It sounds like you have never been to a country where money can buy anything you want, including freedom. Many such countries in the world.
Yeah, maybe you can buy yourself out of trouble. But I suspect in many such cases the people involved prefer to be bought quietly.
Make things too uncomfortably public or too embarrassing and the same people might well throw the book at you.
The latter has a system that doesn’t “include” foreigners, whereas someplace like Romania is a lot more Westernized and offering a bribe carries a lot more risk.
Corruption is an equal opportunity weapon.
I still remember handing over my passport to a guy on a sports bike in Singapore to get an extended stamp for Indonesia, and only a few years later did it occur to me how sketchy the whole situation was.