Depending on who you are and what your time in Hanoi has been like, this statement is likely to either be met with a scoff of disbelief or a mutter about its bloody obviousness:

The Hanoi Police Department is concerned with the rise in pickpocketing crimes in the city’s Old Quarter.

Internet travel lists routinely rank Hanoi among the world’s most notorious pickpocketing cities. They have done so for years. Many of us have had our brushes with the practice or know somebody who has. Shady taxi drivers, laptop snatching cat burglars, and pickpockets are just Hanoi constants.

Yet, their apparent ubiquity belies the lengths some go to catch them on the streets we all frequent.

On a nondescript evening early this year, a trusted acquaintance of mine received an SMS from a contact in his local police ward. They told him to be ready by 10:30pm. Tonight was the night. A car would be sent for him.

In way of preparation, he dressed in an outfit he had thought over for a number of days. Its highlights included a roughly cut sleeveless Walter Sobchak t-shirt (“I don’t roll on shabbas.”) over another long sleeve shirt of similar material and wear, a leather cord necklace strung tight with beads, and an orange floral print bandanna. Accessorized with a backpack and a tattered Lonely Planet, it constituted a seasoned expat’s take on the region’s cliche Tây Ba Lô aesthetic.

He waited on the street until he was picked up by an old taxi bearing a brand he did not recognize. It was a short drive to the ward police station.

There he found the normally forgettable building bursting with light and movement. He was told to remain in the car while they got ready. What appeared to be at least two dozen men milled about before gathering just out of sight within the building. Under such circumstances, the 20+ minutes sitting in the back of that car could not have felt longer. There were far more people here than the task as he had envisioned it would require.

When the station briefing broke, he was moved to an unmarked squad car, given three cans of beer that he placed in his backpack, and joined in the backseat of the car by a man of apparent authority. Everyone called him “Captain.” They drove into the Old Quarter, the Captain speaking of the evening’s work with great confidence. It was as if he was analyzing it after the fact.

The car stopped in the middle of an empty stretch of Old Quarter pavement. There, he would sit on the dusty concrete of a closed shop front. Across the street, the captain would be situated in the lobby of a still open hotel. At this hour, the street was likely to remain all but deserted. He sat on the curb, pulled a beer from his backpack, and opened it. Beer in hand, he unfolded a city map he had been given by the police and looked at it mechanically.

A few short sips into his first can, and a skinny, somewhat ragged looking man with a heavily made up young woman on the back of his bike pulled up a few meters in front of him.

“Hey, you! You want boom boom?”

There’s really no other way to put it: his neighbor was a colossal asshole. With a villa that size in central Hanoi and a massive courtyard to go with it, he was clearly rich, connected, or both. Whichever it was, the neighbor clearly felt it entitled him to an existence free from neighbors, or at least free from neighbors with windows opening onto his personal domain. Pause for a moment in contemplation at the wrong window? Allow your music to issue forth in the neighbor’s direction? His rants knew no bounds. Our protagonist and he had very nearly come to blows on a recent afternoon. The insults lobbed back and forth were still fresh in his mind as he cycled past his local ward police office.

It occurred to him that:

A) His neighbor was truly unhinged (he had gone so far as to build a three-story sheet metal wall on the edge of his garden to prevent neighbors opening their windows outward in his direction), and

B) he did not really know anyone in this neighborhood’s police ranks who he could call should things get nasty. Experience told him the importance of having those relationships before you needed them in Hanoi.

On this specific whim, he ducked into the ward office and introduced himself. His ease with the Vietnamese language made it a fairly straight forward encounter. A couple names were learned, phone numbers exchanged. He said nothing of the troublesome neighbor, knowing it best to not allow his apparent interest in knowing them to be tinged by an immediate need of their assistance.

Just a friendly drop in. Nice to meet you fellas.

On his way down the street immediately afterward, one of the younger officers he had just met chased him down. Would he mind heading back to the office for a few minutes? They had something they wanted to talk to him about. It would not take long at all. Obviously, he wasn’t about to decline, but it was also impossible to deny the difference in comfort one feels being called in for a talk with the police as opposed to dropping in unannounced.

Three officers sat across from him in the backroom of the station. His Vietnamese ability could be a great help to them. Would he be interested in helping them catch a pickpocketing operation targeting westerners in the Old Quarter?

Ummmm…yeah? I mean, help how, exactly?

Pose as a tourist. Be a target.

They explained that a recent uptick in reported pickpocketings had followed a very clear pattern. Same area. Same M.O. It was likely the same crew each time. If he agreed, they’d know right where to place him. He would draw them out, let them run their game and watch them walk off with a phone and some cash the police would plant on him. He’d be safe. They’d see to it. They could prepare him for all that he’d likely encounter that night.

All three sat looking at him as he digested it. An undercover sting. Movie shit.

“Let me talk it over with my wife.”

“Boom Boom very good. Girl beautiful. Sexy. Very good for you.”

The pair were right there. The girl was off the bike before he had much chance to put down his beer and look up. He was not sure this was the duo he was sent out here for, but he knew the routine. Any male on foot in the Old Quarter after 10pm knew this maneuver.

Whether this was THE pair or not, he knew he had to stay put. He had been told that two dozen undercover officers would be set up in the surrounding streets and alleyways to prevent escape should their targets take the bait. There were eyes on rooftops. The captain sat right across the street. Whatever went down, he was to draw them out here and only here.

“I’m sorry. Not tonight. I just got to Hanoi. I’m very tired.”

“No problem! We can go hotel? You have hotel, no? I have hotel. No problem. Girl, she want you.”

The young woman was petite and attractive. She stood, swaying slightly, trying to look seductive. It was still unclear whether this was the target pair or just another motorbike-borne pimp working the streets hard around closing time.

“I don’t think so. Sorry.”

“Come on! No problem. One million Vietnam Dong. Very cheap. Boom Boom very good. No problem for you. Good time.”

“No, I should go back to my hotel. I’m out alone tonight. I should just go back and be safe.”

“Girl go with you. She go you hotel. 800,000 Dong. No problem.”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ll just walk back now. I don’t need boom boom tonight.”

This continued for minutes, but at some point, the demeanor of the man changed, and he spoke quickly to the young woman in Vietnamese, assuming the words were for her ears only: Fuck it. He’s not coming. Just get it and let’s go.

This was it. The girl moved forward, approaching her mark and doing the speaking now.

“No want boom boom?”

She rubbed up against him and ran her hands along his legs and ass. He tried to imagine unsuspecting men in various stages of intoxication and whether her you-want-boom-boom pantomime could seem seductive or distracting at all. Under the bright lights of a full on set up and with the audience called to attention on the cue of just get it, it all felt unbearably clumsy and hapless.

Apparently this works.

She checked each pocket in order, immediately lifting a wad of bills from the right front, either accidentally or skillfully pulling all but a single one thousand dong note, making it feel as if there were still something there, he noticed after the fact. She kept looking up into his eyes. No boom boom?

The man prompted her again in Vietnamese: Come on. Get it. Get it. Hurry up.

Then the man’s attention went to his mark’s left thigh. She had just rubbed the outlines of the iPhone the police planted on him.

It was suddenly so very depressing, watching them work, these emobodiments of menace and street savvy. Pickpockets. Pimp. Hooker. He knew that this crew was almost certainly responsible for dozens of such encounters. They were such a chronic pain in the ass, police in a foreign land, virtual strangers to him, had recruited him for this. And yet, he could not shake the feeling of wanting her to just drop her hands and get out of there.

Just leave the phone. You don’t need it. Ride out of here.

“Hey, friend. You got cigarette?” He asked, pointing to rectangular outline of the phone in the mark’s pocket.

“No, I don’t smoke. It’s just my phone,” he said, pulling it out and showing it to them before putting it back in the same pocket.

The rest was a sad, slow-motion inevitability. She went for the phone. It was hard to think of any of it as a skillful, what with the man sitting there on the bike casually directing her movements, not even bothering to whisper or code his speech.

The man eased the bike down the street a meter or so, and the young woman was backing away toward it. As agreed upon before hand, the man, my acquaintance, the mark, the bait, let out a bellowing, top-of-his-lungs yell:

“Hey! Where’s my fucking phone!”

Start to finish was less than one hour.

In the various briefings before the night went down, they had all agreed that he would stay in character from the time he got out of their car until he was back in it heading for home. While an unlikelihood, they would want to avoid any possible retribution coming back on him by making sure their targets for the evening bought that he was a hapless tourist through to the very end. He would play dumb when the police jumped out on their attempted getaway.

When the moment hit, he stood yelling in the street. He thinks he may have grabbed the girl’s arm or shirt as she made for the bike. So into the character was he that he really isn’t sure. It all kind of swims together. Somehow the man on the bike attempted a getaway without the girl. There’s a vision of the captain striding forth from the hotel, saying in broken English to an ostensibly distressed backpacker, “Okay now, okay now. I police. Police.”

He had dared not look down the street and tip the targets to the presence of the waiting officers. He had no idea where they had been hiding. He had only the vague yet visceral sense in his peripheral field of the man being restrained on the asphalt. He kept his focus straight ahead, speaking to the captain, now in English for the first time.

He would maintain the character all the way through the booking process, signing statements, talking to officers, and encountering the female assailant once more as she was brought in to be booked.

Nobody expected it to be over so quickly, so the night wound down and nerves were tempered with a rượu and hotpot session back at the ward police office. All the guys on the street that night attended, along with the Captain and one of his superiors. They all seemed sincerely overjoyed with having it all go so well, and raved about our protagonist’s performance. They ate, they drank, and when the time came, they went their separate ways in the pre-dawn hours of another Hanoi night.