the same vein.
I was Army, recently back from Vietnam and nolonger wanted to hurt anybody. Coincidentally a bunch of Marines who lived next door were back from that ugly conflict and somehow we all thought it was a good idea to go into Mexico to a friends ranch, spend the week riding offroad motorcycles during the day and drinking at night in the local cantina,,,what could go wrong?!!
Well, we were merrily consuming beer, I had my obligatory one beer since I was the lookout and when someone spotted a dog in the cantina one of the Marines thought it a good idea to see if we could get the canine to howl at the spherical white globe lamps hanging from the ceiling. So, 5 Marines, 2 Army guys, my girlfriend and all the neighboring tables were howling at the lamp. The dog eventually caught on and joined in. The bartender thought this not to funny and kicked us all out of the cantina. We all went peacefully except one Marine, figures... when the Federales showed up with a paddy wagon to haul away anyone making a disturbance we all stood back because they had no sense of humor, but that one Marine had to make a scene and they threw him in the vehicle. At this point the Federales were looking for anyone they thought they could hold hostage and they spotted one of our friends, a hippie guy who was never in the bar but was sitting in the bed of a pickup truck drinking a beer very quietly and had said nothing. They spotted him and grabbed him out of the truck and threw him into the wagon. Now that was when it all got interesting!
My girlfriend was Spanish American and spoke Spanish fluently and a firey little girl at 4’11” with long red hair and bright blue eye ranover to the very large, fat, Federale and grabbed him by the forearm, yelling at him in Spanish the entire time. I understood some of it but very quickly her picked her up like a rag doll and tossed her into the paddywagon! Me, being the designated driver was quickly accessing what to do and decided we should follow the paddywagon to find out where in the hell they were being taken. They took the guys to a main lockup that you could smell a block away but they took my girlfriend to a small substation and hustled her into the backroom. Not a good situation.
My buddy and I went in the front door and inquired about fines to get them out of jail, all the while hearing my GF crying in the backroom, God knows what they were doing to her. The very fat Federale would not speak English to us and in very broken English he said “Judge in morning”. This didn’t sit well with me so we emptied our pockets of all the money we had in an attempt to bribe him. He didn’t even get up from his desk. It called for a rethink, so another friend who had NOT been incarcerated always carried a $100 dollar bil,l for emergencies (this was 1968 when that had impact) so we retrieved the cash and walked back into that substation, bery loudly flapping that $100 dollar bill. Well imagine this, the fat cop stood up and in perfect English saying d “ senior, how may I help you”, ha, no surprise there! We inquired about the charges and the fines which were creating a public disturbance for the guys and obstructing justice for my GF. She had yelled that she knew the Mayor of Ensanada personally and would tell him what bad men they were (she was not lying). So the fat cop says the fine is $12.50, each. He calls the main lockup and had the two guys brought to us and brought the girl outof the backroom. We gavenim the $100 dollars and then he reaches in his coat pocket and pulls out a wad of Americam money all rolled up nicely and made change, something we did NOT expect.
The moral of the story is, don’t go drinking in a corrupt forieng country and if you do bring Laywers, Guns, and Money 😊
We actually did get some good riding in and didn’t hit a cactus or olive trees.
Last edited by LightSpeed; 08/03/19 02:26 PM.
