“So the old guy made friends with a local cabbie, bought them both rooms at the resort, then arranged a cab ride back which he couldn’t pay for. So the cabbie delivered him to the local lock-up where he could now legally stay until spring because he was serving time for a crime.”
He should be put in jail for doing that!
We lived in Kobe during the big earthquake in 1995. Shortly after, I would notice big, burly American blue collar workers, carpenters and such, riding the trains. I chatted one of them up and found out that they had been given 90 day "training visas" to show the locals how to rebuild quicker. The reality was that they were doing the heavy duty reframe and wall work and the locals were doing the detail work. The government had eased the visa law temporarily because they needed the workers and they knew the Americans would not likely be staying on when the job was done.
So some seasonal blue collar guys from America got some very profitable work for three months and some Japanese customers didn't have to wait nearly as long to get rebuilt.
Some do that regularly. Knew of a guy who got out of jail, walked down to a store and chunked a rock through the window and sat down on the curb to wait for the cops to take him back to jail.