Advice for dealing with sociopaths: Don’t take it personally

the robber assault story

I was sleeping. He was out. It was a Monday night, the quietest night in town there. Most bars aren’t even open, and close around 1am. I was a bit irritated he was gone again longer than he said he would. This was our 2nd week together or so. And he was gone pretty every night then.

All of a sudden a car stops at his house, where I’m sleeping. It’s a police truck. He was picked up by the police for trying to deal coke or possession. And he begged me to give him a bribe so they would not incarcerate him for the night. I think it was 20$ or something (but you can live on 20$ including hostel room there). Stupid me did so. Especially, if I’m sleepy or just dozing off, I have a hard time saying no, cause I hardly am aware what’s going on. So he went to the police station and later was dropped off again at his house. Me I thought and expected he would stay home at least then. And I had an excuse to say “no more of this shit”. He showers me with kisses for bailing him out. Calls me an angel. And before I can react, he’s saying he still needs to help out the guy who had done the order or was with him. I half comprehended the story. I think now, he needed to get new coke because of course he got busted with the coke for the tourist or somehting.

And he asks and takes at the same time the last remaining 20$ out of my wallet. I hardly had time to respond, as he was out the door along with his key quick and said he’d be back half hour later.

I had no cash on me anymore. There was nothing to drink. N water, nada. No more cigarettes either, and I was wide awake and getting angrier and angrier as time lapsed by.

So, eventually I was so fed up with having to be the one waiting for him and him grabbing the money after what I had already done and just abandoning me again. So, I dressed myself and decided to take out 20$ out of the ATM, buy a coca cola at the bar close by where I knew he’d eventually end up. Get some ciggies there too. And if I wanted to go to bed, at least I could just ring the door at my hostel where I had my own room.

So, I arrive at the hotel at the beach with an ATM. As I arrive, I hear him shouting my name over and over desperately. He seemed to be aware that he might have just crossed a few too many lines in one night. And he did not seem to be alone there. Now I knew thta at night there might be a danger to be at the beach. So, I did not want to go there. I was not in a mood to talk, because I was too worked up at that moment to have any worthwhile conversation with him. So I waved at him and shouted “Later.” I get the 20$ out. Arrive outside, and the beach is empty. He was nowhere to be seen.

Instead of taking the same route back where some drunk guys sat at the porch on the street, I walk around the block. That street at the time had a bank with a guard on a stool outside. And further up the road is a mercado with guards as well. I am past the bank, when I hear feet running. Thinking it might be him, I stop and turn around. It wasn’t him, but a guy I considered an acquaintance of his. We pooled a couple of times with him. He was short, had a mean face, and was wearing his usual green cap with red Cuban star. He always wanted to touch and kiss me, and he gave me the creeps.
Anyway, next thought going through my mind, that the sleeze may have sent him to run after me to tell me where he was, or to give me some message.
So, I wait for him to come closer. He raises his arm in the air. And I think he’s saying hello to me. Next thing I know, he jumps me, locks his arm around my neck in a strangle grip, and pushed me on the floor.
Didn’t even think of being robbed. I was paralized with fear thinkig I was gonna be raped, as he whispered, with his face a few inches away from me, “Don’t move.”

Then I heard other running feet and his mate, a proffesional volleybal player (tall, handsome, kind looking, in blue long surf shorts and long white sleeveless top), joined us. That’s when Ivan (that’s how the guy with the cap was called) told Oscar (the volleyball player) to take my purse from my body. He said it twice.

And then they ran off. As they ran off, a third guy ran off together with them. Could only make out the clothes of the third, much darker guy. Some green long t-shirt.

As they ran past the mercado, the guards came running outside to find out what was going on. That’s the first moment I was suddenly not paralized by fear anymore, but found the courage to get up. Alas, the bank guard was sleeping on his stool.

Of course the robberers had dispersed and they hadn’t thrown away my purse in some ditch nearby either.

Now, my 20$ was actually in my pocket of my trousers. The wallet had just contained my cards, my toothbrush and cell phone. I hadn’t want to keep it lying in his house.

Because I knew those guys, a part of me could at that moment not believe they would do such a thing without sleeze knowing about it. And I started to realize that sleeze might have been thinking I was bailing out on him altogether, breaking up with him. He didn’t know me that long yet, so he could not be sure. I also knew by his given information that he had been in jail a few months many years before that for thieving. And basically the whole town warned me he was a petty thief.

I also knew that the sleeze had been close by my side a few times when I was at the ATM, so there was a chance. So, it was a real possibility that he had been able to see me put in my pin code. Actually I know for sure he knew, because when he was in Belgium and allowed to go to the supermarket with my card on his own, I never needed to tell him my code.

So, first I went to my hostel to alarm the hosts there of my robbery (same street), and to help me out with international calls or internet to block my cell phone and cards. I also went to the pub in the street of the mercado arond the corner to check whether sleeze was there, to buy that coca cola and the cigarettes. I gave the boss of the pub a message for the sleeze so he would know where to find me.

When he arrived at the hostel, he was first accusing me of desertig him, of how I ignored him at the beach, and that I had taken all my stuff, including my toothbrush from his house, etc. So, my hunch that he thought I was breaking up with him was proven right. He allegedly received the message from the boss of the pub that I had been robbed, or of course he knew from the start I’d gonna be robbed. But he waved it aside, and was more upset of me leaving his house, ignoring him on the beach and being angry with him.

He had a tourist with him. Might have been some guy he met along the way and had had a couple of drinks off. But he was a stranger, and he had no business in our dispute. I remained quiet. And he started to get angrier over the fact I was not even explaining myself. Then I smiled at the tourist and glared at him. “I’m not gonna fight with you here on the street in front of strangers,” smiled at the tourist again and said, “no hard feelings.”

That was the first moment he stopped going on over his misperception of my actions. So, I told him, that yes I had been upset, but I had been incredibly thirsty, had not wanted to go on the beach at night, and I knew that if I had talked to him at the moment he called for me, we would have been in a fight. So, instead I had waved and shouted, “later”. I then asked where he went off to anyway.

His whole countenance read as, “Oops, I made a mistake here.”

Then he became interested in my robbery and started to ask whether I had been able to see who had done it. And I said, yeah, “the guy we pooled with couple of times, with the green cap and his mate, the tall one.” He started to say that couldn’t be true, cause Ivan worked in a restaurant, and Oscar was a total benign guy, a professional volleybal player. He argued that many guys wore caps (actually there was only one who wore that same cap), and I probably made an id-mistake or something. When I started to insist, as did some bystanders, to involve the police and give up the names of those two guys, he finally got into gear. He was gonna find those guys, confront them, etc. He didn’t think the police would be a good idea.

So, he ran off, and returns a little bit later. Ivan had left for Granada that same night already he said. And he kept on saying he could not believe it would have been him.

Next he took me to the guys that hang out at the beachwalk, the drunks, the homeless guys. We gave them some money for tips. WHile I was still within earshot I could hear sleeze telling them who I suspected. And in their answer I thought I could hear confirmation that they had seen those guys leave the poolbar, that closed at the same time I stepped out of the hotel and the ATM. Then he took them aside, talked with one of the guys. A competing dealer (didn’t know that at the time) arrived and heard my story, and urged me to go to the police and warned me that sleeze might have had a hand in it.

He comes back running to me, exclaiming the malecon guys had talked. From another street some guys had come onto the malecon. Those “real” gangsters, had seen me come out of the hotel. And the homeless guys had overheard them planning to rob me. So, sleeze had 3 names now.

With those names we went to the police station. Woke them up. It was 6am by then. One had to drop of his gf at her home first, and they had to dress in uniform. Sleeze told me that bribes would help to get it done faster: petrol money it was called. But it wasn’t me payign the bribe (40$), but sleeze. How much he put in his own trouser pocket, I have no idea.

So, we got in the truck, toured the surrounding country and I even had a confrontation with one of the guys out there in the fields. He looked nowhere like any of the guys who robbed me. But I was not gonna let any chance go by to get some leverage to get my stuff back. So I said that he had the clothing like one of the guys. They took the guy behind a tree, and I had to go sit back in the truck. Was it just talking or roughing him up a bit, I have no idea.

The next house where the police stopped, the guy they were looking for went off running, trying to escape. But he couldn’t, and when he was put in the back of the truck, sleeze who was also in the back suddenly banged the door where I was sitting and told me they had a confession. I thought, “great,” but found it really weird at the same time. None of them looked like the 2 robberers I had seen from close by.

They dropped us off back at sleeze’s home, and were gonna pick up the third name later in the day. At the hostel, my landlords confirmed that those 3 gangster names were names of real heavy gangsters in the area. And that it was good they were in jail now.

Eventually sleeze had been able to locate my cell phone. It had already been sold to someone from the capital. The seller later turned out to be the bigger drugs guy, where sleeze went off too to get the coke to sell it to tourists. We visited the place and that guy apologized profusedly, saying that if they had known I was sleeze’s gf, they would never have done it, blablabalbal. I had to actually buy back my cell phone from the guy of the capital.

My cards, my toothbrush and other stuff turned up at the police station. But in order to get it back, I had to annull my complaint against the 3 gangsters who were set free again. The reasoning was that since I would be back in Belgium by the time they’d go to trial, there would not be an eye-witness anymore, and then my stuff would be the only remaining evidence. No eye-witness, no evidence, no case of course. I saw the third guy they had put in jail as well, and no, he didn’t look remotely close to my robberers either.

While I was mystified about the fact that those 3 guys put into jail didn’t match my own id and yet through them they got my stuff back (but my source was sleeze of course… I have no real clue how they found it, and I don’t think there was a confession either), I remained convinced that the executors of the robbery were this Ivan and Oscar.

The American lady who owned that poolbar, and heard my witness account, was sure I must have been right. All my actions during the robbery point to the fact that I recognized the guy very clearly. I would not have stopped and waited for him to say something to me, if I had not recognized him, or had not been sure it was him. She too confirmed that she closed her bar at the time just before the robbery.

A couple of days later the mercado guard wanted to find out how the investigation was going, and he had recognized Oscar (though he didn’t know his name), giving the exact same description as the one I had of Oscar. In fact I was so sure that eventually I went to the restaurant and told the restaurant owner that Ivan who worked for her and was still in Granada had robbed me.

Sleeze would always dismiss my insistence on their involvement, saying that they had caught the guys as well as my stuff back. He was pretty much acting as if I was making things worse and worse. He wasn’t mad at me. But he reasoned I was inviting more trouble.

One night he came back home, very drunk and angry. One of the three guys who had spent 2-3 days in jail over it, had threatened sleeze with a knife. He had a tiny scratch on his belly for it. Eventually I was to pay off the guy to keep him from our backs.

By then of course, I wanted to be gone from the town. It was getting quite dangerous.

And yet, I saw both Ivan and Oscar one night before we skipped town. After 4 days they had returned, and I met them in a club, while sleeze wasn’t around. Especially Ivan was dancing around me in a intimidating manner. So, I confronted them. But instead of acting angry at me, they started to say, “[name of sleeze] is always causing trouble with tourists.” I looked at them and said, “Why do you start to talk bad of him, when he’s the one who doesn’t believe me that it’s been you guys who robbed me, and who has done everything he could to get 3 gangsters in jail and managed to get my stuff back?” They gave me no answer, and pretty much left me alone after that.

There is one more part of that robbery story… Where had sleeze disappeared off to, after shouting my name from the beach? I had presumed from the start that he might have gone towards the direction of the poolbar. The other side of the beach had no bars at all. Even if he did not appear in that poolbar, it was possible to talk with people inside from the beach across a barrier. I asked him once, much much later where he had gone off to, and he mentioned a bar that is 2 buildings further from that poolbar.

Last year (the robbery was 2 summers ago), I eventually told him what I thought might have been an alternative story than the official one where he was the hero solving the crime. I told him that he thought I was leaving him that night, and I felt he could be pretty vindictive if he wanted to, and had tipped off Ivan and Oscar to do him a favor. He knew the code of my cards. It was only as it became clear to him that I was willing to give him a chance to put things back to right that he came with a sollution, where he would do the police a favor by getting some heavy gangsters who had nothing to do with it really into jail, and it probably might have been to his own petty criminal business advantage as well. He was the sole one who doubted my ability to recognize my robberers, because if they would be thrown into jail they might have given up his name. I also told him it was a complete mystery how the police got my stuff back, but that the only source I had who claimed those 3 gangsters had confessed and said where police could find it was him.

When I first started to explain what I thought might have really happened, he tried to use the same old excuses. But I kindly asked him to simply listen to me. I had forgotten and even forgiven him for the robbery if he had a hand in it. If he had a hand in it, he had tried his best to repair the damage, and he was beaten up eventually by Ivan at the end of that first summer, when we returned back to town. He listened to me very quietly, never revealed an emotion, and hours later when we were back home he thanked me for the interesting conversation.

As a cherry on top, sleeze pointed and showed me pictures of him of December where he was on a boating trip with this Ivan. When I pointed this out, he mumbled that the guy lives in town and he can hardly avoid him. Now, I think he wanted to show me or test me or whatever. But I know full well now, that sleeze never did anything, or pointed something out to me without a purpose.

Now, I’m actually very sure he was behind the whole robbery. As for the girl that was raped last December. I have to be honest, and think of it as a possibility it might have been him or someone he let inside on purpose. I’ll never find out though, because I was in Belgium at the time.