Preface, part-b, Travel Advisory

I tried to imagine the scenario: Kharem would slip his fingers into the pocket of some hapless tourist and we’d surround him with cameras and complicity. Would we root for his success? Applaud afterwards? A few days earlier, I was filming Kharem as he tried to steal from three different individuals. How was that any different? I hadn’t realized it was Kharem, but I’d certainly recognized the pursuit of purloinery.

At our shows and lectures, audience members occasionally ask us if we stop pickpockets before they actually take something. Or they ask why we don’t shout out and warn potential victims. We squirm while defending ourselves because we do feel bad about letting it happen—or possibly happen—when we might have saved someone the money and trouble involved with the loss of a wallet.

But over the years we’ve received thanks from thousands of people: those who are now aware and informed and travel with confidence, and those who have foiled thieves after having seen us. The footage that Bob and I collect is seen by hundreds of thousands of people, millions when you count television, and it is shown not as entertainment, but as prophylactic.

We’re not entirely comfortable speaking respectfully to known thieves, laughing with them, and pretending to be friends with them. Respect, though, is what we believe opened Kharem to us. When we ask ourselves why he spoke with us, why he demonstrated his criminal craft, why he revealed his outlaw guts, we come to only one conclusion. We believe he treasured our attention and respect. He reveled in it. He blossomed in it.

I can think of a sappier story if you want the mawkish plot of a liberal: lonely, impoverished, immigrant outcast who lacks documents, education, and job skills is reduced to robbing tourists for his very survival. No family, no friends, no future, no reason to care what happens. A sensitive, poetic fatalist. Until his tragic trajectory is diverted by an angel dropping out of the sky in the shape of a filmmaker.

You think?

Nonsense.

Neither did he talk for money.