The Steal

by Rachel Shteir

  I owe an unpayback-able debt to Elaina Richardson, the corporation of Yaddo, and the people who make it work for their generosity during the writing of this book. David Plotz and Meghan O’Rourke at Slate, Toby Manhire at the Guardian, and Nick Goldberg at the Los Angeles Times published my earliest writings about shoplifting. Thanks to KGB Literary Reading Series and Suzanne Schneider for letting me read from the manuscript. Many librarians helped me track down obscure sources, including Lyonette Louis-Jacques, Allen Fisher at the National Archives, and the staff at the University of Chicago interlibrary loan department. But no one was as cheerful and responsive as Heather Jagman at DePaul University. Joe LaRocca, King Rogers, David Hill, Gail Caputo, the staff at the FMI, the staff at the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, Jeanine Arnold at the Uniform Crime Research division of the FBI, Evan Schuman and his blog, StorefrontBacktalk, the people at Theft Talk in Portland, Richard Hollinger, and the other criminologists and scholars, loss prevention agents, physicians, and employees of antishoplifting technology organizations too numerous to name here who generously answered my questions. There are many people I interviewed whose stories in the end did not appear in this book. I would like to thank them. I would also like to thank the people whose stories I did use, especially those who allowed their real names to be used. Finally, Dean Corrin and John Culbert, the associate dean and dean of the Theatre School of DePaul University, gave me academic leaves and other forms of assistance in 2005–6, 2008–9, and 2010.

  A word on how I wrote this book: People remained anonymous who wished to. Anyone whose first name I use without a surname is a pseudonym. The names of the people I describe in the groups are pseudonyms. I did not alter details, conflate scenes, or use composites, and I fact-checked everything I could, doing multiple interviews, using police reports, court documents, and the Freedom of Information Act. This book describes shoplifting’s past, so historical and court records, scholarly articles, newspaper clippings, transcripts of TV shows, and rare books and manuscripts archives such as the Wellcome Library in London, the British Library, and the Hampshire Archives were part of my research as well. Loss prevention agents at the National Retail Federation, theft addicts at their conferences, and engineers at Sensormatic explained how antitheft devices operate. I went to stores and saw how things worked behind the scenes. I listened.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  p. 5 over a million shoplifting offenses: United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (September 2009). Crime in the United States, 2008, table 7.

  p. 5 more than “the losses . . . ”: quoted in Richard C. Hollinger and Amanda Adams, 2009 National Retail Security Survey, Security Research Project (NRSS), Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law, University of Florida, Gainesville, 2009, 9.

  p. 5 800, 000 people were arrested: Ibid., table 30. This is a commonly cited figure. See also United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States, 2008.

  p. 6 Stores do not always keep good records: To cite just one example of the complexities of record-keeping, in 2006, in a widely publicized shift from its well-known zero-tolerance position on shoplifting, Walmart decided it would only detain adults (not kids or senior citizens) who stole items valued at more than $25.

  p. 6 more than 150 percent: New York Times, March 15, 1970, 234.

  p. 6 Between 2000 and 2004: Uniform Crime Reports 2004, figure 2.13.

  p. 6 also climbed slightly: Uniform Crime Reports 2008, table 7.

  p. 6 In 2008, shoplifting rose: United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Supplement to Return A Record Cards limited to Group 1 & Group 2 Cities, 2008.

  p. 6 In 2009: Uniform Crime Reports, table 23.

  p. 6 According to the National: NASP internal report. Research since the 1970s settles on a similar number.

  p. 6 But a massive study: C. Blanco, et al., “Prevalence and Correlates of Shoplifting in the United States: Results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC),” American Journal of Psychiatry, 2008, table 1, 906. Thanks to Carlos Blanco for explaining this data.

  p. 6 10 percent: American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

  p. 6 one in forty-eight times: NASP internal report. Other research supports this finding. In a 2009 survey, for example, British retailers estimated that only half of all shoplifting losses are identified.

  p. 7 “More Consumers, Workers Shoplift . . .” USA Today, June 19, 2008, B1.

  p. 7 between 0 and 8 percent: McElroy, “Kleptomania, A Report of 20 Cases,” 652. DSM IV Text Revision puts the percentage of kleptomaniacs “at fewer than 5 percent.” However, the DSM IV Sourcebook admits that where kleptomania was concerned, there is not “a consistent method of documenting phenomenology and diagnostic criteria” (p. 1015). Some forensic psychiatrists, like Will Cupchik, think it’s lower. Some psychopharmacologists, like Jon Grant, suggest that it could be higher. Since the DSM definition of kleptomania has changed over time, and many physicians believe it is fuzzy and the disease is underrepresented, it is hard to say how many kleptomaniacs exist. Harvey Roy Greenberg—a psychiatrist to whom the American Psychiatric Association refers journalists who have questions about kleptomania—“does not count” himself an expert in the subject and could only say that the kleptomaniacs he had treated were “horribly troubled” (December 6, 2007).

  p. 8 $11.69 billion: NRSS, 2009, 8, 9.

  p. 8 “crime tax”: Richard Hollinger provided me with this statistic, which appeared in Consumer Reports. A 2010 study by the Centre for Retail Research found that the “crime tax” in the UK is 180 pounds per family per year.

  p. 8 1.44 percent: NRSS, 5.

  p. 8 “There has been . . . ”: Global Retail Theft Barometer, op. cit, 41.

  1. THEFT AND PUNISHMENT

  p. 13 “we’re the only [species] . . .”: Author interview with John Marzluff, December 6, 2007.

  p. 14 “Then he who is a good keeper . . .”: Plato, The Republic, 8.

  p. 15 “Yet I lusted to thieve . . . ”: Saint Augustine, Confessions, 32.

  p. 15 “It is not theft . . .”: Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 101.

  p. 16 “Be we then so hasty . . .”: More, Utopia, 21.

  p. 16 “thieves and robbers range abroad . . . ”: Shakespeare, Richard II, act 3, scene 2.

  p. 16 “Attired in the form . . .”: Greene, The Second Part of Cony Catching, 19.

  p. 17 “Women are more subtile . . . ”: Quoted in Barrère, Dictionary of Jargon, vol. 2, 16.

  p. 17 “Towards Night these Houses . . .”: Head, The English Rogue, 140.

  p. 17 “go into a mercer’s shop . . .”: N. H., The Ladies Dictionary, 579.

  p. 17 “commonly well clad”: Head, The Canting Academy, 106.

  p. 17 “being born under Mercury ”: This was a common belief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is cited by Autolycus as explanation for his character in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.

  p. 17 “was so ugly . . . ”: Knapp and Baldwin, The Newgate Calendar, Mary Frith.

  p. 19 the majority of all crimes: The numbers are debatable, since before 1800, there were no centralized records of crime. But most historians of eighteenth-century London agree that petty theft was the most popular crime committed and that it skyrocketed in the second decade of the eighteenth century. In his magisterial Policing and Punishment in London, the great scholar J. M. Beattie asserts that in 1670, there were 150 people tried for property crimes in London and by the second decade of the eighteenth century, that number had shot up to around 500–600 (pp. 17–19).

  p. 19 the third most prevalent: Oxley, Convict Maids, 45.

  p. 19 two-thirds of all executions: This works out to about thirty hangings a year. The frequency of property crime and hanging for it in seventeenth-century England is well known. Gattrell estimates that 35,000 people were condemned to death between 1770
and 1830. But not all of these people were hanged. After 1660, many were transported. Most historians of crime agree that after a dip in hangings for theft in the seventeenth century, hangings rose again in the eighteenth century. J. M. Beattie, for example, surveys a sample drawn from the Old Bailey (308–9).

  p. 19 By the 1720s: Like all statistics on crime prior to the nineteenth century, this is impossible to nail down; still, 10,000 is a commonly cited figure in contemporary literature. Other estimates are higher. Some recent scholars think that the number is lower. There is no doubt that the perception was of London as a city of thieves.

  p. 20 “the devil . . .”: Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, 164.

  p. 20 “I pass’d by an apothecary’s . . .”: Ibid., 203.

  p. 20 “I ventured into a house . . .”: Ibid., 229.

  p. 21 “I grew as impudent a thief . . .”: Ibid., 201.

  p. 22 “the increase in luxury”: Rude, Hanoverian London, 96.

  p. 22 “Indeed, could not the Thief . . . ”: Fielding, An Enquiry, 125.

  p. 24 “We, who are thieves . . .”: Godwin, Caleb Williams, 204.

  p. 25 “I do not believe a fouler murder . . . ”: Sir William Meredith, quoted in Rumbelow, The Triple Tree, 113.

  p. 25 “I was convinced . . .”: Rousseau, Confessions, 34.

  p. 25 “I accuse her . . .”: Ibid., 77.

  p. 26 “Thus I learned . . . ”: Ibid., 27.

  p. 26 After the French Revolution: Early on in my research, I stumbled upon a story about shoplifting, pregnant women, and Napoleon. The story, which I first read in James D. Watson and Andrew Berry’s The Secret Life of DNA, tells how, before Gregor Mendel discovered the science of modern genetics in the 1850s, scientists explained hereditary disease as arising from a pregnant woman’s “wicked thoughts.” Berry and Watson write, “On the premise that fetal malformation can result when a pregnant mother’s desires are thwarted, leaving her feeling stressed and frustrated,” Napoleon passed a law allowing pregnant women to do whatever they wanted, including shoplifting. Asked about his story, Berry had no idea where it came from. “I hope I haven’t started an urban legend,” he said.

  When I posted a query on the discussion forum of the Napoleon Series, a website devoted to Napoleon, only a few scholars had heard the story. One e-sleuth found a reference to it in Bergen Evans’s 1946 book, The Natural History of Nonsense. In this version of the story, Napoleon repealed a law passed in revolutionary France allowing pregnant women to shoplift. Evans left no notes on his sources. Lyonette Louis-Jacques, a University of Chicago law librarian, helped me track down sources describing a law passed by a revolutionary tribunal in 1795. The law, which was repealed in 1811, forgave pregnant women for committing crimes, including shoplifting, although whether it did so because of genetics, as Berry and Watson suggest, or because of ideas about the sanctity of motherhood, is not clear. And, Louis-Jacques added, Napoleon himself would not have decreed it. The myth anticipates much of our confusion about shoplifting today—is it revolutionary or apolitical? Impulsive or premeditated? A sign of strength or a symptom of women’s mental frailty? Shameful because of the act itself or because it echoes greater injustices and reminds us of them?

  p. 26 “If we glance . . . ”: de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, 313.

  p. 27 “shift from a criminality . . .”: Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 77.

  p. 27 “Since then . . .”: Tocqueville, Journey to America, 242.

  p. 28 “as much Bristol . . .”: Greenberg, Crime and Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 61. There are scant records of punishment before the American Revolution, but Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina may have executed thieves. Since slaves were considered property, to run away was itself a form of theft.

  p. 28 “Crimes against property . . . ”: Jefferson, Memoirs, Correspondence and Miscellany, vol. 3, 167.

  p. 28 “Nothing was valued . . .”: Wyman, The Life and Adventures of Seth Wyman, 7.

  p. 29 “capacious enough . . .”: Ibid., 19.

  2. KLEPTOS AND REFORMERS

  p. 30 “trembled very much . . . ”: Pinchard, The Trial of Jane Leigh Perrot, 8.

  p. 31 “lamented their being obliged . . .”: MacKinnon, Grand Larceny, 8.

  p. 31 “pressed to death”: Ibid., 70.

  p. 31 “pale and emaciated”: Quoted in Le Faye, Jane Austen: A Family Record, 125.

  p. 32 “Placed in a situation . . . ”: Quoted in Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters, 136.

  p. 32 “That these wretches . . .”: Le Faye, op. cit., 124

  p. 32 Not so fast: Today there is a veritable cottage industry on Jane Leigh Perrot, her kleptomania, and the trial’s influence on Jane Austen and her oeuvre. Jane Austen and Crime, Jane Austen in Context, and Women Writing About Money are some of the titles dealing with it all.

  p. 32 new material concluding that Leigh Perrot: Galperin, The Historical Austen, 38.

  p. 32 “considered Mrs. L.P. . . .”: Quoted in Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life, 427, n. 30.

  p. 33 “Had not the French Revolution. . . ”: Quoted in Hansard, The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, 267.

  p. 33 “I trust . . .”: Quoted in Follett, Evangelicalism, 42.

  p. 33 “a summer airing . . .”: Romilly, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Samuel Romilly, 327.

  p. 35 “that morning secreted in her . . .”: De Quincey, The Household Wreck, 24.

  p. 35 “By that time . . . ”: Ibid., 34.

  p. 35 “organ of the propensity to covet”: Gall and Spurzheim, Physiognomical System, 320.

  p. 36 “pilfered everywhere . . .”: Gall, On the Function of the Brain and Each of Its Parts, 308. Geoffrey Symcox, the leading scholar on Victor Amadeus II, never heard of the king’s shoplifting but speculated that the accusation might refer to his propensity for taking over other countries.

  p. 36 “Petty larcenies . . .”: Gall, op. cit., 323.

  p. 36 klopemania: Matthey is the originator of this term, according to many nineteenth-century cultural historians, including O’Brien, Abelson, and Whitlock.

  p. 37 “permanent but . . .”: Matthey, also quoted in Fullerton, “Kleptomania: A Brief Intellectual History,” 201.

  p. 37 “instinctive, irresistible propensity to steal . . .”: quoted in Miller, Bon Marche, 198. Actually both Marc and Matthey use this phrase.

  p. 38 “moral insanity”: O’Brien, “The Kleptomania Diagnosis,” 70, describes this phenomenon.

  p. 38 “reign of libidinous pleasure”: Proudhon, What Is Property?, 247.

  p. 39 “honest thief ”: Letulle, “Voleuses honnêtes,” 469.

  p. 39 “flounces of Alençon lace . . . ”: Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 431.

  p. 40 “the father of her children”: Quoted in O’Brien, op. cit., 67.

  p. 40 “The personal appearance of . . . ”: Allen, “Prize Essay on Kleptomania,” 20.

  pp. 40–41 “In the slang of the day . . . ”: Bucknill, quoted in Whitlock, Crime, Gender, and Consumer Culture, 203.

  p. 41 “In these days . . . ”: Twain, Essays and Sketches of Mark Twain, 74.

  p. 41 “Moses, when he came down . . .”: Emma Goldman, Made for America, 244.

  p. 42 “Negroes are sent . . . ”: Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings, 126.

  p. 42 Elaine Abelson: There was also a play called Kleptomania, a “Kleptomania Rag,” and other cultural artifacts.

  p. 43 “are the subjects of a . . . ”: Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 543.

  p. 43 “Shoplifting, which . . .”: Lombroso, The Female Offender, 206.

  p. 44 “take hold of something . . . ”: Gross, quoted in Fullerton, op. cit., 202.

  p. 44 “This broad motive . . . ”: Gross, quoted in Stekel, Peculiarities of Behavior, 168.

  p. 44 “So-called kleptomania . . . ”: Abraham, Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, 355.

  p. 44 “wayward”: Quoted in Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, 214.

/>   p. 44 “amazing and voluptuous spasm”: Quoted in Shera, “Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire,” 162.

  pp. 44–45 “Doubtless . . . ”: Crane, “Criminal Psychology,” 451.

  p. 45 “It is not enough . . . ”: Stekel, op. cit., 267. There were several Freudians, including Sabina Spielrein and Franz Wittels, who believed that kleptomania was a type of masturbation for women, or sexual repression.

  3. ABBIE HOFFMAN MEETS THE CHINESE HANDCUFFS

  p. 46 “nation’s fastest-growing . . .”: New York Times, December 2, 1965, 37; Uniform Crime Reports 1965.

  p. 46 “get marbles and erasers . . . ”: Washington Post, August 6, 1991, E1.

  pp. 46–49 Minasy details: Author interviews with Minasy family and with Lillian Curry, the late Mr. Minasy’s secretary, February 2006, March 2008, October 2008. Special thanks to Lillian for assisting with press clippings and scrapbooks.

  p. 49 “mixed” neighborhood: Author interviews with Ronald Assaf, June 2006, June 2008.

  p. 49 “Jack, if we can . . . ”: Ronald Assaf, 2006.

  p. 50 “Even more than today . . . ”: Ibid.

  p. 50 Gradually stores began: Ibid.

  p. 51 “Strengthened security . . .”: Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, November 1970, 5.

  p. 52 “Money Is Shit . . .”: Rubin, Do It, 117.

  p. 52 “All money represents theft . . . ” Ibid., 43.

  p. 52 “The revolutionary will steal . . .”: Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook, 75.

  p. 53 “If you read a New York Times . . . ”: Rat, February 6–23, 1970, 9.

  p. 53 “We chained . . . ”: Letter from Barney Rosset, December 29, 2008.

  p. 53 “Ripping off . . . is an act of . . . ”: Hoffman, Steal This Book, 75.

  p. 53 “We have been shoplifting . . .”: Ibid., 7.

  p. 53 “the food tastes better”: Ibid., 10.

  pp. 53–54 “Sew a plastic bag . . . ”: Ibid., 3.