The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Last fall, testifying before a congressional subcommittee on organized retail crime, Brekke told lawmakers that Internet auction sites need to make “modest changes” to remove the incentives for criminals to sell stolen goods online. He recommended that people who sell up to a hundred thousand dollars a month of merchandise online be required to identify themselves by name on the sites. Arresting individual sellers is not the answer, Brekke maintains, because of the sheer numbers involved. “In the most recent year, Target alone made approximately seventy-five thousand theft apprehensions in its stores. By comparison, the total number of criminal cases in all federal district courts across the country is usually less than sixty thousand in any one year,” Brekke told lawmakers. “Even if all the U.S. attorneys across the country stopped prosecuting bank robberies, fraud, drug trafficking, and even terrorism, there would still not be enough capacity to prosecute even the apprehensions made by Target.”

  IT WAS THREE-TWENTY IN THE AFTERNOON, and the vice-president of corporate asset protection at the midtown Manhattan department store had resigned himself to allowing the suspected denim thief to leave the store. He now went into an adjoining room to greet the store’s director of shortage control, a small man in his thirties who wore a well-tailored black suit and had a neatly clipped goatee. His job was to reduce inventory losses due to shoplifting or employee theft. Mounted on one wall were twelve computer screens that showed images of several sales associates as they rang up purchases and moved about the sales floor, straightening clothes on racks and greeting customers. The two men watched the employees on the screens for a moment. “They’re persons of interest,” the director said. “All of them have been flagged for surveillance.”

  Despite loss prevention’s current focus on organized retail crime and e-fencing, by far the biggest theft problem faced by retailers is internal—the actions of light-fingered employees. Shoplifting accounts for almost thirty-two per cent of shrink; employee, or internal, theft accounts for almost forty-seven per cent—although many experts say that these numbers are skewed, since organized retail-crime rings have begun to recruit store employees as accomplices, and even to send gang members to seek jobs at stores. Whatever the case, in 2006, employees stole about nineteen billion dollars’ worth of merchandise from their employers—which is why many loss-prevention departments devote as much time to conducting surveillance on their own employees as they do on customers.

  The director of shortage control pointed to one of the screens, on which a salesman in his thirties—I’ll call him Jeffrey—was straightening piles of T-shirts and sweaters on an upper floor of the department store. He was a handsome man with close-cropped hair and a perpetual smile. “The first red flag was that he had the highest number of non-receipt returns in his department,” the director said. “Everyone else in his department was getting about three returns a week. He was getting five a day.”

  That was four months earlier, in February. Since then, the loss-prevention team had been monitoring Jeffrey’s activities. Using “exception-based reporting” software—a program installed in all the computerized cash registers which looks for irregular transactions—the team learned that Jeffrey was ringing up returns for merchandise that had never left the store, then putting the credit on his own card. He had also been making out E.M.C.s (electronic merchandise credits, more commonly known as gift cards) in amounts of up to five thousand dollars, then giving the cards to accomplices who would come in and shop for merchandise. Camera surveillance revealed that Jeffrey was selecting clothing from the racks, removing electronic security tags, and leaving the clothing in fitting rooms for friends to come and collect at appointed times. In the four months that he had been under surveillance, Jeffrey had apparently stolen and embezzled an estimated hundred thousand dollars’ worth of false credit and merchandise from the store.

  “The scary thing is that he’s coming to work every day,” the vice-president of corporate asset protection said. “But he’s not working for the store.”

  The director looked at his watch. It was three-thirty—time to arrest Jeffrey.

  Two loss-prevention agents came into the room: a woman in a black skirt and blouse and a man with the bulked-up physique of a bodybuilder. The man went to the screens and panned the camera so that it followed Jeffrey across the sales floor.

  “I’m salivating at the mouth to pick him up,” he said. “It’s been a long time coming.”

  “Your instinct is to jump the gun,” the director told me. “You want to arrest him the first time you catch him stealing. But you’ve got to be patient.” For one thing, the loss-prevention team needed to build a solid criminal case; for another, they needed to find out if he was working in collusion with another crooked sales associate.

  “O.K.,” the vice-president of corporate asset protection said, addressing the two agents who had volunteered to go get Jeffrey: the muscular man and a bespectacled man in his late twenties who was the store’s lead investigator. “You’ve got to be ready for him to deny everything.”

  The agents nodded.

  “So if he becomes indignant and denies everything what’re you gonna do? Because the minute you approach him he knows what it’s all about.”

  The muscular agent replied that he would not be thrown off by Jeffrey’s denials.

  “Well,” the vice-president of corporate asset protection said, “the ones you think are going to be a problem often aren’t, and vice versa. Some confess to everything. They say they killed Kennedy.”

  The two agents headed upstairs to make the apprehension, and the remaining loss-prevention team crowded around the monitor.

  “He was a very nice guy,” one of the camera agents said. “Always said hello to me.”

  “That’s when you know,” the female agent said.

  On the screen, Jeffrey straightened a pile of clothes on a table, checked his hair in one of the mirrors, then walked across the sales floor. The camera agent picked up a walkie-talkie and radioed the arresting agents. “He’s going past fragrances,” he said.

  Suddenly, the two loss-prevention agents appeared from the right side of the screen. Jeffrey stopped, looked at them, and his eyes briefly widened. Then he smiled and shook both agents’ proffered hands. (Later, the lead investigator told his colleagues about the arrest. “I said, ‘Can you please follow me?’ He was calm but scared. You could tell by the way his lips turned pale a little bit.”) With one agent behind him and one in front, Jeffrey walked to the elevator, then rode down to the asset-protection complex. When they passed the open door of the internal-theft camera room, the woman in the black skirt and blouse left the camera room and followed them. She was the lead interviewer. They disappeared into one of the interview rooms down the hall and shut the door.

  The purpose of the interview was not to get Jeffrey to confess—they felt that they had the evidence—but to get him to reveal details of where the stolen merchandise was going, how long he had been stealing and how much, and whether he was working with others in the store. The team was particularly interested in Jeffrey’s colleague, a young man I’ll call Alex. Many of the customers to whom Jeffrey had issued fraudulent gift cards had gone to Alex to redeem them, and Alex had also been overriding the computer denials on stolen credit cards.

  At five o’clock, after an hour and a half of questioning, the woman emerged from the interview and joined the vice-president of corporate asset protection in the camera room. “He admits to the fraudulent E.M.C.s and credit cards,” she said. “And he talked about boxing up merchandise for his friends. He was getting four hundred for each item.”

  “Did you get him to roll over on Alex?” he asked.

  “I can’t get him to give up Alex,” she said.

  The vice-president scratched his head. “O.K.,” he said at length. “Bring the other schmuck down—Alex. I don’t see any reason not to. I wouldn’t get him in a headlock.” He meant this figuratively; the team uses no form of physical persuasion in interviews, he told me.
“I don’t want him going back to the sales floor and bitching to H.R. Just ask him, ‘Why are these guys coming to you with fraudulent E.M.C.s?’ Offer him soda. Water. Whatever he wants.”

  Two agents were dispatched, and a few minutes later Alex, a tall man in a summer-weight beige jacket, appeared in the hallway, his head hanging low. He was led into a neighboring interview room. (It later turned out that Alex was not involved.)

  The director of shortage control dropped into a chair in the hallway. It was now six-thirty. The woman in the black skirt and blouse went back into the first interview room to continue talking to Jeffrey.

  “Who knows how long it’s going to take?” the director said. “He’s got a lot of explaining to do.” One thing, he thought, seemed certain. The amount of merchandise involved meant that Jeffrey would probably be charged with a felony. “He’s going to jail,” the director said, but without relish. “You stare at this expensive stuff all day as an employee—stuff you can’t afford to buy. It’s a temptation.”

  “You’re on commission selling,” the vice-president added. “When times are good, you make a fortune. September through the holiday season, you’re raking it in. Then Christmas is over, no one is shopping, gas is four dollars a gallon, and your paycheck went from fifteen hundred to five hundred a week and you have to pay off those bills from that Caribbean vacation you took when the money was rolling in. So you think, I’ll credit my card for a thousand dollars and make out a fake return. When it works the first time, you try it again. But next time you load a little more onto your card.” He shrugged. “And the way this economy’s going?” he added. “We’re going to be busy.”

  JOHN COLAPINTO was for several years a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he won a National Magazine Award for a story about a famous case of infant sex change (he expanded the story into a book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, which was a New York Times bestseller). In 2001, he published a comic crime novel, About the Author, which is in development for the movies with producer Scott Rudin. Since 2006 he has been a staff writer at The New Yorker.

  Coda

  The world of loss prevention is a secretive, not to say deeply paranoid, one. I knew that, for this story to really work, I would need to get a retailer to allow me to go “backstage” in a store so that I could watch a loss-prevention team in action. This proved harder than expected. Even a store like Target, which was happy to invite me to its corporate headquarters in Minneapolis for long interviews with its top antitheft people, balked when I asked if I could hang out in one of the stores and watch how they actually catch bad guys. I spent five months romancing various loss-prevention VPs at major chain stores and got nowhere. Folks at Loss Prevention, the industry trade magazine, laughed when I told them that I was trying to get inside a store. None of them had ever done so; and they assured me that I wasn’t going to, either. And then, in one of those mysterious strokes peculiar to journalism and perhaps homicide detection, I cracked the case with a single random phone call in the eleventh hour before the deadline. I happened to call a big Manhattan department store that I hadn’t bothered to call earlier because it was such an obvious long shot, and asked if I might be allowed to come in and watch how they stop thieves from shoplifting. The loss prevention honcho said, without hesitation, “Sure, come on down.” The next day, I spent an eye-popping six hours with the store detectives described at the beginning and end of the story—scribbling away madly in my notebook as they revealed one secret after another of the profession. I remember that I had been at the store for about four hours and had not yet brought up the touchiest subject of all: internal theft, shrinkage that results from light-fingered employees. I was trying to summon the courage to raise this embarrassing, almost taboo subject, when one of the detectives motioned me into a small, windowless room with a wall of screens that showed grainy images of employees working on the sales floor. It was several seconds before I realized that he was, spontaneously, inviting me into the Internal Theft room. And not only that. He was going to let me watch them arrest one of their salespeople. Afterward, I ran home, wrote up the story in a rush of adrenaline, and everyone was happy. Or so we thought. When The New Yorker’s fact-checkers called the Manhattan department store to run my facts by them, the loss-prevention people were horrified. They could hardly believe that I had put everything that I had seen into the story. They thought I just wanted “background.” Whatever that is. I found myself on the phone trying to calm the detectives who had been so generous with their time and so open in revealing the tricks of their trade. I felt a little like I’d performed an act of theft right under their noses. We agreed to obscure all identifying details about the store and they reluctantly, grudgingly, gave their blessing to the story. But they aren’t talking to me anymore. Which is why, unfortunately, I cannot give a follow-up on the fate of the store employee who was arrested. (I was never told his full name and thus can’t look up his case.) But suffice to say that there is every reason to believe, in the current state of the economy, that loss-prevention departments are busier than ever.

  Matt McAllester

  TRIBAL WARS

  FROM Details

  SHAFI AHMED WAS 5 YEARS OLD, too young to understand what a tribe was or why the men in these tribes had turned his city into a war zone where, without warning, you could be pulled from your car and shot dead. He and his seven siblings could hear the explosions and crackle of gunfire coming from the streets outside their house in Mogadishu. His mother was terrified, his father desperate to protect the family.

  It was January 1991 and the Somali civil war, a conflict that continues to this day, had just started. With the ousting of President Mohamed Siad Barre, Somalia’s long-simmering tribal rivalries had erupted into extreme violence—many people were fleeing Somalia, driving south to the safety of Kenya. Shafi’s family was running out of food. So his father decided to make a dash to the store. He barely made it through the front door. A bullet tore into his chest, and he bled to death on a dusty street of the capital, among the first to die in a conflict that, according to Human Rights Watch, has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

  Two days later, Shafi, his mother, and his seven siblings fled. As they walked through Mogadishu, some neighbors passed them and offered to give the family a ride out of the city. From there they took a bus to Kenya. Eight years later—most of them spent in refugee camps—Shafi Ahmed and his family made it to America.

  Seven years after that, in the early hours of May 29, 2006, Shafi was dead. Like his father, he was gunned down in the street in what appears to have been part of a Somali tribal war. But this time the killer likely came from a new kind of tribe: one of the Somali gangs of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

  OFFICER JEANINE BRUDENELL WORKS for the Intelligence Sharing and Analysis Center of the Minneapolis Police Department and has come to know more about Somali gangs in Minnesota than probably anyone else in the Twin Cities law-enforcement community. She strongly believes that the situation needs to be addressed before it escalates.

  “It’s going to be like when we decided to ignore the African-American gangs when they came into Minneapolis and we pretended we didn’t have gangs,” she says. “It will grow into a more organized crime syndicate.”

  While Somalis currently constitute a small percentage of the Twin Cities’ gangs (African-Americans make up the largest portion, police sources say), Brudenell believes that if the cities’ Somali community—which some Somalis estimate to number as many as 60,000 people—continues to grow and the local authorities don’t start paying attention, the problem could spiral out of control.

  “A lot of very young people were involved in the civil war,” says Shukri Adan, a community leader who was commissioned in 2006 by the city of Minneapolis to write a report on Somali youth issues. “They witnessed extreme violence.”

  This is confirmed by officials within the justice system. When young Somalis are arrested and enter the juvenile detention center in Minneapo
lis, they are given a medical examination. “A lot of Somali youth suffer from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder],” Chris Owens, the director of Hennepin County’s Juvenile Probation Division, tells me. “They’ve seen a lot of horrible things. [In America] they just jump back to whatever violence they observed in their formative years.”

  The Minnesota Gang Strike Force, a combined-law-enforcement group that combats gang activity in the Twin Cities, now has 52 Somali gang members listed on its classified roster—but law-enforcement officials and Somali community leaders say that figure is only scratching the surface. One federal agent who has significant experience investigating immigrant gangs says that he has rarely come across a closer-knit, harder-to-penetrate gang culture. Very few ethnicities are structured so strongly along tribal lines.

  Somalis, who made up the largest percentage of refugees admitted to the United States in 2004, 2005, and 2006, have turned Minneapolis into the Mogadishu of the Midwest. In 2006, 25 percent of all refugees to come to the United States were Somalis. What worries Brudenell is that the gang problem isn’t being addressed. Another 4,000 to 6,000 Somali refugees are expected to show up in the United States during 2008.

  Government officials and Somali community leaders estimate that the majority of these new arrivals will head for the Twin Cities because of the area’s well-established Somali tribal networks. At first the Somali refugees gravitated toward San Diego, but word spread before long that Minnesota—Minneapolis in particular—was the place to go. Its people were tolerant; the city and state welfare systems were comparatively welcoming; there were lots of good jobs in meat-packing plants and on assembly lines for which you didn’t need more than a few words of English; and more and more in the Twin Cities and throughout the state of Minnesota, there were familiar and friendly faces from back home. Only California is the initial home to more Somali refugees than Minnesota—and not by much; the difference is only two percentage points.