The Steal Read online

  THE GOOD BOOSTER

  Boosters are shoplifters who resell stolen goods for money. I encountered my first one in a class at Theft Talk, a not-for-profit group based in Portland, Oregon, that teaches thieves not to steal. During the “getting to know you” part of the class, Tamara, a slim, dark-skinned woman, wearing small gold hoop earrings, a jacket with white satin lapels, black jeans, and white Keds, stood out by confessing that she had spent six months in a federal prison.

  Tamara had come to the class after “thirty-one years of stealing. I never had this offered in my twenties. So now this is part of the compromise. When I first started, at the age of eighteen, that was fifteen, twenty years ago. I’ve been running on automatic.”

  What motivated her to stop shoplifting? “The thought of doing more time.” The group leader paused like a teacher who wanted to use someone else’s mistake to make a point. “If the only reason you stop shoplifting is a form of punishment, you will steal again,” she said.

  A few days after the Theft Talk class, I met Tamara at a coffee shop near her apartment. She was fifty-four. She used to be a heroin addict. Since her release from prison, she has worked at a series of jobs at small businesses. “I’m trying to show people you don’t need to be a Bible thumper to get clean. I never learned moderation. I can deal with a volcano, but if my shoelace breaks, I can’t deal with that. People used to say to me, ‘If you put this much energy into something positive, I would back you.’”

  When the feds busted Tamara, she had been boosting to support her heroin addiction since the age of eighteen, when she had met her husband, Doug. Tamara grew up on a reservation and spent a lot of time in foster homes.

  “My whole perception of life was power and fame.” About meeting her much older husband, Doug, she said, laughing, “He had this aura. I was in love.” She ran massage parlors and strip clubs with names like Action Unlimited and Playmates’ Club, but she switched to boosting because “I got tired of men.”

  The first thing she and Doug shoplifted was meat, which they called “cattle rustling.” She would slip slabs of it into her baby bag and dash out of the store. Many heists ensued. She resold the merchandise to many different clients. “I was doing longshoremen’s halls . . . underwear to whatever. Roundup, a weed killer, was in demand in the Midwest. There was this old madam, used to service people in prominent positions. Her son, living in California, used to sell the Indian rugs—we boosted them.”

  Boosting was easy money: The team could sell bottles of aspirin or Nicoderm patches to a fence for up to 7–10 percent of the market price. On a good day, that meant pulling in between $400 and $600 and the fence would resell the merchandise for 50–60 percent of the price.

  Tamara’s story was not just about supply and demand: It was an informal history of the eighties’ most popular products and also a primer on how boosters blamed stores for making it easy to steal. “When people were stealing those Mach One razor blades, [the stores] would put them right on the floor,” she said. “Doesn’t make any sense. They were encouraging people to steal them.”

  Eventually Tamara joined a loose network of boosters selling merchandise to fences and wholesalers. “It was the organized Asian mob,” she said. She and Doug worked as a team, driving from store to store, earning enough money to get high. But she soon discovered she also liked boosting. “It was as hard to kick as heroin.”

  Heroin and boosting helped her escape pain and contributed to her sense of invincibility. Boosting momentarily made Doug feel vital after he got sick from complications stemming from his drug addiction: “He would put his oxygen there and still be there stealing from his [wheelchair]. It played on people’s sympathy. He had a disarming smile. All those things that you need to get someone’s guard down.”

  The best parts were the all-night bull sessions where she and Doug would plan the heist: What if this happens, what if that happens, what if something entirely off-the-wall happens? The product could determine their strategy. Just after Nintendos came out, Doug, Tamara, and Doug’s nephew planned a heist at Toys“R”Us. Tamara went to the store and bought a giant plastic wading pool, then carried it aloft into the parking lot, its inside stuffed with Nintendos.

  In the bull sessions, ideas flew fast about what items to boost and how to do it. They’d be watching TV and see a commercial about a high-end fishing reel—Abu Garcia. “During fishing season, guys would die for that reel,” Tamara said. And they would work up a technique. Doug would slide reels across the counter when the cashier’s back was turned. But if the reels were Shimanos, the Japanese high-end brand, after taking them out of the box, Tamara claims, she could fit as many as fifty of them in her purse, evidently a big one. To boost cameras, she would crawl across the floor behind the counter, grab them, and crawl back to the cart. In his younger days, Doug would flirt with the saleswomen to distract them. “He would say, ‘Gee, you’re pretty. Would you like to go out with me?’”

  They usually would.

  At 8:00 a.m. one Sunday morning, Tamara and Doug hit a Safeway. In this early-morning scam, Doug would stand in the store and “read” a magazine while directing Tamara as though he were a crossing guard. He would stand next to her holding the magazine or even a piece of poster board so the camera could not “see” her. “Go,” he would whisper. “Stop.”

  But this time, he kept repeating the words, as though he were on continuous loop: “Go stop go stop go stop.” Dope sick, Doug threw caution to the wind.

  Tamara explained, “A good booster from the time that they go into the store has sixty seconds to assess the situation: Is security there? Is it between shifts? What people are on? Is it a manager that watches people?”

  That day, a cashier was looking straight at Tamara during the operation. The Bonnie of boosting violated another of their Ten Commandments: Never stay in a store for more than three minutes. They had been there three hours. Tamara was impatient and she got careless; she “overrolled” everything she knew because desperation, fear, and anxiety set in. She began to believe she was invincible and adopted a smash-and-grab mentality: She could take anything and no one could catch her. “Not a good thing,” she said. “Real tacky. You should have enough finesse to be able to go in again and again and they could say, ‘Hello, Mr. Jones.’ And you could say, ‘How are your grapes?’” In other words, she was blowing her cover.

  Instead, Tamara crouched on her knees and loaded up her purse while Doug shouted, “Go—stop.” They ran as a saleswoman yelled. They were arrested. “Once you start racking those felonies up,” Tamara said, “you bounce in and out of jail.”

  Shoplifting rehabilitation groups contend that although boosters may be drug addicts, drugs do not make people shoplift. “‘She was so drunk and she went to her favorite store and stole her favorite piece of jewelry.’ No. They know what they’re doing. It’s a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole puzzle,” explained Lisa Paules, an employee at Theft Talk. She meant that people (drug addicts or not) choose to shoplift. Further, this argument goes, although drug-addicted boosters may steal more in dollars or volume than amateurs, they do not comprise the majority of shoplifters. Only 10 percent of “theft offenders” are drug addicts.

  The Oregon Department of Corrections (ODC) does not measure shoplifting (misdemeanors are beneath counting). But after the ODC reported in 2007 that 60 percent of all prison inmates are addicted to drugs, retail industry lobbyists moved to strengthen antitheft laws. Oregon was one of the first states to pass harsher, “enhanced” retail theft laws—putting prescription drugs like pseudoephedrine and ephedrine behind the counter and requiring a state ID to purchase them. (The medicines can be used to make methamphetamines.)

  “A ‘YOU CAN’T CATCH ME’ KINDA THING”

  A few days after I met Tamara, I drove to Amity—a town about an hour southwest of Portland, Oregon, in the state’s wine country—to meet another Theft Talk alum, John Allen Bradshaw, a recovering methamphetamine addict, ex-booster, and born-again Christian w
ho was also the subject of several local newspaper articles. I found John in the garage where he was working as a welder, blowtorching a hood onto a car. Sparks flew off the torch and around his head. When he turned off the torch and removed his mask, with his round face and spidery mustache, he looked much younger than forty-one.

  We went into the office, empty except for a metal desk and two chairs, and sat down. “I’m focused on getting people to love the Lord without throwing the book at them,” John began. “But my brother raised me with marijuana and cross-tops and coke,” he said, cross-tops referring to a pill form of meth known by its hatching on the top.

  After John had been arrested many times, the court gave his wife custody of their three children. In 2004, she lost custody and the state placed them in foster care. John got into meth first, then boosting. To support his habit, he shoplifted electronics from Walmart: “Electronic gadgets, a scanner, two-way radios, digital recording devices, reselling them for methamphetamines.” His technique was not polished or thought through. He did not scheme or use props: “Grab things, take them out, out, go in there, go into bathroom, go into stall, take strips off, depackage them. Set off alarm and keep going. Got scared, almost got caught.” But like Tamara, John described boosting as an addiction whose power was related to drugs and ultimately bested them. “I started with drugs, but it turned out that taking stuff was more of an adrenaline rush than drugs. The thrill: the adrenaline to see if I could get away with it—knowing the alarms. I’d fill up my backpack with stuff. It’s a pretty sick disease. A ‘you can’t catch me’ kinda thing.”

  For John, shoplifting was also about finding something valuable in dirty, ramshackle houses and anonymous big-box stores. The crime allowed him to be a treasure hunter, a landlocked pirate, to scavenge. After he graduated from shoplifting to burglary, he continued to see himself as a kind of pirate. But when he got caught stealing guns from someone’s shed, he didn’t feel good about it anymore. As he put it, “The judge gave me such a small sentence, I felt I deserved more. I wanted to be punished more.”

  John gave up shoplifting. He found solace in a faith-based twelve-step program sponsored by Celebrate Recovery, the national evangelical church, which had opened a branch in nearby McMinnville. It was a drug addiction program, since Celebrate Recovery considered theft a sin. (Now some branches of Celebrate Recovery support so-called theft addiction.)

  The next time I saw him, John had progressed to step five, where the addict is supposed to confess. “Made all my amendses [sic] since talking to you,” he said, happy that he had told everyone he knew about his boosting, sure that confessing would lead to cleansing.

  THREE (OR FOUR) STRIKES

  In 1929, shoplifting was punishable in New York State by the Baumes Law, a Jazz Age antecedent of our “three strikes” law. First passed three years earlier, the Baumes Law allowed four strikes. Many politicians hoped to use the law to punish all shoplifting—not just the felonious version. But a few months after Black Friday, when New York lawmakers utilized the Baumes Law to sentence the first woman to life in prison for shoplifting, it inspired a public outcry. Hundreds of people wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt, then governor of New York, to protest that the sentence was too much for a shoplifter. Roosevelt overturned it on the grounds that a shoplifter—even a recidivist—did not deserve life.

  For the past ten years, the cases of boosters like Tamara and John have convinced many in the retail industry that only a return to a Baumes Law–style punishment will stop the crime. Frank Muscato, the supervisor of Organized Retail Theft Investigation and Prosecution for Walgreens, calls strengthening existing laws “enhancement.” Today, if you are arrested for shoplifting a bottle of Sudafed and it is your third offense and you live in a state with an enhanced retail theft statute, you could get ten years for racketeering. In the past decade, eighteen states have passed enhancements, and more are in the works. The enhancements increase sentences for repeat offenders, fences, and shoplifters carrying tools of the trade, such as booster bags and EAS removing tools. Some states now consider shoplifting a felony if the shoplifter leaves through an emergency exit, no matter how much the stolen item is worth. Other states regard it a felony if the shoplifter resells the merchandise to flea market vendors.

  Muscato defended the enhancements: “We need specific laws so we can charge cases that way.” What would happen to a nice young man who shoplifted Advil for his sick mother? Muscato said, “He is probably going to be charged under the stricter law.” In this way, penalties intended to prevent the booster fall on the shoplifter.

  Another one of Muscato’s causes is lobbying lawmakers to lower the felony level—the dollar amount at which a misdemeanor theft becomes a felony. Since retail trade organizations first began to agitate to enhance these laws in the 1970s, legislators have tightened them in some states and loosened them in others. Now the levels range from zero in Indiana, where shoplifting anything is a felony, to $2,500 in Wisconsin. Some states have built-in exceptions, like California, whose felony level is $400, except for citrus fruits: Shoplifting $100 worth of oranges in the Golden State makes you a felon. In Texas years ago, said Muscato, referring to the obsolete “rustling” statute, shoplifting a can of meat chili could result in jail.

  Today judges use felony levels to determine whether shoplifters are professionals or amateurs, boosters or shoplifters, criminal or insane. Retailers complain that raising these levels for inflation, which some Democrats have tried to do in recent years, artificially suppresses the amount of shoplifting being recorded and invites boosters to go on interstate shoplifting tears.

  In the past ten years, seventeen states have raised the felony level for retail theft, but many others have lowered it. In 2001, in the outletmall-rich state of Maine, after shoplifting had risen for several years, the Maine Merchants Association got the felony level decreased from $2,000 to $1,000.

  In 2009, Senator Arthenia L. Joyner, who represents the Eighteenth District in Tampa, Florida—comprising poor, largely African American areas—sponsored a bill that would raise the felony level from $300 to $600 and place young shoplifters in a diversion program. The felony level had not been raised since 1986, she said at a Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations Committee hearing, adding that doing so would save money and prison beds.

  My main objective was to divert offenders who qualify out of the criminal justice system and into a diversion program. I am concerned that young people are creating barriers to meaningful future employment by engaging in what generally constitutes reckless or thoughtless behaviors. The bill was supported by the Public Defender’s Association and the State Attorney’s Association. It was a collaborative effort in the end, of all but the retail industry. The bill successfully passed all committees in the Senate and was voted favorably out of the Senate. The bill did not move in the House due partly to the misleading statements made by the retailers that the bill would promote concerted or gang shoplifting.

  The Florida Retail Federation’s John Rogers said this sort of bill would encourage boosters from areas with lower felony levels to flock to the Sunshine State. Rogers speculated that Joyner supported the bill because she thought the current one unfairly targeted indigent shoplifters in her district.

  In the past five years, the retail industry has expanded its anti-boosting lobbying campaign to the federal level. In 2006, after several years of attempts, the National Retail Federation pushed Congress to pass a federal bill to fund a Department of Justice Organized Retail Theft (ORT) task force through the House and the Senate. HR 3402 rode through a conservative House and Congress on the coattails of the Violence against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Three Republicans sponsored the bill, which would direct $5 million annually for three years to the Department of Justice to fund a database tracking ORT and to train FBI personnel to pursue thieves and their merchandise: James Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin; Larry Craig, the then soon-to-be disgraced senator from Idaho; and Robert W.
Goodlatte, the libertarian Republican from Virginia who also opposed electronic file sharing. The bill passed; the money was not appropriated, because, according to one source, the FBI already had existing programs to cover organized retail theft. But HR 3402 was only the beginning of the retail industry’s crusade against ORT. Four similar bills were proposed in the 111th Congress alone.

  ON THE TRAIL OF BOOSTED GOODS

  Appearing in the twentieth century’s first decade, the word “booster” distinguished those who shoplifted for profit from those who stole because of disease or compulsion. The popular press typed boosters as women, Jews, Gypsies, or Irish Travelers—foreigners or immigrants. But the word also contained a positive meaning. As the Chicago Tribune put it in 1911, a booster was “a man or a woman of more than ordinary intelligence.” By the Depression, when Americans were obsessed with outlaws, “booster” embraced both skill and deceit. The criminologist Edwin H. Sutherland’s 1937 semifictional biography of the professional thief Chic Conwell uses “boost” as a synonym for shoplifting and also defines it as a technique, a sort of “manipulation of suckers by nonviolent methods.” At the same time, “booster” was also becoming a synonym for civic pride. Today, however, booster’s most powerful meaning as it refers to theft is about what it is not—boosting is not shoplifting. It is bigger and more criminal, and the people who do it are not sick, harmless, or intelligent. Or that is what the retail industry would like you to believe.

  Security people sent me photos of recovered boosted merchandise to illustrate the magnitude of the booster epidemic and the necessity to fight it. One photo showed boxes of Monistat, EPT pregnancy tests, Crest Whitestrips, Rogaine, and Oil of Olay cosmetics piled on top of one another. In a second photo, dusty, dented cans of infant formula were jammed in a similar fashion. To those who worked to stop shoplifting, the meaning of this second photo was especially clear: Perishable boosted infant formula was hazardous to the American people’s health.