Jiu-Jitsu Athlete Was Held Hostage In Rio By Fake Police And Forced Withdraw Money From The ATM For His Own Ransom


It’s getting to the point where things going wrong in Rio leading up to the Olympics is pretty much a non-story. It’s expected. Kind of like when you wake up still drunk and devour your weight in fast food. You’re vomiting that up later. A real story would be if you didn’t throw up those three double cheeseburgers. The only reason the comedy of errors that is Rio is still a story is, because, every time something goes wrong, it’s escalated significantly from the last time something went wrong (read: the day before).

Like today, which brings us a story from Jason Lee, a Jiu-Jitsu fighter from New Zealand, who got kidnapped by two men dressed as Rio policemen. Lee, who will not be competing in the games but has been based in Rio and training there for the past 10 months, had this to say t0 arriving athletes.

He expanded on the story.

Via ESPN:

“…the martial arts athlete explained in further detail how the incident developed from what appeared to be a routine traffic stop by two policemen on motorbikes.

“First, he asked me to stretch my arms, then patted me down,” Lee said. “At this point, it still looked reasonably professional.”

However, after the policemen searched the New Zealander’s rental car, one of the cops returned brandishing a large book and told Lee he was breaking the law.

“He says, ‘You can’t drive in Brazil as a foreigner without a passport,’ which I now know isn’t the case at all. The rental car company hadn’t mentioned that to me. He starts opening the book, showing me all these passages in Portuguese, which I can sort of read, like, every third word.”

The men then demanded that Lee pay them 2000 Brazilian reals ($615) or face a night in a Rio jail.

“At this point, I acknowledged to myself that I’ve completely backed myself into a corner,” Lee said. “These guys have pulled me over. They have weapons. I’m not in any position to negotiate.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt like I could possibly die.”

Lee, who was not carrying any money at the time, was forced to drive to a nearby police bunker underneath an overpass, where he was swapped into an unmarked private car and taken to two ATMs to withdraw enough money to pay the officers. Once he returned to the bunker, Lee handed over the money and was finally released.

“[They] said, ‘You can’t say anything to anyone about this — not a word,'” Lee said. The jujitsu fighter did, however, report the incident to the Rio authorities.

“I was umming and ahhing about whether I should even make a complaint. One of the guys I was reporting it to said, ‘We understand you are hesitant because we are the police, and that branch of the police is so scary, even we are afraid of them.'””

Once again, I don’t think I need to write a conclusion paragraph here about how fucked the Rio Olympics are. We just should not be sending anybody there. I do, however, have a similar story from when I was in college. Every Tuesday, there was a bar in like the asspit of Albany which hosted a dollar beer night that college kids from all over the city flocked to in droves. Probably the only day of the week where that neighborhood so that many people who didn’t keep their drug money under the kitchen floorboards. Since beers were only a dollar and everyone had class on Tuesday, the place usually emptied out around 1:30. One night, for some reason, I decided to stay until like 3 AM with one of my friends who also turned out to be a petite girl who was 5 foot nothing and weighed less than a wet paper bag full of feathers. So, essentially, the last person you want as backup in a fight. Last call comes around, I head outside to grab a cab for us and am approached by one of the largest men I have ever seen. Guy looked like two industrial refrigerators superglued together. The guy keeps asking me to buy him a beer, I keep saying no. We go back and forth for like two minutes before he finally just hits me with, “How about you just give me your credit card and I’ll go by myself a beer on you.” Obviously I said no, which is when I noticed that this dude’s three boys (who were so big that the whole group could have been fucking quintuplets) had come up behind me. They then inform me that my credit card is going to be in their possession in the next two minutes, whether I give it to them or not. So I obviously gave it to them and just immediately cancelled it in the cab on my way home. They were big but, thankfully, not very smart. So I completely sympathize with Lee, here. Sometimes, you just gotta give the money and not get your face caved in. The difference between him and me? He’s a trained fighter and I got winded at the gym this morning while climbing onto the treadmill.