The Steal Page 5

  Another medical advance occurred in 1838, when Pinel’s protégés, Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol and C.C.H. Marc, the physician of King Louis-Philippe of France, began work on the disease. Marc renamed it kleptomania and formulated ideas about how conscious those who did it were of their action. He was also the first to use the phrase “the instinctive, irresistible propensity to steal.” Esquirol distinguished between those afflicted with this propensity and the criminals who impersonated them. He also discriminated between mental deficiency and insanity, and speculated that a reasonable person could commit an unreasonable act—like kleptomania. His book, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity, linked insanity of all forms, including kleptomania, to melancholy (later known as depression) and showed how it could manifest itself in one particular type of unreasonable act, like shoplifting. He and Marc describe one shoplifter confessing she would have stolen even if the store had been a church. Esquirol also was among the first scientists to notice that kleptomania, which he believed to be the consequence of “moral insanity”—a respectable woman (or man) risking her social status by stealing—is accompanied by dread.

  The political writer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s 1840 book, What Is Property?, indirectly proposed a philosophical corollary to artistic and medical summations of why middle-class people were stealing. Despite his famous epigram “Property is theft,” Proudhon does not advocate the crime. Eight years before The Communist Manifesto was published, though, Proudhon does list the outrages “the inalienable right of property” perpetuates—“the reign of libidinous pleasure,” a “hypocritical bourgeois morality,” and rents for the ruling class—and argues that the unequal distribution of property is society’s leading problem. What Is Property? not only shocked and angered many Frenchmen but also angered the July Monarchy, which banned the book.

  The construction of Parisian department stores with glittering displays did much to turn kleptomania into a female disease. These stores seemed to persuade middle-class and wealthy women to shoplift and reinforced the idea that the crime was shopping’s dark side. To lure female customers, stores installed mirrors and adorned enormous display windows with Chinese and Japanese objects and fashions or reproductions of stage sets from popular ballets, operas, or variety shows. Women who a decade earlier would never have left home spent hours in these temples of commerce. But if the dazzle of the modern department store helped to gender kleptomania, so did fashion. As the crinoline became chic, the “kick,” “a short overskirt covering an ordinary dress skirt and stitched so that the lining and the skirt made a bag around the body from the waist to the heels,” replaced the pocket as a receptacle. Kleptomaniacs tucked handkerchiefs, gloves, lace, candies, scarves, needles, combs, and other trinkets and accessories inside.

  The French psychiatrist Ernest-Charles Lasègue, who identified other modern conditions like anorexia and folie à deux, was the first to scientifically link kleptomania—now understood to be a women’s disease—to the rise of the department store. Lasègue’s colleague M. Letulle introduced several phrases charting the cultural anxiety about middle-class and wealthy kleptomaniacs—one was “honest thief.” Another was “the madwoman in the store” whom modernity, by multiplying temptation, was “forcing” to shoplift.

  In the crowded, late-nineteenth-century world of French novels with female kleptomaniacs as heroines, one stands out: Madame de Boves in Émile Zola’s 1883 novel The Ladies’ Paradise. Consumerism crushes beautiful, impoverished, forty-year-old Madame de Boves, whereas her counterpoint, Denise, resisting both material and carnal temptation, marries the store owner. Set in the eponymous Parisian department store, The Ladies’ Paradise depicts de Boves’s shoplifting as though her life depended on it. Gone is the Rousseauian/Proudhonian protest of shopping’s new ideology and the redistribution of the wealth. De Boves shoplifts to compensate for her husband’s affair as her daughter watches, horrified. When the detective searches de Boves in the back room of the store, he finds

  flounces of Alençon lace, twelve meters at a thousand francs, which were hidden in the depths of her sleeve . . . in her bodice, flat and warm, a handkerchief, a fan, a tie, in all about fourteen thousand francs worth of lace . . . Madame de Boves had been stealing for a year ravaged by furious, imperious needs. The fits got worse, increasing until they became a sensual pleasure necessary to her existence, causing her to cast aside all prudent considerations, satisfying her with a pleasure that was all the more eager because she risked, under the eyes of a crowd, her name, her pride, and her husband’s high position. . . . She stole for the pleasure of stealing, as one loves for the pleasure of loving, goaded on by desire.

  The detective forces de Boves to sign a confession. “Women were capable of anything when they get carried away by their passion for clothes,” he muses. Yet, like Moll Flanders, de Boves is not unsympathetic. Nor are the real-life female kleptomaniacs whom French newspapers and case studies often described more as children or overexcitable women than hardened criminals. When a kleptomaniac told one forensic investigator that she preferred shoplifting to “the father of her children,” the crime was trivialized into the petulant protest of a little girl and glamorized as the longing of an amorous woman, at least in France.

  In Victorian England, the more women kleptomania afflicted, the more physicians regarded the disease with disbelief. But this kleptomania seemed to reveal anxiety about the genetic feebleness of monarchs as much as women. Here is an excerpt from the winner of a contest, titled “Prize Essay on Kleptomania, with a View to Determine Whether Kleptomaniacs Should Be Held Disqualified for Employments of Trust and Authority under the Crown,” written by one Henry Allen.

  The personal appearance of kleptomaniacs is easily recognized by many distinct marks. . . . They are commonly tall and stoutly built, but clumsy and badly knit. Their carriage is very noticeable. They walk with a nimble step, carrying the leg rigid from the hip downward and especially stiff at the knee . . . the eyes never look straight. They shift easily from side to side, the glance is habitually aslant. They are of neutral colour, which frequently changes its predominant tint; green when dejected, red when furious.

  Somehow, though the monstrous kleptomaniac minister of state was as noticeable as the hunchback of Notre Dame, he was never unmasked. The “prize essay” turned out to be a political treatise rather than a medical one, concluding, “Only in a country of hereditary legislators could it be needful to inquire whether a kleptomaniac is fit for public offices of trust and authority yet as statistics attest, our hereditary legislators are particularly subject to mental derangement.”

  In 1880, even the eminent British doctor and advocate for mental health, John Charles Bucknill, criticized the ease with which judges—and the public at large—allowed kleptomaniacs to dupe them: “In the slang of the day, a burglar has become a kleptomaniac and a prison a kleptomaniac hospital.” As Bucknill knew, the number of middle-class British women pleading the “irresistible impulse” defense for shoplifting had spiked so sharply that laws punishing the crime had to be tightened.

  In its condemnation of kleptomania as a euphemism for the shoplifting of the well-to-do, America followed England. More attention was paid to the crime and how to stop it than to the disease and how to cure it. Founded in 1850 as a private security company, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency established a division to catch shoplifters after the Civil War and most of the major department stores took advantage of it. Pinkerton detectives pursued shoplifters, while socialists, transcendentalists, and humorists lampooned kleptomaniacs as proof of democracy’s failure. In his 1888 essay “A New Crime,” Mark Twain writes, “In these days, too, if a person of good family and high social standing steals anything, they call it KLEPTOMANIA, and send him to the lunatic asylum.” Twain was not the only Gilded Age American to lampoon the disease. A lifelong advocate for free speech, suffragism, and a classless society, the anarchist Emma Goldman derided kleptomania. In a speech she gave in 1896 in Pittsburgh, she denounced
it as yet another strategy the wealthy enacted to steal from the poor:

  Moses, when he came down from Mt. Sinai, brought us ten laws one of which was “Thou Shalt not Steal.” This law has come to be applied only to a certain class. For example, a poor starving wretch, dying from hunger and cold, steals bread or clothing or money. Brought before a judge it is demanded of him if he did not know of the Divine prohibition of theft. Then he is given a so-called trial and imprisoned. If the man of wealth steals whole estates, whole factories, entire railroads or immense fortunes on change he is called a “shrewd man” and honored with rank and title [applause]. If a rich woman is caught shoplifting the wealthy court has a new word for her and says she is afflicted with “kleptomania” and pities her [applause and laughter].

  Ida B. Wells, civil rights activist and journalist, was critical of how differently the law punished African Americans and whites for petty theft. The majority of African Americans being lynched were not rapists, but those accused of small offenses such as shoplifting, she complained. And: “Negroes are sent to the workhouse, jail, or penitentiary for stealing five cents of bread whereas white men are rewarded for stealing thousands.” Wells also told how, in Philadelphia, a white kleptomaniac accused a young black man of raping her to cover up her shoplifting.

  As the historian Elaine S. Abelson points out in her book When Ladies Go A-Thieving, the advent of moving pictures provided a new popular forum for skewering the disease as a rich woman’s euphemism for shoplifting even as it titillated audiences with scenes of shoplifters getting caught. She describes how, in the 1905 Edison film, The Kleptomaniac, the eponymous title character emerges from her brownstone one snowy day and takes her horse-drawn carriage to Macy’s, Herald Square. There, pretending to browse, she stashes gloves and scarves in her muff. A second sequence of shots follows, and a second character: An impoverished, single mother departs from her barren flat and her beloved children to grab a loaf of day-old bread the baker has left on the doorstep. Both women are arrested and appear in court. The police let the rich kleptomaniac go and imprison the indigent mother.

  Headline-making American kleptomaniacs included a countess, a nurse, and Lizzie Borden, who shoplifted two porcelain paintings four years after allegedly slaughtering her father and stepmother with an axe. Mrs. Ella Castle, a wealthy San Franciscan, filched a fur muff while on vacation in London. Yet these celebrity shoplifters were the exception in that their names were revealed in newspapers. Jane Doe, Maria Miller, Mary Brown, and Mary Smith were aliases who wore thick veils to their court dates to protect their families from the shame of shoplifting. Husbands, though often shocked to receive requests to bail their wives out, complied. If the kleptomaniacs were wealthy, the stores rarely pressed charges. Today’s kleptomaniac is tomorrow’s big spender.

  As European social scientists moved from classifying kleptomania as a biological imperative to classifying it as a new type of social and emotional expression for women, they linked the disease more explicitly to new theories about female sexuality. The pioneering sociologist Emile Durkheim attributed the disease to the temptations bewitching women to deviant acts; for him kleptomaniacs’ inability to resist beautiful objects in department stores was about modern life’s expansion of what women felt they needed. Although in his 1886 encyclopedia, Psychopathia Sexualis , Richard von Krafft-Ebing eschews the word “kleptomania,” the sexologist counts some stealing as a fetish, which he defines as a charged interest in an otherwise ordinary body part or activity. He writes that the unfortunate creatures who steal “are the subjects of a deep mental taint,” especially those individuals prone to shoplifting handkerchiefs, shoes, and aprons.

  The birth of criminal anthropology codified scientists’ ideas that kleptomaniacs, mostly women, were born to steal. In The Female Offender (1893) Cesare Lombroso wrote: “Shoplifting, which has become so fashionable since the establishment of huge department stores, is a form of occasional crime in which women specialize. The temptation stems from the immense number of articles on display. . . . We saw that fine things are not articles of luxury for women but articles of necessity since they equip them for conquest.” This, according to Lombroso, resulted in “women’s organic inability to resist stealing.”

  The idea that kleptomania arises out of female sexual repression was made popular around 1906 by Freud’s disciples, who attached the Oedipal myth to the disease, attributing it to infantile revenge fantasies and the castration complex, and sometimes equated shoplifting with sex. Best known as a charismatic anarchist, free-love advocate, and cocaine addict who influenced expressionism and Franz Kafka, Otto Gross was the first psychoanalyst to champian kleptomania as sexual release. Published in 1907, Gross’s major work, The Freudian Moment of Ideogenity and Its Meaning in Kraepelin’s Manic Depressive Psychosis, explores “Case #33,” a female kleptomaniac he treated at Emil Kraepelin’s visionary clinic in Munich.

  Gross portrayed Case #33 more like a lover than a patient, writing that she shoplifted from a desire to “take hold of something forbidden, secretly.” In his second book, published two years later, he added: “This broad motive plays a tremendous role in the soul of women, especially of the women belonging to the better classes—not, of course, with regard to property, but in the realm of the erotic.” The next Freudian to tackle the disease, Karl Abraham, proposed that kleptomaniacs shoplifted to take revenge on their parents: “So-called kleptomania is often traceable to the fact that a child feels injured or neglected in respect of proofs of love—which we have equated with gifts—or in some way is disturbed in the gratification of its libido. It procures a substitute pleasure for the lost pleasure, and at the same time takes revenge on those who have caused it the supposed injustice.”

  The most notorious exporter of Freud’s theories about kleptomania to America was Wilhelm Stekel, whom the master himself described as “wayward.” As early as 1906, Stekel was reading French case studies on department store kleptomania for a paper he was working on about the subject. In one study, a former seamstress becomes sexually aroused stealing silk blouses and is unable to remember what she does with the silk at home. Another silkaholic who was also an ether addict described the “amazing and voluptuous spasm” shoplifting the fabric gave her and ended this confession with a “shiver.”

  In 1910, Stekel’s essay “Sexual Root of Kleptomania” married Gross’s theories to those of Abraham and the French studies, proposing that kleptomania, whether it substitutes for a primal sexual urge or expresses an infantile desire for revenge, is all about the repressed id. “The root” of kleptomania is “ungratified sexual instinct,” he wrote in one of his most provocative sentences. In 1911, when Mae West had yet to swagger across our stages, Stekel’s essay, translated into English, annotated, and published in the Journal of American Criminal Law and Criminology, shocked American sensibilities. Harry W. Crane, an esteemed professor at the University of Michigan, bristled in his response: “Doubtless there may be something of sexual symbolism in some of the abnormal acts of some of the psychoses, but to go to the extremes to which the writer in question goes seems absurd.”

  Once America entered World War I, psychoanalysts on both sides of the Atlantic retreated from the sexual roots of kleptomania and moved toward theories explaining all stealing—including shoplifting—as the behavior of traumatized groups. The massive social and cultural upheaval made Victorian-era ideas about sex appear trivial. When the war ended, Stekel combined psychoanalytic theories with those of mass trauma; he theorized that the carve-up of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires into nation-states and allied protectorates at the Paris Peace Conference made it difficult to distinguish stealing from winning. In Peculiarities of Behavior, he writes: “It is not enough to discover the symbolic meaning of the stolen article. The act in itself has its significant stolen value; it stands for some other act which is a part of the subject’s past and it amounts to a game; it is a compulsive repetition.”

  As psychiatry replaced psychoanalysis, t
he shift dealt the sexual roots of kleptomania another blow. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association, in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), did not mention sexual repression—or even define kleptomania at all. By the 1970s, the rise of pharmacology and the sexual revolution made attributing kleptomania to repression obsolete. Shedding its sexual reputation, shoplifting was reborn as a political action.

  3. ABBIE HOFFMAN MEETS THE CHINESE HANDCUFFS

  Shoplifting came of age in America in 1965, when the FBI reported that it had jumped 93 percent in the previous five years and was “the nation’s fastest-growing form of larceny.” The crime was part of President Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement (the Katzenbach Commission or the Crime Commission); his “Special Message to Congress on Crime and Law Enforcement in the U.S.” marked the first time a president ever mentioned shoplifting. The shoplifting spike also inspired three men in different parts of the country to launch the modern antishoplifting technology industry, which in the past half century has claimed multibillion-dollar profits, evoking both rags-to-riches tales and a morality play about the costs of trying to suppress the crime.

  Arthur John Minasy was born in 1925 to a Hungarian mother and a Greek father who had settled in America only three years earlier. The family opened a teahouse, Leon’s, on Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan. As Minasy told the Washington Post in 1991, growing up on Queens Boulevard, he was not thinking about stopping shoplifting as a career. In fact, he and his friends used to “get marbles and erasers and pencils and tennis balls and kind of drop them in our knickers.”