Frustrated pickpocket

Having just done a blog on the crime situation, and pickpockets in general, it was only fitting that shortly after, a pickpocket would attempt, thankfully unsuccessfully, to pick my pocket.

Here's how it happened. I walked up to a parked public car. The car fills up and then leaves, and it still needed a few more people. I noticed a woman waiting for someone to fill the more uncomfortable part of the front seat--that is the one where you are halfway sitting on the parking brake, and the driver is shifting right next to your leg--and decided to oblige her. The instant I got in, a man jumped in front of her so that he could sit next to me. His accomplice sat in the back, as did the other woman.

I immediately became suspicious. Why had this man been so rude? Why was it so important to him to sit there? He began the usual pocket fumble, as the driver began to drive off. I scooted over noticably and stared at his hand in his pocket. He asked the driver if the car went somewhere everyone knows it doesn't. Upon receiving a "no," he asked to be let out. The driver was irritated, but I was relieved.

Once the two were gone, we had to back up and wait for two more to fill the empty spaces. As we drove off, I told the driver that the man was a pickpocket, and the woman behind me confirmed it. He went around the block and came back to the starting point, to make sure the two hadn't just hopped into the next car. The guy who works with the company asked him why he had come back. When he told him about the pickpockets, the guy said, "Yes, I recognized them." He knew that they were pickpockets, but had simply watched them get into the car!

Half the way home, the driver gave the other woman and myself a lecture. "You should have told me. I would have taken care of him." He pulled a baseball bat out from under his seat. He said that they have a room upstairs in their office where they take pickpockets when they catch them, and that they break all their ribs, and beat them badly, and that they usually die of their injuries. He wasn't joking. Vigilante justice is just part of this Dominican Life.