Personal Narrative-White Collar Crime In Italy

I was mid laugh when the cabin door opened and my stomach dropped. A man in a uniform, a security guard, was walking towards me, and I rushed to try to hide the half full paper cup of wine I was holding. My mother, who was sitting across from me, had not realized that the security guard was making his way towards us. She had a bottle of Italian wine in one hand, and a cup, like mine, in the other. In my state of panic, the cup in my mother’s hand distracted me; they had the name our hotel in Venice printed on them. It was a quaint little hotel hidden in the winding streets and corridors of the city. Our windows were right above a construction site so we had some unpleasant early mornings, but overall I really enjoyed the hotel. I snapped back to reality when the security guard greeted my mother and me. He politely asked for our passports since we were passing over the border between Italy and Switzerland. While my mom put her wine down and began digging through her purse to find our passports, another security guard entered the car. As I saw him walking towards us, my panic grew, and I

In less than five minutes I went from fearing my own arrest to witnessing the arrest of two young men. I never did find out what they were arrested for but I always assumed that they had stolen something or committed some kind of petty crime in Italy. As they were being taken out of the car towards the front of the train, one of them, the shorter one with lighter hair and a beard that seemed to have been growing out of control for months, looked at me and muttered something in Italian. I’m not entirely sure what he said but I could swear I heard him say “innocente”. Anyway, They were both taken to a car at the front of the train, and when we finally got off the train, we saw them being taken to another train platform by local police. I can only assume that they were taken back to Italy, where they were formally interrogated for whatever crime they may have