My Encounters with Criminal Gangs

The East-West Inquirer

An online monthly that strives to bring East and West closer
Vol. IX, No. 98, February 2010
Web address: www.eastwestinquirer.com
Editor and Publisher: M.P. Prabhakaran

E-mail address: editor@eastwestinquirer.com

Traveling alone has its rewards. But it also has risks which a solitary traveler has to be on the lookout for all the time.

When you travel to a foreign country in a group, you do everything with the group, as planned by your travel organizer. You rarely break away from the group to mix and talk with local people. The knowledge about foreign cultures and ways of life you can get from such mixing and talking is invaluable. You don't realize it until you experience it. Bookish knowledge is no substitute for it.

After having traveled a lot with groups put together by tour companies, lately, I have been venturing out to distant lands all by myself. The latest such venture was my 30-day odyssey around Europe, this past summer. While I wouldn’t trade what I have gained from it for anything in the world, it has also reminded me of the importance of being extra vigilant while traveling alone. Especially if the traveler has features that make him stand out in a crowd. With my brown skin and unmistakable Indian features, I do stand out in any European city.

From July 21 to 23, I was at St. Petersburg, Russia. The city was founded by Tsar Peter I, as the capital of his vast Russian empire and “window on the West,” in 1703. It continued to be the country’s capital until the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, when the triumphant communists moved the capital to Moscow. But St. Petersburg, named for the emperor who built it, still remains the cultural capital of Russia.

One evening, I was on Nevsky Prospekt, the busiest and perhaps the most fashionable avenue in the city. The sidewalk was crowded with people. I was enjoying everything I saw around. Unlike in other parts of the city, Nevsky Prospekt has the names of some offices and stores written in English. In other parts, it’s all Russian, Russian and Russian alone. When a young man at a street corner, who was distributing fliers and touting conducted tours of the city, greeted me with a “Namaste,” with the syllable ‘na’ correctly pronounced, I felt ecstatic. Alas, the ecstasy was a short-lived one.

I briefly stopped in front of a movie theater, watching the big crowd that was coming out of it. When I turned around to continue my stroll, I found five men blocking my way. “Excuse me,” I said. They pretended not to have heard it. All of them were smoking and looking in different directions. “Excuse me,” I said again, this time loudly. They still wouldn’t move, and I was surprised. I was about to leave the sidewalk and step onto the road, so I could go around them, when I felt my right hand being caught by one of them. He said something in Russian and started pulling me toward him. I got scared. The other four were still looking afar as though nothing was happening in front of them. “Excuse me,” I shouted and wriggled my hand out of the man’s grip. The grip was firm.

Frightened and confused, I walked fast. After making sure that I was at a safe distance from them, I stopped and looked back. All five were looking at me, smirking. One of them gave me a salute. I have yet to figure out what that salute meant.

I was still nervous when I reached the bed-and-breakfast place I was staying in. When the Russian lady who owned the place asked me how my day was, I said: “I have heard, and actually been warned, about the Russian mafia prowling big cities in the country. I never took it seriously – until this evening.” I told her what happened to me on Nevsky Prospekt.

“Yes, there are criminal gangs in the city,” she said. “They are mostly after foreigners. In your case, it is very obvious that you are a foreigner.” She clarified the point by touching the skin on her folded left hand with her right index finger. “I didn’t want to scare you. That’s the only reason why I didn’t warn you about them.”

“Fortunately, I was able to get out of the man’s grip before they could do any damage,” I told her. “If one of them had reached into my pocket when my hand was held and grabbed everything in it, my tour would have ended there.”

The cash I had in the pocket was not much – a few ruble and U.S. dollar bills. But it had all my credit and debit cards. Lately, with the availability of ATM machines in all important cities of the world, I have stopped carrying cash in big amounts. I have been using credit and debit cards to withdraw money in local currencies, for my daily expenses. The St. Petersburg incident alerted me on the danger of putting all cards in one pocket. Throughout the rest of my trip I carried only one card at a time. But then, one incident doesn’t prepare you to guard against all the ingenious ways in which criminals operate. I had to wait only for a few more days to realize it.

On August 9, 2009, I was in Frankfurt, Germany. I was leisurely walking on the promenade leading from the city’s main train station to Willy Brandt Platz. The platz, which in German means place, is named for the late Willy Brandt, the Chancellor, from 1969 to 1974, of what was then West Germany. (I used to be a fan of Willy Brandt.) Among the tourist attractions of the place are a huge symbol of euro mounted on steel pillars and the imposing European Central Bank building behind it.

I might have walked for about 10 minutes when a man, with a broad smile and a city map in his hand, approached me. “Roma, Italy,” he said by way of introducing himself. He didn’t speak much English. Or that was the impression he conveyed to me.

“I love go India,” he said. “Next year.” Then he opened the map and asked me direction to some place.

“I am new to this city,” I told him. “Ask someone who is familiar with the place.”

“No, help me look,” he said. He looked around for a place where he could spread the map. The place he found was behind a building, away from the attention of passersby.

I have found myself seeking help from total strangers in locating places on numerous occasions, in numerous cities. Refusing to help a person in a similar situation is the last thing I would do. I followed him around the building.

No sooner had he opened the map than two men appeared from nowhere. They identified themselves as “police” and showed what looked like police badges. They were in civilian clothes, in neatly pressed trousers and jackets. “Could be undercover cops,” I said to myself.

“This gentleman is asking me for direction to some place, Sir,” I replied. “Perhaps you can help him.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t have any money to change. I use credit cards most of the time.”

“My passport is in my hotel room. I have a photo copy of it with me.” I took the copy out of my backpack and gave it to him. He took a glance at it and handed it back to me.

“I don’t have a wallet,” I told him. “Here is the money that I have with me.” I showed him the few euro and dollar bills I had.

“There are illegal money transactions taking place on streets,” he said. “Don’t change money on the street. Do it at a bank.”

That piece of advice made their conduct look legitimate. Money laundering is an activity criminals engage in all over the world. I wouldn’t have given the incident a second thought but for what happened a few days later.

It was August 15, 2009, the last day of my tour. I was in Copenhagen, Denmark. I had only one more hour left, on what was my second day in the beautiful Danish capital, before leaving for the airport to fly back to New York. It was 9 o’clock in the morning. I had just come out of the city’s main train station and was about to enter Vesterbragade, the first thoroughfare one hits as he comes out of the station. To my surprise, I saw the same “Roma, Italy” man whom I had met in Frankfurt walking toward me. This time, he had a map of Copenhagen in his hand. This time also, he needed my help in locating a place on the map.

“I remember seeing you before,” I said as soon as he stopped in front of me. He didn’t say anything. Either he didn’t recognize me or pretended not to.

“Yes, I know,” I told him. “But most Danes speak English. If you think you can understand me, you can understand them also.”

He did not pay attention to what I said. He was more interested in finding a place to spread his map. He found one behind the “Astor Pizza Restaurant,” which was closed. The Indian-owned restaurant, whose “eat all you can for 59 kroner” sale pitch had enticed me into it the day before, would be opening only at 11 a.m. He spread the map on a window ledge of the restaurant and said, gleefully, “Big city.”

I turned around. To my utter astonishment, I saw the same two ‘cops’ who had confronted me in Frankfurt a few days earlier standing before me, showing their ‘police badges.’ They were wearing the same civilian clothes they wore while in Frankfurt.

Though I recognized them, they gave no indication of having recognized me. They repeated the process of interrogating me in the exact order in which they did it in Frankfurt: asked for my passport; asked for my wallet; and seeing that I had only a few euro and dollar bills with me, said, “That’s all what you have?” Their parting words also were the same as in Frankfurt: “Don’t change money on the street. Do it at a bank.”

I was stunned. I watched them walk away, the two ‘cops’ in one direction and the “Roma” man in another. “This is stranger than fiction,” I said to myself. Questions arose in my mind: “Are the three men members of the Interpol? Are they moving from country to country to crack some international money-laundering racket?”

Questions displacing those thoughts also arose just as fast: “If that is the case, why did they have to coax me into an isolated place to do their job? Why didn’t they bother to read anything in the copy of my passport when I presented it to them? Why that disappointed look on their faces when they found that the amount of money I had with me was very small?”

It’s my strong suspicion that the three were part of a criminal gang in Europe, moving from city to city, looking for innocent travelers to bilk. They let me go on both occasions because they found the cash I was carrying too little for their enterprise.

I am sorry you were followed from Frankfurt to Copenhagen by criminals. I think those who followed you were the Gypsies. Known as map-readers, they were a menace in Italy. The Gypsies call themselves Roma or Sinthi, depending upon the tribe they belong to.

I have encountered them in Milan and other places. Once, a teenager was happy that he succeeded in picking my pocket. But when he realized that what he picked from the pocket of my leather jacket where just papers which were of no value to him, he came back running, calling me “amigo [friend],” and returned the papers. I had kept my purse elsewhere.

The Gypsies should be contrasted with Bombay’s Frere Road groups, managed by an advocate-pickpocket called Bhanu. The gang members specialize in tossing off your trouser pockets to make the purse fall off.

In Europe, at the entrance to exhibition halls, groups of Gypsy children surround you to snatch away whatever you have. At night, they move about in groups and resort to tactics like pelting windows with pebbles to find out if anyone is home. When the light is turned on, the group disappears. When no light comes on, the group knows that there is no one home. It breaks in and commits robbery.

Apart from this, there are Romanian bands roaming around Europe now, employing another tactic: using anesthetic bombs to desensitize the victims before breaking into houses! On trains, they operate in groups.

I don’t know much about the Russian mafia, except that it is supposed to assault and kill.