Twenty-six years ago, I was arrested for selling a pair of jeans to a plainclothes Soviet policeman. They weren't even Levi's 501s, they were the kind with the zipper, but that's not why I was arrested. It was a setup, designed to scare a 16-year-old and his 20 teenage fellow travelers into behaving for the remainder of their summer behind the Iron Curtain. And scare me it did, though the authorities allowed me to rejoin my group after a few hours of interrogation.
Despite my arrest, and to the horror of my parents, I returned to New York something of a...
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