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频道帖子
This is one of the hardest-hitting emotional chapters I’ve written in a while.
It starts in the basement of a Bulgarian courthouse, with me bruised from the prison transport van, wearing every shirt I owned, waiting to see whether anyone outside even knew where I was.
Then two familiar faces appeared in the hallway.
From there, the chapter moves into the courtroom, the missing extradition papers, the U.S. Embassy hovering over everything, and the moment I started to understand this was not just a hearing. It was something much bigger.
This one matters.
Read the chapter here.
https://chadzhower.substack.com/p/cold-tea-and-bulgarian-law
| 2 |  I did not know that today would be my first court appearance.
At about 7:30 in the morning, the guards knocked on the door and told me to get ready to go. They did not tell me where I was going. They only told me I was going somewhere and that I would be coming back.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chadzhower/p/the-jacket-from-the-man-who-wouldnt?r=8lty9t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true | 77 |
| 3 |  没有文字... | 75 |
| 4 |  We were temporary in that room. The roaches were not.
In that room, the roaches had more freedom than we did.
Not a few roaches. A colony. Probably several colonies. They came in every size. Small ones, large ones, and everything in between.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chadzhower/p/no-sheep-only-roaches?r=8lty9t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true | 74 |
| 5 |  Each inmate was allowed 5 kilograms of food, about eleven pounds, 5 kilograms of other items, and up to 50 packs of cigarettes.
No, not a typo.
Fifty packs of cigarettes every two weeks.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chadzhower/p/fifty-packs-every-two-weeks?r=8lty9t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true | 76 |
| 6 |  The room was so tight only one of us moved at a time. When one man stood up, the other three stayed on their beds and waited. That was one of the first rules the room taught me. Not the guards, and not the paper declaring my rights. The room itself.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chadzhower/p/the-chihuahua-bowl?r=8lty9t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true | 90 |
| 7 | The first thing I noticed was the smell of old cigarette smoke.
Nobody was smoking when I walked in, but the smoke was still there. It was in the walls. It was in the blankets, the pillows, the thin cushions on the beds. It hung in the room like an invisible extra prisoner, something locked inside before me, waiting.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chadzhower/p/room-for-four?r=8lty9t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true | 106 |
| 8 | Please follow the new account on Instagram! Thanks!
https://www.instagram.com/chadzhower/reels/ | 96 |
| 9 | The guard removed the handcuffs and pointed at my belt and shoelaces. Then he pointed at the desk.
“Tuka,” he said.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chadzhower/p/tuka?r=8lty9t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true | 94 |
| 10 | The sun finally came up, and around 8:00 a.m. a police officer came for me. I was the first one taken out.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chadzhower/p/transport-to-bulgarian-prison?r=8lty9t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true | 96 |
| 11 | https://youtube.com/shorts/f4I2b32SmLE | 88 |
| 12 | https://youtube.com/shorts/ZrvNOpgOeb8 | 72 |
| 13 | https://youtube.com/shorts/W1BMHn-CQPk | 73 |
| 14 | My book has moved here:
https://chadzhower.substack.com/
It starts with my 2009 arrest in Bulgaria on an Interpol Red Notice and follows the story behind the FBI case, the custody fight, the extradition battles, the prisons, the documents, and the long road that led me to Russia, where I now live with political asylum.
This is the real story, told piece by piece, from the inside. | 74 |
| 15 | The first episode of my audiobook is live.
Read by me.
This project has taken a lot more than recording a few chapters into a microphone. I have poured a lot into the writing, the pacing, the sound, and the format.
The writing is still the main thing. That comes first. The audiobook exists to bring the story to life, but the text is the foundation.
I spent a long time trying to find a way to turn this into short-form audiobook episodes without losing the weight of the story. I think I finally found a format that works.
The written version is already far ahead, and I’ll release audiobook episodes as I’m able. I don’t know yet how often they’ll come out, but this is a priority now.
You can read the text version too, and if you’re not already there, join the Telegram group for updates.
Episode one is here.
https://youtube.com/shorts/VHgK2tSBf-I?feature=share | 125 |
| 16 |  没有文字... | 80 |
| 17 | Everyone... over here please. :)
https://www.instagram.com/chadzhower/ | 89 |
| 18 |  没有文字... | 123 |
| 19 | There was some snoring, but nobody slept for long. The drunk man on the floor was the only exception.
The rest of us kept trying and failing.
After a while, everyone seemed to accept sleep was impossible.
The cell went back to chatting and smoking.
At some point, a family was let into the room across from the cell. They seemed to be waiting for someone, though I never learned why they were there. After about an hour they went farther down the hall, and I never saw them again.
No explanation.
They appeared, waited, moved on, and disappeared into the building.
By then, the night had become fragments. Bulgarian voices. Russian phrases. The guard’s television. A wet floor. A bench that never let the body settle. People coming and going on the other side of the bars.
Peter had somehow gone back to sleep on the long section of the bench. The other two men paced near the back of the room. They did not speak Russian, but I decided to try anyway.
I used simple Russian phrases and spoke slowly. By bouncing back and forth through alternate words, they understood what I wanted in Russian, and I understood their Bulgarian.
Then one of them told me the thing I needed to hear.
“They can only hold you for twenty-four hours without a judge’s order,” he said.
The other man kept smoking and did not join the conversation, but he listened.
“So you should be set free in the morning,” the first man continued. “They have held you since yesterday morning.”
They seemed certain. They also seemed like men who had been there before.
I believed him.
I had every reason to believe him.
That was the rule. That was how this was supposed to work. Twenty-four hours. Then either a judge got involved, or they let me go.
So I began to make plans.
Not fantasy plans. Practical plans.
I needed to get to one of the lawyers. I still had the list of lawyers the police had given me, with their phone numbers and addresses. Viktor’s address was written in Bulgarian, but since Bulgarian uses Cyrillic and is close enough to Russian Cyrillic, I could read it without much trouble. His office was in the city center, inside a shopping center.
I knew nothing about Viktor. He was not a famous name to me. He was the lawyer from the list who had answered the phone and said okay.
That was enough.
The plan became simple.
Get released. Get outside. Find the bus. Reach the city center. Find Viktor.
That was the thread I held onto.
“How do I get to the city center from here?” I asked.
“There are many buses on the road outside the door,” he said. “Across the road is a big university.”
“Which bus number do I need?”
He told me the number, and I made a mental note of it.
“How much does the bus cost?”
I had arrived with thirteen leva, but I had bought water. By then I had maybe nine or ten leva left. They had taken everything else. No passport. No ID. Only the small amount of cash I had left and the list of lawyers.
I asked Peter about the bus fare too. I do not remember the amount, but it was Bulgaria, so it was not much. I had enough.
That mattered.
I had no passport. No identification. No phone. No control over what the Americans were doing. No idea what would happen next.
But I had enough for a bus ride.
Buses usually run in both directions on the same street, so I asked which side I needed.
“The university side,” he said. “That bus will take you to the city center.”
In my mind, I was already doing it.
Walk out in the morning.
Find the stop by the university.
Ride into the city center.
Find Viktor’s office.
I was still wearing the same clothes I had put on before leaving the hotel that morning. That morning felt like it belonged to someone else. The man who had put on those clothes had walked out of a hotel room. The man wearing them now was making release plans from a wet holding cell through a bus route described in broken Russian and Bulgarian.
The experience was miserable, but the Bulgarian police, and even the guard who joked about getting me a television, were polite and professional. They did their jobs as they were supposed to do them. They did not take sides.
America has some good police officers, of course. But most American police departments could learn a lot from the Bulgarian police.
What an irony.
Peter and I had talked for a while because we both spoke Russian, but carrying on a conversation in simple Russian and simple Bulgarian was tedious. It worked for basic survival, not much more.
And survival was the whole point.
Sometime before sunrise, around five, it began to snow.
There was no window inside the cell. But from the small barred opening, if I stood in the right place and looked past the guard, past the hallway, and toward the glass entry doors, I was able to see outside.
The guard noticed me standing there, but he did not acknowledge it. It did not bother him.
When the others drifted into their short bursts of sleep, I stood by the opening and watched the snow fall through the glass.
After the smoke, the wet concrete, the half-sleep, the hard bench, the squat toilets, the strange family across the hall, the men pacing in the back of the cell, and the guard lighting cigarettes through the bars, the snow was almost pretty.
It gave me something to look at.
It made morning feel close.
And in my head, morning meant release.
I would like to say this was the worst night of my life. But I have had quite a few rough spots, and as bad as this night was, it was nowhere near the worst.
There were too many worse contenders, and there many worse ones yet to come. | 112 |
| 20 | I had water, but they had cigarettes.
Apparently, even a Bulgarian holding cell came with the one thing I had been unable to escape all day.
Nothing loose was allowed in the cell. Before we went in, they took wallets, cigarettes, lighters, and whatever else anyone had. What we wore was basically what we kept. Even the water stayed outside. If I wanted a drink, I had to ask the guard for the bottle, take a sip through the barred opening, and hand it back.
Near the bench, about face level when I stood in front of it, was a small barred square looking out into the hallway. It was only about eighteen inches across, but it became the center of the cell. Water, cigarettes, the guard, the television, and the only real light all came through that opening.
The actual door was on the other side of the room, solid metal and closed. Inside the cell, there was only one dim bulb above it, and it barely helped. Most of the light came from the hallway, where yellow fluorescent lights stayed on all night. Anyone near the barred opening had light. Anyone farther back faded into the dimness. If they were not close to me, they were more like shapes than people.
The men had to request their cigarettes from the guard one at a time, like small privileges passed through iron. He would pass one through the bars, wait while they held it back out, and light it for them.
One cigarette. One light. One more ribbon of smoke in a room with nowhere for it to go.
The guard never complained. He always obliged. If not for the locked cell, the bars, and the fact that he was a police officer, it would almost have passed for a few guys hanging around in a bar.
The same guard stayed on duty all night. He was there to keep an eye on us, of course, but on that night he felt less like a guard than an attendant. He handed out water, passed cigarettes through the bars, lit them, unlocked the door for the toilet, chatted with the men in Bulgarian, and then went back to his chair and his television.
I am sure it was not always like that. I am sure they sometimes had men in there who were violent, angry, drunk beyond reason, or looking for a fight. But not that night. No one tried to fight him. No one challenged him. No one made his job difficult. The whole room seemed to understand the arrangement. We were locked in, he was outside, and everything we needed had to pass through that small barred square.
Only one person could fit at the opening at a time, but whoever had that spot could see the television and hear it a little, though it was not loud.
I do not get cold easily, but I was cold in there. Cold enough to ask for something I already knew they almost certainly did not have.
“Guard, excuse me, please,” I asked in Russian through the opening, half joking, half desperate. “Is there any chance of a blanket? Maybe a pillow?”
It was a ridiculous request, and I knew it even as I said it. But exhaustion makes a person bargain with reality. Some small part of me still wanted to believe this nightmare had normal rules.
The guard chuckled.
“Maybe I could get you a television too?” he replied in Russian.
No one else reacted. The others were chatting, half asleep, half drunk, watching the guard’s television, or lost inside their own problems.
The guard meant no malice. There were no blankets, no pillows, and he was replying in the same jovial tone he used with everyone. It was part of the same routine.
He did not seem curious about me being foreign. He did not ask why I was there. He did not need to know. To him, it was a room of drunks and me. Maybe because I spoke Russian, he figured I was not fresh out of America. I never tried to speak English with him. I only spoke Russian.
He treated me the same as everyone else.
That mattered more than I expected.
He was not trying to humiliate me. He was not making a point. He was not taking a side. He was a Bulgarian guard in a small police holding cell, doing his job while a group of tired men tried to get through the night.
I had never been in any jail before. Not in America. Not anywhere. Jails were things I had seen from a distance, or in movies. I had no personal frame of reference for any of this.
Even then, inside that Bulgarian station, I never feared the Bulgarian police. Not once. It never crossed my mind. It was never the concern.
The concern was why I was there at all.
The bench was more like one of those hostile bus stop seats designed to stop homeless people from sleeping on them. It seemed like an odd choice for a jail cell.
I was not expecting a bed. I was not expecting a recliner. But this was the only place detainees had to sit, and for some of us, the only place to try to sleep. You would think someone might have chosen a bench meant for people who had to stay there all night.
The bench was made of wooden slats, each roughly two inches wide, with gaps about the same size between them. It was hard enough to sit on. Trying to sleep on it was punishment by geometry.
The bench was L-shaped, but it was too short and too narrow. My section was not long enough for my legs, never mind my whole body. With that many people in the cell, the only way to make it work was for about four men to squeeze onto it: one in the corner, one on one side, and two along the longer section. You could not lean against the bench. There was no way to do that. You had to lean against the guy in the corner. The guy in the corner ended up with one person leaning against him from each side.
That was the only geometry that worked at all. I guess the guy in the corner did not mind too much. At least he was being kept warm.
Personal space was gone. Comfort was gone. Dignity had become a luxury item.
We took a few turns so people could sit, but there still was not room for everyone. Some men had to stand. When they became too tired to stand, they sat on the wet floor.
One man arrived late, and there was no space left. He was drunk enough, or tired enough, that he eventually sat down on the cement floor, leaned against the wall in the corner, and passed out. Nobody bothered him. He was alive. You could tell he was alive and all right. In a room like that, that was enough.
The cell smelled of cigarette smoke and wet concrete. Nothing worse. No one was stupid enough to pee in there. I never knew where the water on the floor came from. It might have been tracked in. It might have been from cleaning. It was there.
To go to the toilet, you had to ask the guard. He would unlock the cell door and let you out.
I had been drinking water, so I went several times. Sometimes I asked because I needed to go. Sometimes I asked because I needed out of the cell for a few minutes.
I went alone. Nobody escorted me.
You had to walk down a long hallway to the very end of the building, turn right, go down to the other end, turn right again, and come back along another hall. You ended up somewhere behind where the holding cell was.
It was the closest thing to a walk I had. I was not able to linger back there, and there was nowhere to go anyway, but by that point even a long walk through a police station hallway felt like a privilege. Stretch the legs. Reach the toilets. Turn around. Come back.
There were three or four squat toilets back there. I do not know why they had so many. I could not imagine the officers using them during the day, though I suppose maybe they were planning for people with bad diets.
They drained into the sewer, but there was no toilet to sit on. Each one was only a hole in the floor. If you had to do more than pee, you had to squat over it.
There was no chance to escape. There was no exit on that side, or if there was, it was locked and inaccessible. The guard did not follow me in or supervise me. He did not need to. He was in front of the only exit. There were other offices along the way, but they were closed.
There was nowhere to go.
Sometime in the early morning, we all tried to sleep. Not for a few hours at a time. Nothing like that. You might get ten or fifteen minutes if you were lucky. Then you would shift, slide, tip over, or wake because the bench was too hard and too crowded. | 70 |
