The Most Incredible Bribes

The case dates back to not-so-recent times, the 70s of the last century. In the Russian outback, in one of the small provincial town worked a city prosecutor with the talantes conman.

The man is not yet old and, on the contrary, is still very promising in age. He did not shine with particular successes on the front of the fight against lawlessness and crime, but he did not harm anyone either.

And suddenly a citizen turns to higher law enforcement agencies and declares that the said prosecutor demanded and received from him a bribe in the form of a large sum of money, and the method of its transfer looked completely unrealistic in the applicant’s presentation. At the prosecutor’s suggestion, their “business meeting” took place in a distant, half-abandoned cemetery in the dead of midnight. There, the “guardian of the law” demanded that the bribe-giver climb one of the cemetery birches and, sitting on the very top of it, begin to swing as hard as he could. He himself climbed onto a nearby tree, which he also began to swing. When the swaying of both birches reached the required amplitude, the prosecutor flew up to the applicant once again and accepted the treasured envelope.

It is no wonder that when the briber came to complain, they simply did not believe him. Moreover, the applicant was considered mentally ill and the authorities categorically refused to consider his application. This story, apparently, would have sunk into oblivion if the prosecutor had not repeated such a successful and original method of “accepting bribes.”

After the second statement of the same content, the competent authorities began, as they say, to have doubts, and after the third statement they opened a criminal case and conducted a thorough investigation. The facts, as they say in such cases, were confirmed, the original “thief” took bribes in this unusual way, clearly counting on the fact that no one would ever believe in such “nonsense of a madman.” Therefore, real, practical criminology never denies the most incredible “fiction”.

 * Alexander Bastrykin, Olga Gromtseva “The ideal crime of the century, or the collapse of a criminal case”.