Steal This Book

by Abbie Hoffman

  Pants can also be rigged with secret pockets. The idea is to let your fingers do the walking through the slit in your coat, while the rest of the body remains the casual browser. You’ll be amazed at how much you can tuck away without any noticeable bulge.

  Another method is to use a hidden belt attached to the inside of your coat or pants. The belt is specially designed with hooks or clothespins to which items can be discretely attached. Ditching items into hidden pockets requires a little cunning. You should practice before a mirror until you get good at it.

  A good idea is to work with a partner. Dig this neat duet. A man and woman walk into a store together looking like a respectable husband and wife. The man purchases a good belt or shirt and engages the salesman in some distracting conversation as he rings up the sale. Meanwhile, back in the aisle, “wife” is busy rolling up two or three suits. Start from the bottom while they are still on the rack and roll them up, pants and jackets together, the way you would roll a sleeping bag. The sleeves are tied around the roll making a neat little bundle. The bundle is then tucked between your thighs. The whole operation takes about a minute and with some practice you can walk for hours with a good size bundle between your legs and not appear like you just shit in your pants. Try this with a coat on in front of a mirror and see how good you get at it.

  Another team method is for one or more partners to distract the sales clerks while the other stuffs. There are all sorts of theater skits possible. One person can act drunk or better still appear to be having an epileptic fit. Two people can start a fight with each other. There are loads of ways, just remember how they do it in the next spy movie you see.

  One of the best gimmicks around is the packaging technique. Once you have the target item in hand, head for the fitting room or other secluded spot. Take out a large piece of gift wrapping and ribbon. Quickly wrap up the item so it will look like you brought it in with you. Many stores have their own bags and staple the cash register receipt to the top of the bag when you make a purchase. Get a number of these bags by saving them if you make a purchase or dropping around to the receiving department with a request for some bags for your Christmas play or something. Next collect some sales receipts, usually from the sidewalk or trash cans in front of the store. Buy or rip-off a small pocket stapler for less than a dollar. When you get the item you want, drop it in the bag and staple it closed, remembering to attach the receipt. This is an absolutely perfect method and takes just a few seconds. It eliminates a lot of unsightly bulges in your coat and is good for warm-weather heisting.

  A dummy shopping bag can be rigged with a bit of ingenuity. The idea is to make it look like the bag is full when there’s still lots of room left. Use strips of cardboard taped to the inside of the bag to give it some body. Remember to carry it like it’s filled with items, not air. Professional heisters often use a “booster box,” usually a neatly wrapped empty package with one end that opens upon touch.

  This is ideal for electrical appliances, jewelry, and even heavy items such as portable television sets. The trick side can be fitted with a spring door so once the toaster is inside the door slams shut. Don’t wear a black hat and cape and go around waving a wand yelling “Abracadabra,” just be your usual shlep shopper self. If you can manage it, the trick side just can be an opening without a trick door. Just carry the booster box with the open side pressed against your body.

  Briefcases, suitcases and other types of carrying devices can all be made to hold items. Once you have something neatly tucked away in a bag or box, it’s pretty hard to prove you didn’t come in with it.

  ON THE JOB

  By far the easiest and most productive method of stealing is on the job. Wages paid to delivery boys, sales clerks, shippers, cashiers and the like are so insulting that stealing really is a way of maintaining self-respect. If you are set on stealing the store dry when you apply for the job, begin with your best foot forward. Make what employment agencies call a “good appearance.” Exude cleanliness, Godliness, sobriety and all the other WASPy virtues third grade teachers insist upon. Building up a good front will eliminate suspicion when things are “missing.”

  Mail clerks and delivery boys can work all sorts of neat tricks. When things get a little slow, type up some labels addressed to yourself or to close friends and play Santa Claus. Wrap yourself a few packages or take one that is supposed to go to a customer and put your label over theirs. Blame it on the post office or on the fact that “things get messed up `cause of all the bureaucracy.” It’s great to be the one to verbalize the boss’s own general feelings before he does when something goes awry. The best on-the-job crooks always end up getting promoted.

  Cashiers and sales persons who have access to money can pick up a little pocket change without too much effort, no matter how closely they are watched by supervisors. Women can make use of torn hems to stash coins and bills. Men can utilize cuffs. Both can use shoes and don’t forget those secret little pockets you learned about in the last section. If you ring up items on a cash register, you can easily mistake $1.39 for 39¢ or $1.98 for 98¢ during the course of a hectic day. Leave pennies on the top shelf of the cash register and move one to the far right side every time you skip a dollar. That way at the end of the day, you’ll know how much to pocket and won’t have to constantly be stuffing, stuffing, stuffing.

  If you pick up trash or clean up, you can stick all sorts of items into wastebaskets and later sneak them out of the store.

  There are many ways of working heists with partners who pose as customers.

  See the sections on free food and clothing for these. There are also ways of working partnerships on the job. A cashier at a movie theater and a doorman can work out a system where the doorman collects the tickets and returns them to the cashier to sell again.

  A neat way to make a large haul is to get a job through an agency as a domestic for some rich slob. You should use a phony identification when you sign up at the agency. Once you are busy dusting the town house, check around for anything valuable to be taken home. Pick up the phone, order all sorts of merchandise, and have it delivered. A friend with a U-haul can help you really clean up.

  CREDIT CARDS

  Any discussion of shoplifting and forgeries inevitably leads to a rap on credit cards; those little shiny plastic wonder passes to fantasy land that are rendering cash obsolete. There are many ways to land a free credit card. You can get one yourself if your credit is good, or from a friend: report it stolen and go on a binge around town. Sign your name a little funny. Super underworld types might know where you can purchase a card that’s not too hot on the black market. You might heist one at a fashionable party or restaurant. If you’re a hat check girl at a night club, don’t forget to check out pockets and handbags for plastic goodies.[5]

  Finally, you can redo a legitimate card with a new number and signature and be sure that it’s on no one’s “hot list.” Begin by removing the ink on the raised letters with any polyester resin cleaner. Next, the plastic card should be held against a flat iron until the raised identification number is melted. You can use a razor blade to shave off rough spots. This combination of razor blade and hot iron, when worked skillfully, will produce a perfect blank card. When the card is smooth as new, reheat it using the flat iron and press an addressograph plate into the soft plastic. The ink can be replaced by matching the original at any stationary store. If this is too hard, you can buy machines to make your own credit cards, which are made for small department stores. Granted, this method is going require some expertise, but once you’ve learned to successfully forge a credit card, buy every item imaginable, eat fancy meals, and even get real money from a bank.

  Whether your credit card is stolen, borrowed or forged, you still have to follow some guidelines to get away without any hassle. Know the store’s checking method before you pass the hot card. Most stores have a fifty-dollar limit where they only call upstairs on items costing fifty dollars or more. In some stores it’s less. Some places hav
e a Regiscope system that takes your picture with each purchase. You should always carry at least one piece of back-up identification to use with the phony card as the clerk might get suspicious if you don’t have any other ID. They can check out a “hot list” that the credit card companies send out monthly, so if you’re uptight about anything watch the clerk’s movements at all times. If things get tight, just split real quick. Often, even if a clerk or boss thinks it’s a phony, they’ll OK the sale anyway since the credit card companies make good to the stores on all purchases; legit or otherwise. Similarly, the insurance companies make good to the credit companies and so on until you get to a little group of hard working elves in the basement of the U.S. Mint who do nothing but print free money and lie to everybody about there being tons of gold at Fort Knox to back up their own little forging operation.

  9. MONKEY WARFARE

  If you like Halloween, you’ll love monkey warfare. It’s ideal for people uptight about guns, bombs and other children’s toys, and allows for imaginative forms of protesting, many of which will become myth, hence duplicated and enlarged upon. A syringe (minus the needle) or a cooking baster can be filled with a dilute solution of epoxy glue. Get the two tubes in a hardware store and squeeze into a small bottle of rubbing alcohol. Shake real good and pour into the baster or syringe. You have about thirty minutes before the mixture gets too hard to use.

  Go after locks, parking meters, and telephones. You can fuck up the companies that use IBM cards by buying a cheap punch or using an Exacto knife and cutting an extra hole in the card before you return it with your payment. By the way, when you return payments always pay a few cents under or over. The company has to send you a credit or another bill and it screws up their bookkeeping system. Remember, always bend, fold, staple or otherwise mutilate the card. By the way if you ever find yourself in a computer room during a strike, you might want to fuck up the school records. You can do this by passing a large magnet or portable electro-magnet rapidly back and forth across the reels of tape, thus erasing them. And don’t miss the tour of the IBM plant, either.

  Another good bit is to rent a safe deposit box (only about $7.00 a year) in a bank using a phony name. That usually only need a signature and don’t ask for identification. When you get a box, deposit a good size dead fish inside the deposit box, close it up and return it to its proper niche. From then on, forget about it. Now think about it, in a few months there is going to be a hell-of-a-smell from your small investment. It’s going to be almost impossible to trace and besides, they can never open the box without your permission. Since you don’t exist, they’ll have no alternative but to move away. Invest in the Stank of Amerika savings program. Just check out Lake Erie and you’ll see saving fish isn’t such a dumb idea. If you get caught, tell them you inherited the fish from your grandmother and it has sentimental value.

  There are lots of things you can send banks, draft boards and corporations that contribute to pollution via the mails. It is possible to also have things delivered.

  Have a hearse and flowers sent to the chief of police. We know someone who had a truckload of cement dumped in the driveway of her boss under the fib that the driveway was going to be repaved.

  By getting masses of people to use electricity, phones or water at a given time, you can fuck up some not-so-public utility. The whole problem is getting the word out. For example, 10,000 people turning on all their electrical appliances and lights in their homes at a given time can cause a blackout in any major city. A hot summer day at about 3:00 PM is best. Five thousand people calling up Washington, D.C. at 3:00 PM on a Friday (one of the busiest hours) ties up the major trunk lines and really puts a cramp in the government’s style of carrying on.

  Call (202) 555-1212, which is information and you won’t even have to pay for the call. If you call a government official, ask some questions like “How many kids did you kill today?” or “What kind of liquor do Congressmen drink?” or offer to take Teddy Kennedy for a ride. A woman can cause some real excitement by calling a Congressman’s office and screaming “Tell that bastard he forgot to meet Irene at the motel this afternoon.”

  A Washington call-in would work even better by phoning direct to homes of the big boys. For starters you can call collect the following:[6]

  • Richard M. Nixon—El Presidente—(202) 456-1444

  • Spiro T. Agnew—El Toro—(202) 265-2000 ext. 6400

  • John N. Mitchell—El Butcher—(202) 965-2900

  • Melvin R. Laird—El Defendo—(301) 652-4449

  • Henry A. Kissinger—El Exigente—(202) 337-0042

  • William P. Rogers—El Crapper—(301) 654-7125

  • General Earl G. Wheeler—El Joint Bosso—(703) 527-6119

  • General William C. Westmoreland—El Pollutoni—(703) 527-6999

  • Richard M. Helms—El Assassin—(301) 652-4122

  • John N. Chafee-El Sinko Swimmi-(703) 536-5411

  A great national campaign can be promoted that asks people to protest the presidential election farces on Inauguration Day. When a president says “So help me God,” rush in and flush the toilet. A successful Flush for God campaign can really screw up the water system.

  If you want to give Ma Bell an electric permanent, consider this nasty. Cut the female device off an ordinary extension cord and expose the two wires. Unscrew the mouthpiece on the phone and remove the voice amplifier. You will see a red and a black wire attached to two terminals. Attach each of the wires from the extension cord to each one from the phone. Next plug in the extension cord to a wall socket. What you are doing is sending 120 volts of electricity back through equipment which is built for only volts. You can knock off thousands of phones, switchboards and devices if all goes right. It’s best to do this on the phone in a large office building or university. You certainly will knock out their fuses.

  Unfortunately, at home your own phone will probably be knocked out of commission. If that happens, simply call up the business office and complain.

  They’ll give you a new phone just the way they give the other seven million people that requested them that day.

  Remember, January is Alien Registration Month, so don’t forget to fill out an application at the Post Office, listing yourself as a citizen of Free Nation. Then when they ask you to “Love it or leave it,” tell them you already left!

  10. PIECE NOW

  It’s ridiculous to talk about a revolution without a few words on guns. If you haven’t been in the army or done some hunting, you probably have a built-in fear against guns that can only be overcome by familiarizing yourself with them.

  HANDGUNS

  There are two basic types of handguns or pistols: the revolver carries a load of 5 or 6 bullets in a “revolving” chamber. The automatic usually holds the same number, but some can hold up to 14 bullets. Also, in the automatic the bullets can be already packed in a magazine which quickly snaps into position in the handle. The revolver must be reloaded one bullet at a time. An automatic can jam on rare occasions, or misfire, but with a revolver you just pull the trigger and there’s a new bullet ready to fire. Despite pictures of Roy Rogers blasting a silver dollar out of the sky, handguns are difficult to master a high degree of accuracy with and are only good at short ranges. If you can hit a pig-size object at 25 yards, you’ve been practicing.

  Among automatics, the Colt 45 is a popular model with a long record of reliability.

  A good popular favorite is a Parabellum 9 mm, which has the advantage of a double action on the first shot, meaning that the hammer does not have to be cocked, making possible a quick first shot without carrying a cocked gun around.

  By the way, do not bother with any handgun smaller than a .38 caliber, because cartridges smaller than that are too weak to be effective.

  Revolvers come in all sizes and makes, as do automatics. The most highly recommended are the .38 Special and the .357 Magnum. Almost all police forces use the .38 Special. They are light, accurate and the small-frame models are easy
to conceal. If you get one, use high velocity hollow pointed bullets, such as the Speer DWM (146 grain h.p.) or the Super Vel (110 grain h.p.). The hollow point shatters on contact, insuring a kill to the not-so-straight shooters. Smith and Wesson makes the most popular .38 Special. The Charter Arms is a favorite model. The .357 Magnum is an extremely powerful handgun. You can shoot right through the wall of a thick door with one at a distance of 20 yards. It has its own ammo, but can also use the bullets designed for the .38. Both guns are about the same in price, running from $75-$100 new. An automatic generally runs about $25 higher.

  RIFLES

  There are two commonly available types of rifles; the bolt action and the semi-automatic. War surplus bolt action rifles are cheap and usually pretty accurate, but have a slower rate of fire than a semi-automatic. A semi-automatic is preferable in nearly all cases. The M-1 carbine is probably the best semi-automatic for the money (about $80). It’s light, short, easy to handle and has only the drawback of a cartridge that’s a little underpowered. Among bolt actions, the Springfield, Mauser, Royal Enfield, Russian 7.62, and the Lee Harvey Oswald Special, the Mannlicher-Carcano, are all good buys for the money (about $20).

  One of the best semi-automatics is the AR-18, which is the civilian version of the military M-16. In general, this is a fantastic gun with a high rate of fire, minimal recoil, high accuracy, light weight, and easy maintenance. If kept clean, it will rarely jam, and the bullet has astounding stopping power. It sells for around $225.