HERE TO THERE DEPT. V.I.P. IN CHAINS

Whatever else you think about invading a country and capturing its President, there’s no getting around the inconvenience of imprisoning Nicolás Maduro in New York City. Maduro is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center, near Industry City, in Brooklyn.

- -Zach Helfand

He'll be tried at a courthouse in downtown Manhattan. Industry City is already a transit headache. The bus doesn't run between boroughs. The R train is hit or miss. The B.Q.E., one of these days, is going to collapse. The U.S. Marshals typically transport high-security defendants in a van or an armored convoy. But this tends to ruin everyone's rush hour. For part of the trial of El Chapo, the city shut down the Brooklyn Bridge; his lawyers tried to move the proceedings to Philadelphia, because the jury pool was poisoned by angry commuters.

Lenny DePaul, a former marshal, said recently. He went on, “I escorted John Gotti. That was pretty easy—Brooklyn Bridge, early in the morning. Coming over, he would say, “Take a right here, I know people in Little Italy, we'll get a bagel.’ But that was the early nineties. There wasn't much on the bridges back in those days.” DePaul said the marshals would mix up their transportation strategy, to foil would-be Jack Rubys. Also, so the prisoner didn't get any ideas. “We had a guy upstate go out the window and jump off a bridge,” he said.

Maduro was transported to his arraignment by helicopter—an apparent first. This had its own complicated logistics, involving two convoys and an improvised landing site on a soccer field near the jail. On the other hand, it saved on the nine-dollar congestion fee. But, to prevent a pattern, you can’t always go by air. Traffic Armageddon seems unavoidable.