The Steal (13 page)

The American legal system sentences noncitizens more harshly for the crime than those born here. Bill O. Hing, a lawyer and professor of Asian American studies and public policy at the University of California, Davis, tracks the government’s deportation of illegal immigrants who have committed petty crimes, including shoplifting. “It’s considered a felony even if the state does not consider it one,” he said. In a
Washington Post
op-ed piece published during Winona Ryder’s trial, Hing criticized the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which allows the government to detain or deport those without green cards for crimes of moral turpitude: “Every day the United States deports lawful immigrants and refugees who have been convicted of minor offenses such as shoplifting,” he writes.

Marlene Jaggernauth, a woman of Indian descent whose ancestors come from Trinidad, was deported because of an old shoplifting case. Jaggernauth’s family brought her to the United States in 1977, when she was twelve years old. At first they lived in New York. In 1990, she moved to Miami, where she worked at her parents’ auto parts business. She bought a house. Six years later, depressed and anxious over a divorce, suffering from postpartum depression after the birth of her twins, reeling from an abusive relationship and from losing her job, she began to shoplift. “I just got the urge to pick up stuff,” she said.

Jaggernauth was arrested. “I didn’t care. I kept doing it. The arrest didn’t mean anything.” She was arrested again and given a suspended sentence. She got counseling and stopped shoplifting. Seven years passed. She obtained her BA and began working at Florida Atlantic University. And then one night in 2003, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) barged into her house and detained her for the old shoplifting charges. She was held in four different county jails—one each year—and then sent back to Trinidad, where she stayed for a fifth year.

While she was in jail, her family fell apart. She sent her children to her parents’, but her daughter did not complete high school and her son dropped out and began to take drugs. In Trinidad, she knew no one. She was only able to survive thanks to her mother, who sent her money. “I would have prostituted myself if not for her,” she said.

In 2004, Jaggernauth created a foundation, the Displaced Nationals in Crisis Coalition, to help immigrants like herself. She continued to fight her deportation and eventually successfully appealed it. Three years later, she returned to the United States, determined to make her case known. She began giving press conferences exposing the atrocities in the jails she stayed in and telling of the untreated mentally ill women there. She never felt “violated” when she was arrested for shoplifting. But she did by her ordeal with the INS. Today, Jaggernauth works as an advocate for the mental health court in Florida, in the courtroom of the judge who sentenced her after she shoplifted. She has never mentioned her past. “One day I will get the nerve.”

The few studies gauging the connection between shoplifting and income reveal counterintuitive results. In the 1960s, one landmark paper showed that shoplifters who looked affluent were detained less frequently than those who looked scruffy. Joshua Bamfield argues that wealthy shoplifters are statistically underrepresented. “Every few months Harrods arrests a millionaire shoplifter,” he says. The study “Who Actually Steals” observed that one common shoplifter is the “primary household shopper” who “usually has gainful employment” and steals to stretch the budget. The most recent study measuring income and shoplifting ascertained that Americans with incomes of $70,000 shoplift 30 percent more than those earning up to $20,000 a year. Having some money arouses desire more than having little.

The most overrepresented groups of shoplifters are young African American and Latino men. Among the first to document the inequity was JoAnn Ray, a professor emeritus in social work at Eastern Washington University. In 1984, after Ray compared court records with a thousand questionnaires she randomly distributed at ten different shopping centers in Spokane, she found “considerable differences may exist between people who shoplift and those few who get caught.” Shoplifters who answered Ray’s questionnaire were overwhelmingly young and white, whereas those she pulled from court data were very old or very young Hispanic and black men.

Twenty-five years later, criminologists continue to argue that African Americans are overrepresented in store data because of profiling or “shopping while black.” A pool of lawsuits brought against stores for “SWB” over the past decade exposes the tenacity of this prejudice. In one case in New York in 2005, Macy’s paid the state attorney general’s office $600,000 in sanctions after an investigation concluded that whereas the percentage of nonwhite shoppers in Macy’s, as in most stores in most states, hovers between 10 and 12 percent, 75 percent of people detained for shoplifting were “nonwhite.”

No African American shoplifter I interviewed identified herself as a kleptomaniac or a theft addict—the disease’s hipper cousin. Perhaps considering shoplifting as a disease is a luxury the most frequently profiled feel they cannot afford.

On March 10, 2006, a few months after I began work on this book, I broke the story in
Slate
of the shoplifting of Claude Allen, then the highest-ranking African American men in George Bush’s White House. I first heard about Allen a month earlier at the National Retail Federation (NRF) in Washington, D.C. A cop I was interviewing there told me that besides all the professional thieves he busted, there was
one
well-known white-collar shoplifter he was investigating—Allen, then a senior domestic adviser in the White House. “Maybe he has two wives,” the cop joked, puzzled over why someone with money would shoplift. Particularly, he added, when the person shoplifted, as Allen did, something as insignificant as a mop.

Allen was the first government official convicted of shoplifting to be tried against the backdrop of the twenty-four-hour newsroom, and the first to confess in public. He first shoplifted the day after Scooter Libby was indicted and several weeks after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans. In the following weeks, the sharecropper’s grandson, Covenant Life Church member and advocate of homeschooling, allegedly committed refund fraud—a twenty-first-century variety of shoplifting—over fifty times from Target and Hecht’s.

Like price switching, wardrobing (the returning of once-worn dresses to the store) and grazing (“self-sampling,” as Whole Foods warns at its salad bar in some stores, or “eating your way around the store,” as one security guard put it) are new versions of shoplifting. Wardrobing is also technically legal, and stores look the other way if they decide that grazing is a prelude to buying, although some salad tasters have been detained. Refund fraud, which is illegal, also belongs in this twilight category. In the days after Allen was arrested, I found myself explaining how refund fraud works: You buy a TV set and wheel it to the car in your shopping cart. You go back to the store and put a second one, identical to the first, in a shopping bag in the cart. Using receipts from the first item, you refund the second for credit. Some chains allow you to do the refund at a different store from where you purchased the first item. Others, like Nordstrom, actually give you cash.

According to incident reports, Allen’s spree began in Gaithersburg, Maryland, on October 29, 2005, with his most expensive item: a Bose stereo worth $525. Next, on Christmas Eve, was a $237 Kodak printer from the Germantown Target. According to loss prevention reports, on December 30, Allen returned a suit jacket, two pairs of slacks, and two lamp shades valued at $25 at the Rockville Target. On New Year’s Day, he went back to the same store for an $88 RCA stereo. On January 2—the day that he was caught—the items he allegedly shoplifted included a scrub mop priced at $11.99, two bras priced at $9.89, and massage gloves valued at $4.99. When Pete Schomburg, then a floor detective at the Gaithersburg Target, detained him, Allen immediately confessed.

In February, Allen resigned from the White House, according to a Bush spokesperson, “to spend more time with his family.” A month later, John Lalos, then the Maryland assistant state’s attorney, charged Allen with a felony theft scheme—a more serious offense, signaling that the state was going to treat Allen like any other shoplifter.

In covering Allen’s shoplifting, the
Washington Post
wavered between casting the crime as a character defect and blaming it on the Bush administration’s hiring and promoting an incompetent, African American ideologue. When Bush had nominated Allen for a judgeship in 2004, the American Bar Association declared him partially unqualified, citing his lack of trial experience. The National Organization for Women and the NAACP lobbied against Allen for his support of abstinence as sex education and his pro-life position.

What irritated liberal commentators more than Allen’s politics was the puniness of his hauls.
Post
columnist Eugene Robinson asked, “Why would a man who met several times a week with the President of the United States, and who earned $161,000 a year, risk everything to steal an $88 radio?”

The media were so at a loss to explain Allen’s shoplifting that dark family secrets were hinted at. A
New York Times
story, “For Bush’s Ex-Aide, Quick Fall after Long Climb,” mentioned Allen’s identical twin, Floyd, a security guard, who, according to his stepmother, “kept running into trouble.” And a
Washington Post
reporter told NPR, “Close friends say that Mr. Allen has indicated to them that maybe his brother holds the key to this entire puzzling affair.” Nothing was ever printed to explain the insinuation that Floyd—not Claude—had ripped off Target. And yet a mix-up of two African American brothers—one a powerful conservative official who shoplifted, the other a lowly security guard who caught shoplifters—was too haunting to pass over. As was a rumor the
Washington Post
printed that Allen could not afford his legal counsel, intimating that he had shoplifted because he was broke.

But what was striking about Allen was not just these fake explanations, shot through with preconceived ideas about shoplifters. Nor was it that after a brief flirtation with the sort of denial the White House had become notorious for, Allen actually confessed in court and the judge dropped the charge of felony theft scheme to one count of misdemeanor theft. What was striking was the explanation Allen himself eventually used in his testimony at the District of Columbia Court of Appeals Board on Professional Responsibility hearing: shoplifting as exorcism. In effect, Allen was infected with shame. His shameful shoplifting arose out of the greater shame about the administration’s inept handling of Hurricane Katrina and George W. Bush’s apparent indifference toward the suffering of New Orleanians seen on every TV screen. Allen testified that his shoplifting surfaced because of his inability to do anything about this larger shame. He told the committee that after he visited post-Katrina New Orleans, “I would go to Target just to kind of escape, walk through” to escape his memories of “seeing vividly a gentleman sitting out in front of the Superdome in a chair for days with an [
sic
] sign on him saying, ‘I’ve passed away. Please bury me.’ That didn’t happen and I felt very much responsible.” Allen’s psychiatrist, Thomas Goldman, added, in case there was any confusion: “He was outraged that there was so much needing to be done that was not being done that it put a strain . . . on his loyalty.”

Four years after Allen was arrested, the discipline board recommended that he be suspended for a year from practicing law in D.C. He had already served ninety-day suspensions in Pennsylvania and Virginia. “We especially are concerned by the repeated and calculated nature of [Allen’s] misconduct,” the board wrote.

Shoplifting, says Ronald V. Clarke, a lanky, matter-of-fact criminologist at Rutgers University, is one of the “most common but least reported and detected crimes” in the world. Clarke is one of the leading experts on the so-called situational approach to crime, which, in the case of shoplifting, focuses on the objects people steal as opposed to who does it or why. In the late 1990s, he invented a catchy phrase to predict what shoplifters would steal: “hot products.” He gave the products a catchier acronym: CRAVED, which stands for “concealable, removable, available, valuable, enjoyable, and disposable.” He published the particulars in a less catchily titled monograph:
Hot Products: Understanding, Anticipating, and Reducing Demand for Stolen Goods
.

In 2006, in a spare campus conference room at Rutgers’s New Brunswick campus, Clarke explained to me that “shoplifting is a neglected area because governments don’t want to fund research that benefits private sector, and private sector isn’t interested in research.” He went on to proclaim his continuing faith in CRAVED and the situational theory as they applied to shoplifting. “The crime is highly concentrated: in certain areas of the city, and of certain goods. In a drugstore, for instance, highly specific goods will be stolen. Many goods will never be. They are too big or bulky or too cheap or difficult to steal.”

Clarke added that the levels of shoplifting today “have been created by modern retailing. Historically, you had very few opportunities to shoplift. Because today there are far more stores in relation to people and population and goods are laid out on shelves—you can get them.”

In the last ten years,
Hot Products
has inspired retail trade groups to come up with their own “most shoplifted item” lists; these lists look similar year after year. Each one comes with its own biases and limitations; each one’s creators claim that gathering information is as difficult as finding black truffles. In America, for the past several years, the most consistent list counted the top fifty items shoplifted in supermarkets, whereas in England, the most publicized one spans all food groups, products, and stores.

To protect stores from competitors, most lists, whose architects keep secret how they determine a product’s shopliftability, rarely identify brands. An exception is a newcomer list identifying Jack Daniel’s as the most-stolen liquor and Max Factor as the most-stolen mascara in three retailers in the United Kingdom. More common is the 2003 Centre for Retail Research “top ten” list. An annotated version of this list, published in British newspapers, crowned Gillette Mach 3 safety razors and replacement cartridges the most-shoplifted items in the world and tossed the remaining “hot products” into lumpy, unbranded categories: