Tecate Shakedown

A new friend and editor of a magazine for wealthy over-50 types asked me to write a story about a time when the perceived value of money was transformed. The assignment brought to mind this south-of-the-border shakedown that happened to my son and me a couple of years ago on the Baja Peninsula.

US/Mexico Border • May 12, 2024

Coasting adventure motorcycles downhill, we roll into Mexico. So Cal to South of the Border in seventy feet. A green neon arrow on an adobe arch welcomes us to Tecate. No hours-long lines of diesel-belching trucks, no surly federales. Smiles from the customs officials at both sides. Cheerful waves. Unbelievably smooth.

I should’ve known it was too good to be true.

I’d prepped my 19-year-old son for all manner of bad behavior at the border. Instead, we’re greeted with gleaming, white-toothed smiles? I glance over at Liam, pulling in the clutch so that I can take my hand off the throttle and accompany an upward held palm with a shoulder shrug. How could that have been so easy? He shrugs back. Under his full-face helmet, I know he’s smiling too.

Maybe I’ve gotten too cynical. Good things DO happen, afterall.

The short hill into Tecate ends in a T and the peaceful transition explodes. Colors everywhere, bright reds, yellows, a blizzard of primary color signs. On a motorcycle, it’s instant immersion in the smell of charcoal smoke and dust, the sounds of bleating car horns and blaring music, reggaeton and ranchero and recycled American pop pouring from a bazaar of tiny shops, crowded vendor stalls.

I’m bedazzled.

This is why we’ve come: the adventure, the teeming life.

The traffic light at the T turns green and it’s time to go, but which way? The Garmin GPS mounted above my handlebars offers no clue. The pink line we’d been following, a prescribed route for an off-road run through the Baja Peninsula, seems to end right in front of us. Maybe I need to zoom in, but there isn’t time. Tijuana to the right, Mexicali to the left.

I signal right and quickly dart westward. My son following on his bike, we cruise through three more stoplights as I try to get us back on the pink GPS line that marks this unmarked route, but it seems I’ve left it behind. Maybe Mexicali was the answer. With a circular wave over my head, I signal U turn, and we thread the needle of oncoming Toyota pickups and bicycles and scooters, dogs skittering through traffic with uncanny expertise.

And still I can’t figure out where to turn.

On our third pass through town, there’s something missing from my mirror: Liam. I turn in my saddle to look and several blocks back, through the chaos, I see his yellow bike at the curb, next to another motorcycle. The second motorcycle features a flashing blue light. My stomach clenches as I whip another U turn and ride back to him.

“I think he’s saying I ran a red light,” Liam says to me. “But I didn’t.”

The motorcycle cop looks young, late teens or early twenties, but I can’t tell; he’s wearing a black face mask under his helmet. I can only see his eyes.

“Habla Espanol?” he asks.

“Un poquito,” I offer because I know that’s what you say, not because I can speak a little Spanish.

But it’s enough to jump-start a long harangue that, though I can’t understand it, I think I know where it’s leading. So, I hold my hands up in the universal signal of Too much, I don’t understand.

“Sígueme a la estación,” he says. Follow me to the station.

That I understand, and it’s something I’m not doing. From similar experiences in Mexico and Central America, I’ve formed the opinion that you don’t want to go to the station under any circumstances. At the station, there will be many incomprehensible demands, an opaque bureaucracy, and a virtual guarantee of losing hours and maybe days, as well as more money. Everyone has their hands out.

I shake my head and use English: “No, that’s not happening.”

He gives me a look. Removing my sunglasses, I return the glare, feigning a world-weary confidence (that I don’t feel). We will take care of this here and now (which I hope is true).

“Cuánto costará?” I ask. How much do you want?

“Quinientos dolares,” he says. Five hundred dollars.

“What!?” I exclaim, loudly repeating the sum with an outrage I do not need to feign. It’s not that I don’t have five hundred dollars. I do. It’s right here in the zippered pocket of my moto pants. But I’m not parting with it. Never mind that the offense is cooked up and this is a clear shakedown, the number is wrong. The invisible hand of the market smacking me in the temple, upending my mental ledger. Even here, even in these circumstances, there are unwritten rules around money.

A bribe shouldn’t be two or three times his weekly salary.

“Sígueme a la estación,” he repeats. Follow me to the station.

The tendons in my neck torque. I grind my molars. And as I take a long, slow breath, it occurs to me that could be is a teachable moment for my son, who’s recently enrolled to study international business at a university in New Zealand.

Welcome to Redistribution of Wealth 101.

“No,” I say. As I dig in my moto pants pocket, pulling out a thin wad of greenbacks. “I will give you one hundred dollars.”

I’m guessing that if we go to the station, where others will need to be paid off, he’ll be lucky to net a hundred from the shakedown. I watch his eyes, but he’s not giving anything away. Not that I can see anyway; I never was any good at poker. Now he digs into a zippered pocket on his Policía vest and brings out a nice new Pixel phone. Maybe I was wrong about amount of his weekly salary. Or maybe the shakedown business is booming. He taps the phone, speaks into it, and turns the screen to me.

It reads: “You give four hundred dollars so that you can depart.”

The Google Translate app is still in its infancy and more than a bit clunky.

Okay, I say to myself, now that he’s negotiating, it’s clear that he doesn’t want to go to the station any more than I do. I feel my jaw unclench. Now, I understand the game we’re playing and remember books I’ve read, the many deals I’ve done.

Welcome to Negotiating As If Your Life Depended on It. We will follow the tenets outlined in a book of the same title by Chris Voss.

I already know Crooked Cop’s upper end: $400. I could just pay it and roll, but that’s really weak, so I counter with two hundred and we agree on three. It’s still way too much—forgive me Chris Voss, I did split the difference—but all your active listening and tactical empathy techniques would take hours on Google Translate, and we’re burning daylight.

Sliding bills from one hand to the other, I start to count.

“Not here,” he says in English. “Too many,” he says gesturing around, indicating the passersby, mostly kids and moms steadfastly ignoring us on the broken asphalt of the sidewalk. “You follow me.”

I nod to him and step over to Liam, quietly telling him that we’ll follow CC and that if it looks sketchy, we’re going to gun it and ride straight back to the border checkpoint. He nods.

Ahead, CC turns off the main road, up a side street of low-hanging palms, and then banks into a wide swath of slanting concrete next to a half-built cinder block building. He stops his bike, swings a leg over, and turns to face me. Scanning the block, I see that he’s accomplished his goal: except for a mama hound and three puppies lolling in the shade of a dumpster, there is no one in sight. No thugs waiting to jump the gringos and steal their motos.

Just project confidence.

I nod to Liam as he pulls up and we come to a stop in from of the CC’s bike. Killing the bikes, and a hot silence descends, the ticking of cooling engines the only sound. Heeling my kickstand, I swing a leg over the saddle, turning to face hCC with all the bravado I can muster.

Smash. Metal meets tarmac in a sickening clatter. My bike has tipped over. I’d rested the stand on a raised manhole cover that I hadn’t noticed.

For a moment, no one moves. And in that moment, maybe something changes. For a split second, maybe we are just three guys on motorbikes. Tres Amigos. Beneath the balaclava, CC might’ve even be grinning.

Then Liam is off his bike and, together with CC, we’re grabbing my panniers and righting the bike. I roll it back from the manhole cover and re-kick-stand it. Keen to capture the fleeting kinship, I slap three hundred-dollar bills into CC’s gloved hand, quickly remount my bike, and thumb the starter. Liam does too. The alley comes alive in sound. Mama mutt leaps to her feet and scurries under a chain-link fence, her puppies following in a jumbled scrum.

“Stop,” the cop yells, taking a step closer to me.

Now what? Class is over; lesson learned. You got your money.

I’m tempted to just gun it and get the hell out of there, but for some reason I flick the kill switch and turn to CC as he holds up his phone.

“Where are you going?” it reads.

I don’t know what sort of game he’s playing now, but I point to my Garmin screen, stabbing a finger on the place where the pink line leaves paved road and proceeds on dirt, away from town, toward Ensenada. In response, he taps his screen and then shows it to me.

“You follow me,” it reads.

Another attempt to run us into an ambush? Naw, he could’ve done that right here.

Or maybe the fleeting kinship I felt was real and now he wants to provide some value for the toll he’s collected?Or, most likely, now that he has his money, he wants to whisk us out of town asap.

Liam and I pull out of the alley behind him, steering into his wake as he accelerates. Weaving through traffic, he’s setting an astonishing pace—forty, fifty miles an hour—which we are only too happy to follow. I look over at Liam, who’s now riding beside me, and give him another who-the-hell-knows shrug. Slaloming all manner of obstruction, using the gutter and occasional sidewalk, we’re flying past the slowly creeping traffic.

And then, up ahead, the light turns red at what looks to be a five-way intersection. I squeeze my brake, but I notice that CC is not slowing down. Instead, he flips on his flashing blue light, blips a loud siren, and guns it through the intersection. I accelerate quickly and whip through the suddenly stopped cars, close on his wheel. Liam, however, is not next to me. In my mirror I see him stopped at the red light. CC keeps going.

Now what? I pull over and wait for the light to change. Watching Liam in the mirror to make sure he sees me, I don’t notice CC swinging his bike around and pulling up next to me. I look over as he’s tapping at his phone screen again before holding it up.

“Tell boy to keep up,” it says.

The light changes, Liam joins us, and I relay the message.

“I thought it was a trap to get us to actually run a red light,” he yells over to me.

I nod. That’s good thinking. All sorts of learning going on here.

“He might be trying to get us out of town,” I yell. “Let’s stick with him.”

And we’re off again, moving as a unit now, blowing through intersections frozen by the blue flashing light. Cars and trucks pull off the road in front of us.

Look out, Baja, the clueless gringos are now visiting royalty with a police escort!

Trading a few rumpled C-notes for this treatment now seems like a sweet deal.

As we hit the outskirts of town and traffic thins, CC accelerates some more. Passing trucks, rickety jitneys, and sputtering scooters with impunity, we take the straight-away at seventy. As the road begins to curve westward, he slows, pulls off to the shoulder, and points. I follow his finger to a dirt road on the left and then glance down at the Garmin.

That’s it. I can’t believe it, but there it is. He’s brought us right to the spot we were looking for.

I wonder about how to part ways—a quick goodbye to a fellow adventurer -- and then I remember the three-bill extortion.

He just ripped us off; don’t be friendly.

But I give him a big wave anyway.

I provided financial incentive, and he provided value. A market in motion. Lesson learned.

Liam follows as we hook left onto the dirt and blaze up a thin, silty two-track. Cresting a ridge, neither one of us looks back, as the invisible hand of the market guides us toward our next adventure.