Day 181 - The Weiss Brothers

After a year working in the Visa Section, I moved to the American Citizen Services Section where the majority of the work involved issuing passports and reports of birth abroad to family members of service members in Germany. Once again, like visa applications, most of these cases were straight forward. But a few were interesting.

The Weiss brothers were definitely interesting.

Image of cowboys by DangerRanger,
via Flickr.com

The two brothers showed up wearing cowboy hats, cowboy boots, and big smiles, requesting that we arrange to repatriate them back to the U.S. because they had run out of money. But the kicker was that they had previously been repatriated back to the U.S. from Stuttgart and their explanation for why we should do it again was that they hadn't yet repaid the repatriation loan from that first occassion three or five years before. They had copies of the paperwork to prove it.

The brothers were Amcits, State-speak for American citizens, but they spoke English with an accent that suggested an eastern European background. Russian was my guess.

The reason their case was interesting is that the brothers shouldn't have been issued new passports until after they had repaid the previous loan. When U.S. citizens are repatriated, their passports are annotated to expire when they arrive back in the U.S. and a hold is placed on any new applications until the loan to cover the cost of repatriation has been repaid. Repatriation is intended to be a last resort for Americans in trouble overseas. Even people who are evacuated out of dangerous places such as Tehran in February of 1979 end up with a bill for a representative cost of their last-minute flight out if town. Let that be a lesson to you if you were thinking of taking an adventure vacation in one of the world's hot spots, assuming the USG, that is how we refer to the United States Government in State-speak, will bail you out.

So the Weiss brothers showing up, claiming they were broke and needed to be repatriated again in spite of the fact that they still owed the government for the earlier trip home, was interesting. The first question to answer was how they got those passports. And that required sending a message back to Washington to verify that the passports were legitimate.

They were. All we got as an explanation was that someone made a mistake when the new passports were issued. So we decided we needed to dig deeper. Since the original case was several years old, that meant digging into our files in the basement. We explained to the brothers that they would have to come back in a few days.

They were impatient, so they came back earlier than we were ready to give them an answer. And this time, they brought their parents. They were not U.S. citizens, so they had no passports. They also didn't have the same last name. Theirs was definitely Slavic, perhaps Russian. They were permanent residents, green card holders, who had reentry permits. These are travel documents issued to permanent residents who have a legitimate reason to be out of the U.S. for an extended period of time. The boys informed us that they wanted their parents to be repatriated as well. Now that posed a few problems because repatriation isn't extended to non-citizens, even those with green cards. But we collected their reentry permits and photocopied all the pages, at the strong recommendation of my boss. It turned out to be a very good step since there were pages missing from both of those documents. That led us to look more closely at the brothers' passports. They were also missing a few pages. The boys claimed they had been in Germany only a few weeks, but missing pages suggested there may be something bigger they wanted to hide.

After interviewing the brothers again, asking a long series of questions regarding where they had been since they left the U.S., I sent a second report to Washington with their explanation for their predicament, along with a summary of their previous repatriation file and their request that we repatriate their parents as well. I also copied the other consulates in Germany in order to find out if the brothers had previously appeared anywhere else to request assistance.

We received approval to repatriate the brothers, but the addition of the parents complicated things.  The brothers complicated things even more. In spite of the likelihood that we would not receive approval to pay for the parents' return, the boys kept upping the ante. They insisted that we repatriate them via ship instead of by plane because, they said, their parents were afraid to fly.

By this time, it seemed clear that they knew we weren't going to repatriate all four of them, and that we wouldn't agree to send them back by boat. But they had started the process, so they had to follow through. The smiles on their faces gave away that they were just playing a game. Or so I thought.

Image of Mercedes Benz by pilot_micha, via Flickr.com

As suddenly as they appeared, they disappeared. They never returned to find out if we would book their return via ship. But we did hear more about them later. They turned up at another consulate in Germany. I think they had a new story and a new request. The details are not in my memory. What I do remember is that the brothers and their parents had been sleeping in two brand new Mercedes Benz vehicles which they probably purchased in Stuttgart, the heart of Mercedes Benz manufacturing.

They must have run out of money before they could ship them to the U.S.