Like grocers, luxury retailers connect the professionalizing of shoplifting to their embracing of state-of-the-art surveillance systems: Shoplifting a $6,000 Birkin bag, furs from Bergdorf’s, caviar from Petrossian, chocolate from La Maison du Chocolat, $1,700 bras from La Perla, scallops from Citarella, handbags from Prada, or sequined Italian skirts from Barneys is too daunting for amateur thieves. You have to go back to before Merkin’s essay—the 1970s—to read a news story about a theft at a luxury jeweler that uses the word “shoplift.” Barry Matsuda, the former director of security at Richemont North America, which owns Cartier and a dozen other “mansions,” including Chloé and Montblanc, says, “You don’t shoplift a $300,000 necklace. You shoplift peanut butter, toilet paper, shirts, skirts.”
Matsuda meant that to steal the most valuable jewelry in Cartier required more skill than an amateur shoplifter could muster. In the flagship store on Fifty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, except for a few silk scarves, one or two lonely bottles of perfume, and stationery, there was hardly any merchandise at all outside the glass cases. In the High Jewelry Room, where the most expensive jewelry is displayed, a thick, plaited ruby-and-diamond choker and a platinum ring featuring one emerald as big as a marble were heavily surveilled. (There are ninety-six cameras and eight guards in the Fifty-third Street store.)
Wrapped in a heavy, flat satin ribbon, the catalog—the size of a large, hardcover coffee table book—is sent exclusively to the handful of finicky clients known to spend half a million dollars on a necklace. To even get close enough to such a necklace to steal it, you’d have to be able to impersonate a Greek shipping mogul, a Saudi prince, or a Russian tycoon at close range. You’d have to make small talk about Cannes while you and the sales associate waited for the necklace and sipped glasses of wine or lattes in a small private viewing room—a sort of jewelry confessional. You would have to be a Houdini of jewel theft, volleying banter across the small table, concealing your theft from the camera, slipping the real necklace from the wrap box into your sleeve and replacing it with a paste version in an instant. Not for amateur shoplifters.
In eighteenth-century London, clothing accounted for 27.1 percent of all shoplifted goods. It is impossible to know whether these shoplifters wanted to dress better or resell the clothes for profit or both. But over the centuries, clothing has continued to be a frequently shoplifted item. Defeating clothing shoplifting, the first job the antitheft technology industry took on fifty years ago, is a multibillion-dollar industry today.
Some of the most ingenious clothes shoplifters I heard of were drag queens and transvestites who stole for their pageants—burlesques of Miss America contests and antecedents of reality television competitions. The most “legendary” thefts occurred in the 1980s, when the most important category was “labels,” that is, designer labels, Terence Dixon, aka Terrence Legend, a community historian, told me. (Legendary was something all contestants wanted to be.) One time, he said, a group of ball walkers, as contestants were called, lined a Louis Vuitton satchel with tinfoil to make a high-end booster bag and then hit Saks. The contestants were organized into houses, or teams. Tina Montana, a prolific shoplifter, or “crafter,” as scam artists are referred to in this community—and one-time head or “mother” of the house of Montana—shoplifted a $25,000 Versace bustier, Dixon told me. A 1997 photo at the Ebony Ball showed her in a full-length Versace gown. Some ball walkers still shoplift haute couture, although many others, Dixon said, have moved on to jeans. Like everything else, the pageants are less formal these days.
First reported in newspapers in the 1880s, filching corsets and women’s underwear was for years snickeringly attributed to kleptomaniacs and erotomaniacs. Today, lingerie lifting, though supposedly a for-profit crime, is still treated as a lurid pulp subject with headlines such as “Victoria’s Secret Missing Its Panties” or “Undiecover Thief.” Although the occasional bold amateur shoplifts from La Perla, and one does read about a panty-swiping cross-dresser or a loving husband stealing a thong for his wife, the most common underwear lifters in the news are boosters rushing into Victoria’s Secret with their foil-lined bags, sweeping thousands of dollars’ worth of push-up bras and matching low-rise panties from the front table, where they are displayed to lure customers into the store. The boosters abscond with the underwear and then resell them over the Internet, at swap meets, or from warehouses.
The retail industry pays close attention to what professionals shoplift from luxury and big-box stores, but it is less vigilant in tracking what amateurs steal. Some of the items swiped by the latter can never be deemed luxurious—even in our psyches’ funhouse interior. The amateur shoplifter takes ill-fitting blouses or high-heeled sandals she doesn’t like or other unusable or unsellable items—a piece of gum, a pencil, or a marble. These shoplifted souvenirs languish in the closet or the desk drawer; records of such jejune thefts fade from view or are destroyed.
Perhaps it is to be seen that some amateurs shoplift items that are so big they stretch the definition of the crime. One shoplifter I met dragged rugs out the side exit of a home emporium, another fled carrying a folded-up mattress, and a third pushed small ornamental trees through the garden section at Home Depot into the parking lot. Another person shoplifted kayaks. The scion of a wealthy Detroit family shoplifted so many fishing rods from sporting-goods stores that he needed a tractor trailer to move them. The fishing rod shoplifter countered his outdoorsman pose by shoplifting a $10,000 Montblanc pen and a $32,000 watch.
CONDOM RADICALS
In our anything-goes time, shoplifting forbidden objects is more difficult than you might think. Take cigarettes: A lot of people used to shoplift them, particularly young people. That is no longer possible now that the law mandates that cigarettes be placed behind the cash register. You have to commit an armed robbery to steal smokes. Or take pornographic magazines, once widely stolen. (For the articles.) Today, with Internet porn available at the click of a mouse, why bother shoplifting Playboy?
But take condoms. After two decades of selling them on the open shelves, chain pharmacies, citing shoplifting in the 1990s, began locking them up. In the spring of 2006, an article about CVS doing so in its twenty-two D.C. stores appeared in the Washington Post. (Walgreens and Duane Reade only lock up Trojan Magnums.)
The article did not just label this obstacle to practicing safe sex as an inconvenience. It condemned it as a public health issue. “Most of the stores that locked up condoms were in poor neighborhoods,” the Post noted, with populations at risk for AIDS/HIV, adding that these measures tied in with the abstinence-only education movement, which aimed to prevent young people, especially poor young ones, from having sex.
It was this conjecture that inspired graduate students at George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services to launch the “Save Lives: Free the Condoms” effort as part of a group class project. After the class ended, four of the students formed a coalition with public health groups, drummed up media attention, and then, store by store, convinced CVS to install “power wings,” or “end caps” (stands at the ends of aisles) and “click boxes” (clear plastic dispensers that snap over the shelves), essentially housing the condoms in vending machines. The condoms were more accessible but still unshopliftable.
By the early winter of 2009, the condom radicals had won. Just one of the fifty CVS stores in the District of Columbia still sold only locked condoms—the one at 2646 Naylor Road, Southeast, near Howard University, a low-income, mostly African American neighborhood. But then the Washington-based coalition of labor groups, Change to Win, stepped in. In February, backed by two hundred liberal and community organizations, Change to Win launched the “Cure CVS: Unlock the Condoms Initiative” by sending “Valentines” to CVS’s CEO with the message “Have a heart. Unlock the condoms” on them and by staging protests in front of CVS stores. In June, Change to Win released a study claiming that CVS was three times more likely to lock up condoms in poor, minority neighborhoods i
n cities including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The only places in the country where CVS stores did not lock up condoms, the organization found, were D.C. and Fairfield, Connecticut.
In a prepared statement, CVS responded to Change to Win’s accusations by blaming shoplifting. “In stores where condoms have been heavily shoplifted, a selection of condoms may be kept in a locked display to ensure that there is stock available for customers to purchase. This decision is based on the theft experience of the store, not its specific location. In stores that have a locked condom display, we maintain a selection of condoms that are not locked and are available for customers to purchase without asking for assistance from store employees.”
When public health leaders, social service advocates, and journalists decried CVS’s policy of locking up condoms, they took for granted that condom shoplifting happened because of the shame incurred when young people were forced to push the call button at the pharmacy, ask sales staff to open locked drawers, or wait while an employee requested assistance in the family planning department over the store loudspeaker. By refusing to reveal raw data about shoplifting condoms, CVS has thrust anyone wanting to buy a prophylactic back into the 1950s.
7. BOOSTERS
The flagship mall of the Simon Property Group, Woodbury Common Premium Outlets, is nestled in a valley on Route 32 in the shadow of Averell Harriman’s estate, one hour north of New York City. Not that you can see much from the interstate of the 137-acre parcel of land that the former governor of New York and industrialist donated to the town of Woodbury twenty-three years ago. Woodbury Common only bursts into view once you go right onto a long, sloping driveway across from Monroe-Woodbury High School, a good-looking brick building that the Common is partly responsible for. But for years perks like the school barely consoled the locals, who regarded Woodbury Common, the nation’s largest luxury discount shopping mall, as a mixed blessing.
When it was built in 1974, Woodbury Common did not look like a mall. Developers had modeled the outdoor emporium after a colonial village with gables peeking from gently sloping slate roofs. All the stores are on the first floor. A steeple rises from a clock tower—if you don’t look too closely at the big windows, you might be strolling through eighteenth-century America. The riches of Fendi, Gucci, Versace, Bose, Tory Burch, Tod’s, Burberry, Calvin Klein, Jimmy Choo, Kate Spade, Ralph Lauren, Godiva, Frette, Barneys New York, DKNY, and other luxury brands promise silk on every limb, leather on every extremity.
Over the past thirty years, Woodbury has expanded again and again. Today it spans 840,000 square feet and houses 222 stores. Two thousand people work there, or one-fifth of the population of the town. These days, Woodbury draws upward of 10 million people a year, more than Niagara Falls, although still less than Disneyland. Buses slide in six times a day from the Port Authority terminal in New York City.
“It’s like an open-air market in the Middle East,” said Cliff Weeks, a balding, skinny Central Valley Police Department lieutenant then doing double duty at the mall.
Weeks added: There is a “downside” to the mall’s swollen “waistline.” Since 9/11, the authorities have declared Woodbury a potential target for terrorists. The FBI and Homeland Security monitor “suspicious” license plates in the parking lot.
But the biggest problem that Woodbury has introduced to the town is a king-size amount of shoplifting. When I asked Michele Rothstein, the senior vice president of marketing for the Chelsea Group, which owns the Simon Property Group, which owns Woodbury Common, about shoplifters there, she said, “A center of that size plopped into the boondocks. There’s going to be a juxtaposition of two worlds.”
Robert Kwiatkowski, Weeks’s boss, the chief of the Central Valley Police Department, was less blasé: “West, north, east, south, they all come to steal. They’re like Fuller Brush salesmen up and down the highway,” he said. In 2005, the “Fuller Brush” shoplifters required Kwiatkowski to triple the police force from seven to twenty-two men. The thirty-two-year veteran of the force, who grew up in Woodbury and resembles Marlon Brando in his Godfather days, cautioned that just as there is no typical Woodbury shopper, there is no typical Woodbury shoplifter: Miscreants range from a member ofthe Montreal Expos to a pregnant woman who shoplifted $4,000 worth of clothes; from an Asian diplomat’s wife to the Newburgh-born pro Willie Mae Adams. Adams was “always a lady,” and with twenty-eight aliases, she taught the department “everything we know about shoplifting,” Kwiatkowski added, grinning at her memory. “She passed a little while ago.”
The chief continued, “There’s what we call ‘back to school shoplifting’ in the third week in August.” Once, he said with a smile, after a high school senior at Monroe-Woodbury won “best dressed” in her class thanks to her $2,600 collection of pilfered clothes, she was arrested. The town court ruled that she return the clothes along with her ill-gotten title. Fortunately, the yearbook had not yet been published.
In the squad room at the Central Valley police station, Cliff Weeks showed me a folder containing what he described as a shoplifting manual written by boosters or professional shoplifters. “If you are arrested, don’t give your name and address,” the manual advised. And, “Always carry $500 so that you will be able to make bail.”
I asked Weeks how he knew a high schooler who had watched a few hours of Law & Order could not come up with the same talking points, which were available for anyone to see on the Internet. He shrugged.
We went down to the basement of the Woodbury PD, and Weeks dragged a couple of the booster bags—also called magic bags or bad bags—from storage to show me. One was from Macy’s. It had a false bottom and deep white creases etched into the waxy red paper, and it was lined with tinfoil. A large blue-and-gold-striped wooden box—meant to look like a Christmas package—was suspended inside the bag by a wire attached to the bag handles. At the bottom, a trapdoor swung in and out so that the booster could rest the bag on top of a pile of shirts and suck them inside, where the electronic sensor could not detect them. If she suspected security was watching, she could dump the shirts.
When I cracked that the booster bag had seen better days, Weeks went into the storage room and returned with a booster coat—a long beige wool coat with different-size pockets hand-sewn into the lining—which he hung over the back of the door. It reminded me of what a flasher might wear to a peep show in the old Times Square.
Weeks assured me that the booster bags were effective tools for shoplifting, as were booster aprons, bras, pants, girdles, harnesses, and bloomers enabling “booster pregnancies” to swell, collapsing nine months into a few minutes as the shoplifter stuffed in hundreds of dollars’ worth of garments where the child should be.
Kwiatkowski sat in his fake-wood-paneled office and confided that the shoplifting epidemic at Woodbury had overwhelmed his men: If they’re at the mall, they can’t be in town. “The Common is a pain in the ass,” the chief said in a conspiratorial tone. He pulled from his desk drawer an Excel spreadsheet documenting “calls for service” for the Common.
In 2000, the year before Kwiatkowski became chief and a year after the department opened a satellite office at the Common, the police department made 626 arrests there—about two a day. That’s not taking into account the thousands of calls the police answered without arresting anyone. Kwiatkowski was quoted in the local paper, the Times Herald-Record, as saying that shoplifting accounted for 70 percent of the town’s criminal cases.
Shoplifting had plagued Woodbury well before this most recent spike, townspeople said. The difference was that until the late 1990s, no one cared. According to Sheila Conroy, who sat on the town planning committee in those days, Woodbury’s first owner hired janitors to moonlight as security guards, until the town planning committee put the kibosh on that cost-saving measure. Then, for a while, the emergency medical team doubled as shoplifter catchers. “They [the mall leadership] thought all you had to do was change your shirt to be part of security,” said Conroy. The Simon Group said that the
cleaning crew was only charged with this responsibility for a brief time and only at night.
In 2000, Woodbury created a Business Improvement District (BID) to handle the extra need for policing, to shift the cost of that policing from the taxpayer to the Common, and to siphon more of the Common’s taxes to the town. Because of an archaic New York State law, sales tax from the Common goes to Orange County, and Woodburyites thought they were bearing the mall’s burden with fewer payoffs than they deserved. After the BID, the mall gave money not just to the police department but also to the schools and the water and sewer systems. Still, the chief complained, it was not enough. When in 2004 the police department exceeded the budget by $30,000 because of overtime and rising benefits and Social Security costs, he assumed that the mall would make up the difference. The mall thought otherwise. “As a major taxpayer, we were entitled to a portion of police and other emergency services,” said the Simon Group representative Rothstein. Kwiatkowski took his men off “mall duty” and threatened to keep them out for four months.
Kwiatkowski’s lip curled when he talked about this time, because even though Woodbury eventually came through, nothing was ever the same. “I had an understanding. Shame on me. Big business will cut costs whenever they can. Crime goes up when they cut corners. And they’re continually cutting corners.” He thought for a minute and looked out his tiny window into the parking lot. “What do I think about Woodbury? It’s a nice place to shoplift.”
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