Another weekend, back from work. Probably was friday evening when we started, but the border crossing was crowded with all the gasoline smugglers, so we crossed after midnight and hence the date on the stamp. We'd start packing around 16, be finished with shopping by 18, be at the border around 19:15 or so, which means we waited at least five hours.
Once it happened that the queue didn't move for an hour and a half. We later heard what happened - some TV station in Beli Manastir (in Croatia, RSKrajina at the time) was running a porn flick, so all four teams (cops and customs on both sides) just stopped all work and watched. The gasoline smugglers brought the news, as one of them simply walked to the pole, perhaps even took a peek through a window, understood what was going on. Walking back, he exchanged shouts with the rest of his team. "What's up?" "We go!" "Where to?" "Home!".
The team was well synchronized. Some chick, with a trailer hooked to her merc, would wait on the side, perhaps 500m from the crossing. I've seen her so many times that I still remember her tags. The trailer held barrels with gasoline and probably some electric pump to refill the cars faster, as their profit was directly dependent on how many rounds they manage to pull in a day. Having a ready supply at this place was important, as the nearest gas station was a dozen kilometers away and probably had some queue. Sometimes they'd leave a full car by the road, not far from the crossing, so it would be near in the morning. Again, anything to shorten the wait.
The two villages on our side, Bački Breg and Kolut, profitted the most; Bezdan was too far away. Every smuggler had a fence, who'd wait with ready barrels and marks. They ran a good throughput, both sides were getting rich. About half of the stories on these crossings I know from what Ileš told me, and then some from a customer in Bezdan. Sometimes we'd cross at Kelebija, via Subotica, and sometimes at Horgoš, though we wouldn't go all the way to Szeged - there's a sideroad from Mórahalom straight to Horgoš, that's 12km instead of 34. About Kelebija I remember a story (from Ileš, of course) about a customs officer sitting in the shade, and a sixpack of beer lands by his side, with instruction to take care of it while it's cold. Which means look that way, don't look this way... Meanwhile, on the hungarian side, a locomotive maneuvers with four cars full of gasoline barrels. Pushes them slowly southwards, then it was supposed to stop, switch tracks and take them somewhere else. Unfortunately, nobody remembered to actually hook these cars to the locomotive, so when it braked, they followed their inertia... into FRY. Where they were welcomed by appropriate personnel. The inspector opened his third beer.
A pair of villages on the border, somewhere between Kelebija and Bački Breg, had a double hoseline - from hungarian side they pumped gasoline, rakija went the reverse. Or another case when whole village comes and rolls barrels down a slight slope so they end on the other side of the border... Similar stories were heard about the lower flow of Danube, around Milanovac, when an ukrainian tanker would start losing the barrels from its upper deck, and they'd end up floating in the river. Luckily, there was just enough air in them to keep them afloat. The glorious years for smuggling.
5-XII-2013 - 13-IX-2024