During World War II, Minasy met Jayne Leary on a train from New York to her hometown, St. Louis. He was in uniform. In 1946, the couple married, moved to Woodbury, Long Island, and had their first child. Minasy liked family life, but he was restless. He got his BS in administrative engineering at New York University in 1949 and did graduate work at the Case Institute of Technology in Ohio. After that, he worked as an assistant general manager at the Bulova Watch Company. By the late 1950s, although a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, he had tired of inventing things for other people.
In 1962, while a vice president at Belock Instrument Corporation, Minasy worked on a project that interested him more: He helped NASA develop a gyroscope that could run on a spaceship. When his youngest daughter, Kathy, was in sixth grade, she wanted her ears pierced, and he made her clip-on earrings with magnets for clasps. He invented a napkin with a buttonhole at the top so airline diners would not spill soup on their clothes.
Minasy began to hang around the New York City Police Department, where he devised a facial recognition device he called Vaicom (variable image compositor). Noticing that the police hardly arrested any shoplifters, Minasy came up with the idea for what he dubbed “Chinese handcuffs,” after the novelty toy that traps your index fingers in a snare. The “handcuffs” would attach a sensitized tag to a piece of clothing and use a radio-wave frequency system to sound an alarm when the shoplifter passed two pedestals at the store exit. If the shoplifter tried to remove the tags, the garments were rendered unwearable.
Minasy’s tags changed shoplifter catching. Until this moment, the act was much the same as it had been since the time of Moll Flanders. A few things had been added in the nineteenth century—some stores now hired off-duty cops, called floorwalkers, to protect the merchandise. Their techniques resembled a game of hide-and-seek: Detectives stood for hours inside Trojan horses, or “observation perches”—hollowedout pillars—peering through one-way mirrors watching for shoplifters. Other stores installed rudimentary pinhole cameras behind mannequins’ eyes. But in general, when a store employee found garment tags on the dressing room floor, she would let the shoplifter go rather than arrest “the wrong person,” which might incur false-arrest lawsuits and alienate customers.
Analog waves, the technology that allowed Minasy to create the Chinese handcuffs, had existed since Scottish physicist Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt developed radar in 1935. Minasy began to build prototypes of tags and pedestals that could “read” analog waves and set off alarms. He dragged pieces of the prototype from his basement workshop into the living room. While he was at the office, Jayne checked the needle gauge. If the prototype system shivered when a car drove by, anything might set off a false alarm in the store.
Minasy applied for his first patent for an electronic article surveillance (EAS) tag in 1966, a year after the FBI announced the shoplifting spike. His inaugural theft protection device was a white plastic rectangular tag or wafer that a salesclerk could clip on a piece of clothing. The pedestal at the door would screech if a shoplifter tried to leave the store. The second version, a round dome with a nipple in the middle, looked like a diaphragm.
Minasy named his company Knogo and set up headquarters in Hicksville, Long Island, not far from his home. Shortly afterward, EAS made Minasy rich. The family moved to an eleven-room house in a swanky part of town. Minasy bought his first Rolls-Royce. But his dreams of persuading other industries to adapt EAS foundered. Although he convinced one old-age home to try it to prevent Alzheimer’s patients from wandering off, and he hoped hospitals would use it to protect newborns from kidnapping, neither of these applications ever gained traction. Minasy’s bread and butter remained retail shoplifting.
In 1977, the company went public. Minasy received a letter from Richard Nixon offering him a job in security. (He turned it down.) Stevie Wonder’s people called to ask if he could design something to prevent Stevie from falling off the stage during concerts. (He couldn’t.) With many American retailers increasingly concerned about customer lawsuits triggered by EAS, Minasy expanded into Europe. Soon that business generated 75 percent of sales.
Minasy became an industry hero. The Congressional Record honored him at the Library of Congress in 1984, a year when Knogo was making about $6 million in profits. Never shy about his accomplishments, Minasy compared his invention to Fulton’s steamboat. In 1991, the Smithsonian Institution placed Minasy’s tag in the National Museum of American History.
Ronald Assaf, who would supersede Minasy as a businessman, did not meet his rival until 1968, when Knogo’s EAS system was already installed in stores. But two years earlier, just as Minasy was applying for his first patent, Assaf was working on his own antishoplifting device. Of Lebanese and Irish origin, Assaf had attended the University of Akron for three years, then dropped out to manage a half dozen supermarkets in Ohio for the Kroger Company, a midwestern chain. All the stores had shoplifting problems, but the Case Avenue store in downtown Akron, which Assaf described as a “mixed” neighborhood, was the worst.
The store had already fired three managers. Assaf tried all the security methods then in vogue: mirrors, detectives, TV cameras. He moved the cigarette rack into the clerk’s line of vision; he stopped selling shoes, which shoplifters could wear out of the store, and hosiery, which they tucked into their pockets. He placed mannequins above the meat department so detectives could look down through their eyes and catch shoplifters stealing tenderloin.
Nothing worked. Then Assaf’s cousin, Jack Welsch, an amateur inventor who, according to Assaf, had designed a novel pizza cutter, began to experiment with a device similar to Minasy’s—an antishoplifting gizmo with a sensitized label that could be attached to products and that pedestals placed at store exits would detect. One day, a big, burly guy came into Assaf’s Kroger store, picked up two bottles of wine, looked Assaf in the eye, and walked out. Assaf chased the thief to the railroad tracks but lost him. Fifteen minutes later, Jack Welsch came in to cash a check, and Assaf said, “Jack, if we can invent something to stop shoplifting, we’re gonna make a lot of money.”
The team hired two University of Michigan engineers to help. In 1966, they borrowed $10,000 and formed JKR—named after Welsch’s three children: Jack, Karen, and Randy. But like Minasy, Assaf couldn’t get financing at first. So he developed a franchise program to sell the marketing rights in each state; his salesmen formed the lab prototype into handmade units. Assaf’s first tag was a piece of paper and an aluminum antenna. The second, a small diode hand-soldered onto the antenna, cost a dollar.
Assaf paid Stephanie’s, a small retail clothing store in Akron, $400 a month to pilot the tag. In 1967, JKR produced and installed twenty-five pairs of pedestals on a free trial basis in Akron, Cleveland, and other midwestern cities. Assaf said, “Even more than today, there was no accurate way of calculating shrink; stores generally did inventory twice a year and couldn’t measure how much missing stuff had been shoplifted and how much just lost via other means. It was difficult to come up with numbers that could show the product’s effectiveness.”
Gradually stores began to install the systems. In 1969, now called Sensormatic, Assaf’s company went public and raised $12 million. Like Minasy’s, Assaf’s tags modernized stores’ methods of catching shoplifters. Before, the store detective had to see a person shoplifting with his own eyes. Once stores installed tags, catching shoplifters became more objective. Or that was the theory. The detectives were able to rush to the door after the alarm went off when the shoplifter was attempting to leave with the stolen goods. But she could still defend herself by saying that she had forgotten to pay. As more and more stores relied on tags and pedestals, the number of false-arrest lawsuits for shoplifting skyrocketed. Thus Sensormatic and state retail lobby associations worked to broaden existing retail laws or pass new ones allowing stores to stop people if they had probable cause.
Assaf’s first tags operated on microwave frequency—as opposed to Knogo’s radio frequency tag—and cou
ld be detected at a greater distance. Thus, they worked better in the new malls with wide entrances for each store. Called “alligator tags” because of their big “jaws,” these tags are removed from garments with a tool resembling a giant nutcracker.
Some retailers acknowledged that shoplifting comprised a significant part of inventory losses, but many others remained skeptical that Assaf’s product would help. The decadelong shoplifting spike and the computer revolution (stores used them for inventory) finally helped push Sensormatic into profitability. “Stores began to let salespeople go and shoplifting skyrocketed. Almost out of desperation, stores decided to give EAS an opportunity,” Assaf said, adding that his first client, Macy’s, installed the tags in the fur department, but years passed before the store used them on designer and ready-to-wear clothing.
Of the other basement inventors, garage engineers, and Saturday-afternoon entrepreneurs who created the antishoplifting technology industry, Peter Stern is typical. While Assaf and Minasy were tinkering with their tags, Stern, an engineer living outside Philadelphia who served as president of a branch of the local public library, asked the director about his problems. The director said: book stealers.
Stern designed his own antishoplifting device—a refined metal detector that picked up signals from small slips of paper lined with a laminate of lightweight conductive metals such as aluminum. These were pasted on books’ flyleaves. Libraries at New York University, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania used this system.
Albert “Ted” Wolf, a prominent local family’s scion who worked with Stern, became CEO of a new company founded by Stern dedicated to this technology, later called Checkpoint. Wolf set up headquarters in Barrington, New Jersey, and later, a little farther to the west in Thorofare. In 1974, the two men decided that the library market was too dull and switched to retail and to radio frequency tags. Soon Korvette’s, CVS, Walgreens, Urban Outfitters, and the U.S. Postal Service installed the tags Checkpoint manufactured.
EAS drove shoplifters to find new ways to steal, such as using booster bags—shopping bags lined with metal to deflect the electronic technology. In one of the scaremongering articles about the shoplifting surge in this decade, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance announced, “Strengthened security and crackdowns don’t seem to help much.”
WHEN “STEALING THIS BOOK” WAS COOL
Just when the technology began to boom, the counterculture introduced a new motive for shoplifting: the revolution. In 1970, a new generation of euphemisms for the crime came into vogue: “Five-finger discount,” “liberating,” and “ripping off.” The same year, two books endorsed the crime as one that belonged to the people: Do It: Scenarios of the Revolution and The Anarchist Cookbook. Jerry Rubin, a thirty-two-year-old yippie and hero at the trial of the Chicago Seven, wrote Do It. William Powell, nineteen, was responsible for the cookbook. Chapter 22 of Do It, titled “Money Is Shit—Burning Money, Looting and Shoplifting Can Get You High,” is not so much a how-to as a crude celebration of theft. The famous line comes after Rubin tells the story of destroying dollar bills with Abbie Hoffman at the New York Stock Exchange. But even that commemoration of American outlaw cheek fails to prepare readers for Rubin’s out-and-out endorsement of shoplifting as an exhilarating, revolutionary act: “All money represents theft . . . shoplifting gets you high. Don’t buy. Steal. If you act like it’s yours, no one will ask you to pay for it.” In “shoplifting gets you high,” the yippies found an anthem.
In a chapter on electronics, sabotage, and surveillance, Powell lumps shoplifting in with other pranks such as tapping phones, squirting glue in keyholes at the Stock Exchange, and hot-wiring cars. Like Rubin, Powell makes out liberators to be more discriminating than common thieves: “The revolutionary will steal from large corporations and the common thief will steal from anyone. If you can ever get over the Protestant ethic you will see what I mean.” But where Rubin provides epigrams, Powell gives readers “commonsense tactics” in the form of an eleven-point list. Two of the items instruct the would-be revolutionary (shoplifter) how to disguise herself as a civilian: “Operate in pairs with one person holding the employee’s attention, the other stealing him blind,” and “If caught for shoplifting or robbery never admit to being part of the movement. It will get you more time in jail.”
These handbooks of the counterculture mark the first time that any American had argued for shoplifting as a revolutionary act. While Elizabethan pamphlets noted that shoplifters wore silk to disguise themselves as nobility, and Enlightenment memoirs blamed stealing on class inequity, yippie books and articles advised liberators to gear up as establishment squares to steal for politics’ sake. In the underground feminist newspaper Rat, “Lizzie Liftwell” and “Pearl Paperhanger,” reportedly the pen names of Sharon Krebs, later a Weatherwoman, wrote one column, “Rip Off,” instructing the would-be shoplifter, who perhaps prior to becoming a revolutionary enjoyed the op-ed page on the commuter train from Connecticut: “If you read a New York Times, buy one before you go to the A&P.”
The figure most responsible for pushing the shoplifting-as-revolution meme into the mainstream, Abbie Hoffman, was not content with dressing up as the Man. In January 1971, after more than two dozen New York publishers rejected his manuscript, Hoffman scrounged $15,000 from friends and set up Pirate Editions to put out Steal This Book. Grove Press distributed the book, which endorsed Hoffman’s stealing from rage at bourgeois America’s materialism. Barney Rosset, Grove’s publisher, wrote me, “We chained the books to the counter (in other words, buy the book, don’t steal it).”
Reading Steal This Book today gives a sense of how innocent the world used to be: Scamming free plane rides simply by boarding without a ticket is unimaginable in our post-9/11 world. Even some of Hoffman’s notes on stealing are a bit dated. “Ripping off . . . is an act of revolutionary love,” he writes. A section on free food, invoking Robin Hood, offers a slightly more up-to-date line: “We have been shoplifting from supermarkets on a regular basis without raising the slightest suspicion, ever since they began. . . . We are not alone and the fact that so much stealing goes on and the supermarkets still bring in huge profits shows exactly how much overcharging occurs in the first place.” Hoffman includes helpful hints, photos with funny captions, and a bibliography. He also advises that “the food tastes better” shoplifted.
At his best, Hoffman elaborates on how-to: “Sew a plastic bag onto your tee shirt or belt and wear a loose fitting jacket or coat to cover any noticeable bulge,” he writes. “Fried chicken is the best and easiest to pocket, or should we say bag.” Other tips Hoffman incorporates: Work with a partner to distract security; slide sandwiches between your thighs; cart stolen goods into the ladies’ room and rewrap them in the stalls. “Specialized uniforms, such as nun and priest garb, can be most helpful.”
In four months, Steal This Book sold upward of 100,000 copies. No newspaper would review it. Few radio stations would advertise it. Many states banned it. In Ohio, stores wrapped the state shoplifting law on a brown paper band around the book. Canada seized copies at the border; Doubleday bookstores refused to stock it, blaming the title. Some authors might have seen this as failure; not Hoffman. He set up a table outside the Doubleday store on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street and sold books there.
Thirteen New York bookstores declined to sell the book. Only the San Francisco Chronicle ran ads. The New Left political journal Ramparts published an excerpt as well as an advertisement containing hints on how to steal Steal This Book from the nine stores in America carrying it. In Boston at BookMart, “second aisle on the left is the best bet.”
A June memo from the FBI’s New York office to the Washington office revealed that the government regarded Steal This Book as “a manuel [sic] for revolutionary extremists . . . foisted on the reading public by Grove Press.” And “In view of the contents of Steal This Book, Internal Security Division of Department being queried for an opinion as to whether authorship, distribution, and/or publication
constitutes a violation of Federal Law.”
Regardless of its legality, Steal This Book incited controversy and censorship everywhere. In Coldwater, Michigan, a librarian resigned after the board objected to, among other things, his adding copies of Steal This Book to an exhibit about the Chicago Seven, as the mayor put it, “where a ten-year-old could see them.” No more than midwestern libraries, the American literary establishment was not ready for Steal This Book. In July, Esquire writer Dotson Rader convinced John Leonard, then New York Times Book Review editor, to let him review the book. Rader called the book “a hip Boy Scout handbook,” used its phobic reception to condemn the timidity of the publishing industry, and described Hoffman as a countercultural Thoreau. “It reads as if Hoffman decided it was time to sit down and advise his children on what to avoid and what was worth having in America.” Steal This Book “possesses its own peculiarly righteous morality.”
Basking in his one positive review, Hoffman descended on Boston, where, accompanied by a reporter, he shoplifted a Currier and Ives coffee table book, giving the clerk at the downtown bookstore the finger after learning that it did not carry Steal This Book. In Cambridge, he visited the Harvard Coop, where he demanded that the manager move Steal This Book from his office to a display in the front of the store: “Where the f——do you keep it—in the safe?”
In the wake of Steal This Book, Hoffman became a celebrity. He also seemed to have stimulated a shoplifting craze. A Sunday New York Times Magazine article, “Ripping Off: The New Lifestyle,” led with the lyrics from the Jefferson Airplane song “We Can Be Together”: “In order to survive we steal cheat lie” was one lyric, followed by “We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young.” The article then jumped to a scene in which a Harvard Divinity School dropout smokes pot and extols shoplifting’s virtues. “Ripping off—stealing, to the uninitiated—is as rapidly becoming part of the counterculture as drugs and rock music,” it warned.
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