Ohio trucker escaped communist rule to make America his home

By Jerry Breeden
The Trucker Staff

1/9/2008

Owner-operator Michael Ionese’s journey to America from his native Romania was a life-and-death odyssey that included his capture as an alleged spy for the Israeli government.

His 18-month nightmare began in 1968 and ended only after Ionese landed on the shores of New York City, safe and sound, in 1970.

Ionese was the fourth of seven sons who, along with their father, worked a once-flourishing family farm that, ultimately, was confiscated by communist authorities after they repeatedly tortured the elder Ionese to the brink of death and despair.

In 1967, 12 communist agents swarmed onto the farm and arrested Ionese’s father amid accusations that he was hiding a gun, which, in fact, the agents themselves had planted there.

Ionese said his father was whisked away to the local constabulary where he was repeatedly beaten without mercy. Each time he would lose consciousness, his interrogators would throw Ionese’s half-clad father into the snow to revive him.

“Then they would stick pins or needles into his fingertips to try and force him into falsely confessing that the gun was his so they could ‘legally’ take our farm,” Ionese said.

When it became all too clear to the agents that the elder Ionese would rather die than willingly sign over his holdings, “they put ink on his nose and slammed his face down hard on a blank sheet of paper,” Ionese said. “Above the print of his nose, they wrote a false confession, which wrongfully entitled them to my father’s property. They considered the nose print as legal as his signature would have been, but they, in truth, stole the land from him.”

Michael was 15 years old at the time. From that moment on, he, his brothers and their father were forced to eke out a meager existence by working on other state-owned farms “solely for the good of the communist party.”

Michael said communism also cost him his long-held dream of one day studying physics at the university level.  “I would have had to sign a statement pledging allegiance to the communist party and I wasn’t about to do that,” he said.

Eventually, he found employment at a port on the Black Sea on the southeast coast of Romania. Almost instantly, Michael began thinking about escaping to the United States, Canada or Australia, in that order. He knew it would be difficult, perhaps even deadly, but it was a risk he was willing to take. When the opportunity arose, he took it, stowing away on a ship. “I had no idea where the ship was headed,” he said. “I didn’t care. I knew I had to escape and I ended up in Alexandria, Egypt.”

The Six-Day War of 1967 was still fresh in the minds of many in Egypt and other Arab nations

and, as fate would have it, Michael wound up being taken into custody as a Jewish spy.

“They arrested me because they said I looked Jewish and because I couldn’t speak Arabic,” he said. He was jailed and placed under armed guard.

“One day, the guard went out for a smoke, so I tried to escape, but I got caught,” he said. As punishment, he was chained to a pole along with several other prisoners.

“It was a rule,” he said, “that the prisoners had to stand up immediately when the chief of police entered the room. He came in one day and I refused to stand, so the guards yanked on the chain and dragged me around the cell numerous times.”

Michael knew if he was to live, he had to convince the authorities he was not a spy for Israel or any other country. Word of his arrival in Alexandria soon reached the Romanian ambassador, who secured his release and began arranging for him to go back to his homeland, where he would have to answer for his “crimes” against the communists.

He wound up on a ship bound for Romania and was placed under the care of a guard who gave Michael reams of communist reading material, which he only pretended to study during the return voyage. His holding cell was barely big enough for him to turn around in, but it did have a porthole, which would eventually serve as Michael’s door to freedom.

One night, as the guard was sleeping, Michael pried open the tiny circular window. He somehow squeezed himself through the opening without arousing the guard. Suddenly, though, he found himself stuck in the opening and dangling by his feet above the surface of the water.

“I was doing fine, until my shoes got hung up in the porthole,” Michael said. “I looked down at the wash from the propeller of the ship. I couldn’t make out which direction it was coming from, so I couldn’t determine exactly where the prop was located. I didn’t want to fall into the prop, but I couldn’t just hang there, either. I managed to tie the legs of my pants so I could use them as a life preserver. I kept twisting and turning my feet until, finally, one of my shoes came completely apart and I fell into the water. I started swimming as hard as I could the instant I hit the water.”

He missed the prop.

“It’s odd,” he said, “but an old French song came immediately to my mind at that point. The title, loosely translated, is ‘I’m Living!’ and for that, I was deeply grateful.”

For the next eight hours or so, Michael floated along in total darkness. He said at one point “a very large fish bumped me. I don’t know if it was a shark, a whale or what, but it certainly gave me a scare.”

As daylight began breaking, he caught a glimpse of a British ship moored next to a pier.

“I made it to the anchor’s chain and rested,” he said. “I saw a fisherman on shore. He had a fire. I made my way over to him. I lied to him and told him I had gotten drunk and fell off the ship.”

The fisherman allowed him to dry his clothes by the fire. “He gave me some coffee, which was very hot and very good. Then he gave me some wine and some oranges. It was like a feast. I hadn’t drunk or eaten anything for a long time.”

Michael didn’t know it then, but he had actually been floating in The Bosphorus, or Istanbul Strait, which serves as the boundary between Europe and Asia.

“Fortunately, as it turned out, I was drawn by the lights on shore to the Asian side,” he said. “I went into town. I could see all the houses and buildings. I actually thought I was in America. I had no way of knowing. But it turned out to be Istanbul.”

The pier was quarantined. “I couldn’t stay there, so I walked into town and found a nice park,” he said. He found a place to rest among a stand of pine trees. Settling in, he soon fell asleep.

“I was dreaming that someone or something was poking me in the side,” he said. “Finally, when I woke up, I realized it wasn’t a dream but a policeman poking me with a long stick. He asked me for identification.”

All of Michael’s worldly possessions at that point consisted of a Romanian driver’s license, a razor blade and one aspirin, all of which he kept in a plastic bag. The officer accepted Michael’s driver’s license as identification, but told him he would have to vacate the park.

He left, not knowing where he would wind up. He then met “two drunks who said they were going to kidnap me. I had to fight them off. It was turning cold and windy. I got away from them by running to a mosque,” he said. He found shelter just outside the front door of the temple.

Contemplating his next move, he spotted a sign that read “Tourist Information.”

Inside, the people working there asked if they could help him. He told them he was from Romania and had no money. They, in turn, called the Romanian embassy and the next thing he knew, he was in a car heading for the office of the ambassador.

“I noticed that the people working there were looking at me in an odd sort of way as they hurried me up to the second floor,” said Michael.

He soon found out why. One of the employees told him they had read in a local newspaper that a young man answering his description had fallen from a ship at sea and drowned.

“I thought I was in deep trouble,” he said. “How could I have died when I was standing right there in front of them? I was about to jump out the window when a man stopped me and told me I was free. He asked me where I wanted to go and gave me three choices. I thought he was lying, but I told him America, Canada or Australia, in that order.”

For the next few days, Michael was held at a refugee camp. Through an interpreter, Turkish authorities tried to persuade him to go to work for them training Turkish spies to speak Romanian, but he declined.

He eventually was turned over to U.S. authorities at the American embassy.

“The Vietnam War was winding down, but still going on and the only question that the Americans asked me was who I wanted to win the war. I told them ‘America.’ The man doing the questioning then said ‘Welcome to the U.S.’ and shook my hand. That was it.”

Shortly after arriving in New York, Michael ran his own taxi service for awhile before going into trucking with a friend in 1974. He has been an independent since buying his pal’s share of the partnership.

Today, he lives in Columbiana, Ohio. He is married for a second time. He has one child, a daughter, from the first marriage. Michelle Ilena Ionese, 22, is in her fifth year of medical school, enjoying the educational opportunities that the communists stole from her father when he was a young man.

Only two of Ionese’s brothers are still alive. Both reside in Romania. One of them came to the U.S. for a while, but went back when Romanian authorities denied him permission to bring his family here.

Understandably, Ionese is wary of all forms of government except democracy. “The U.S. is the beacon for the rest of the world,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important that we choose our political leaders wisely. We should all pay close attention to those we put in office. 

“All things considered, America is the greatest country on earth,” he added. “If you want something bad enough and are willing to work hard for it, you can live your dream. Work hard and invest your money wisely. Those are the keys.”