The Steal (14 page)

Much has been written asserting that Gillette Mach 3, the world’s most popular brand, is most shoplifted. Criminologists have produced white papers with flowcharts tracking its progress from the Russian mob to your store. But Robin Hoodish theory charged that the Mach 3 is the most shoplifted because it costs a few cents to make and is marked up so steeply. “It
is
difficult to buy Gillette,” says Joshua Bamfield, the director of the Centre for Retail Research, launching into a story about grappling with drugstore shelving that sounded more like a trek through the Amazon than a jaunt to the pharmacy.

Though criminologists argue about which brand of razor is the hottest, they agree that the categories of hot products have remained constant in the last decade. The most comprehensive lists today break down hot products by type of store, or “sector.” According to the 2009
Global Retail Theft Barometer,
the most-shoplifted items in the supermarket sector are razor blades and cosmetics, and the most-shoplifted items in the clothing category are “accessories” and “anything branded.” The
GRTB
also includes cosmetics, Wii systems, liquor, steak, SatNav systems (including GPS), haute couture, infant formula, and watches. In short, all the products that are sold are shoplifted.

Some older surveys, like the
1999 Retail Theft Trends Report
, elaborated on the preferred times of shoplifting in different sectors. In the auto parts sector, most shoplifting occurs between noon and 3:00 p.m. on Saturdays, whereas in bookstores, it occurs between 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. on Mondays. Do hubcap thieves shoplift on the Sabbath so they can take a spin on Sunday? Do book thieves steal on Monday afternoons because universities give exams on Tuesdays?

Asked such questions, Bill Greer, until recently the director of communications for the Food Marketing Institute (FMI), which published its last most-shoplifted list for American supermarkets in 2009, said, “We don’t drill that deep.”

Steak first made the top of the FMI’s most-shoplifted-items-in-thesupermarket list in 2005. It held the title for four years. To retail security professionals, steak’s staying power vindicated their practice of locking up over-the-counter health and beauty products and pharmaceuticals, which had formerly been at the top. Their methods had forced professional shoplifters to switch from Benadryl to beef, they said. To some scholars, carnivorous amateurs were the ones shoplifting steak. “I think it’s unlikely that a professional is going to steal something as perishable as steak,” said Timothy Jones, a University of Arizona anthropologist, adding that a shoplifted chop would turn into a bloody mess after a few unrefrigerated hours.

Shoplifting meat and fish makes retailers angrier than stealing a loaf of bread: Its causes stem from middle-class feelings of entitlement as opposed to starvation. I first heard this point of view in 2006, when I attended a “Theft Offenders” diversion class sponsored by the Educational Association Service, a not-for-profit company based in New York. In a dour room in a Queens junior high school sat about thirty alleged shoplifters: recent Korean immigrants with their spouses, a trio of college-age men whose parents came from Mumbai, tourists visiting New York for the first time, a professional woman who believed her arrest was part of a conspiracy, and a nurse turned semiprofessional thief. Queens, the nation’s most diverse borough, is also home to the nation’s most diverse assembly of (alleged) shoplifters.

Group leader James McCall read a word problem from a workbook. An elderly person had shoplifted canned salmon and pork chops. Was the supermarket “mean” to prosecute “to the fullest extent of the law”?

The correct answer was no. McCall argued: If one senior citizen succeeded in her surf and turf heist, she would tell her friends at the assisted-living facility and they would file into A&P “with their walkers.” Eventually these oldsters would bankrupt the store. Soon octogenarians all over America would be divesting supermarkets of salmon and pork chops. McCall believed that if senior citizens were shoplifting something they wanted as opposed to something they needed, the store should prosecute. But in our world of a million brands, since the supermarket offers more items “not needed for personal use” than at any other time in human history, it seems cruel to tolerate shoplifting only if the person steals carbohydrates or to observe, as several grocers did, that if shoplifters were hungry they should limit themselves to swiping loaves of bread.

“Where was the beef on the day of August 26, 2009?” a prosecutor joked at the beginning of a jury trial in Orangeburg, South Carolina, over whether Mark Zachary shoplifted an $80 side of steak. Zachary pleaded not guilty. There was no video footage of him shoplifting. There was a hung jury, and the judge had to instruct the jurors to come up with a verdict. Part of the difficulty may have been the severity of the punishment: Under South Carolina law, three shoplifting convictions are punishable by up to ten years in prison. Zachary had nine shoplifting arrests, and once the jury ruled that he was guilty, the judge sentenced him to the maximum amount.

Keith McHenry, the cofounder of the food pantry Food Not Bombs, told me that food shoplifters would otherwise starve. Plenty of people were imprisoned for what he called “lunch related crimes,” he said. “I spent time in jail one time where I was caught feeding homeless people with stuff a store threw away and the others had been busted for dining and dashing or shoplifting lunch from groceries.”

For centuries, shoplifting has meant stealing objects from stores. But if you believe music executives from the end of the last century, we are in the middle of a paradigm shift: Shoplifting may be an endangered species. Like everything else, it has migrated online. In 1999, honest citizens who would never dream of shoplifting a CD were downloading music illegally, which the adversaries of this practice called “electronic shoplifting.” Even after peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing sites replaced Napster, the phrase stuck. In a 2002 congressional hearing on a bill that advocates hoped would quash these sites, Senator Robert Goodlatte (R-VA) referred to Kazaa “the Home Shoplifting Network.” Those who called P2P file sharing shoplifting favored more draconian penalties for the electronic version than had ever been used for the brick-andmortar one. The fines file sharers (some of whom were college students or housewives) were asked to pay were many times greater than those imposed on shoplifters.

At the same time, just as Abbie Hoffman and the yippies had renamed shoplifting “liberating,” Internet gurus, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and tech-friendly journalists maintained that P2P file sharing was not shoplifting—it was “trading.” File-sharing programs on the Internet, a new frontier, should be exempt from established property laws: The people using such programs, this argument went, would never
shoplift
. They were not criminals. File sharing could not be shoplifting, because music was not a stealable object like a pack of gum. In fact, this argument continued, P2P was saving the music industry by helping to distribute less commercial songs more widely. One Dutch file-sharing company called itself the Honest Thief, dredging up the phrase that nineteenth-century French doctors used for an altogether different purpose. But the most intriguing question about the relationship between electronic shoplifting and CD shoplifting—whether anyone whom the government found guilty of P2P file sharing shoplifted CDs from Tower Records before it went bankrupt—remained unexamined.

The arrival of e-books and magazines inspired a different kind of news story about the Internet promoting electronic shoplifting. Many technology writers have noted how easy it is to download books illegally. Yet the more significant question for stores is whether—as Kindle, e-books, and the iPad replace hardcovers, paperbacks, and print magazines—oldschool book shoplifting will disappear or multiply.

Some writers are as vulnerable to the romance of book shoplifting as they are to that of the vanishing independent bookstore. Literary essays keeping count of the most-shoplifted books continue to be published as though they conferred legitimacy—or even creativity—upon the crime. Apparently, to these observers, shoplifting conjures nothing more sinister than a list of readers who have fallen so completely under books’ spells that they steal them. The list, after all, includes literary characters, like Augie March. No lowbrow crook, Augie—shoplifter and reader of Plato—when granted a chance to borrow a magisterial work of European history using a library card, observes, “But somehow that wasn’t the same.” The hero of the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s
The Savage Detectives
shoplifts poetry and rare books about astronomy.

Many readers and writers make a case for book shoplifting as less reprehensible stealing. “It’s not a case of lusting after a particular rare book,” Alan Edelstein, a filmmaker, said. “If you love books and you can’t keep up with it, it’s a little bit different, from, say, shoplifting food. I stole a paperback of William Gaddis’s
The Recognitions
, which I haven’t read,” he added. The writer Luc Sante recalled, about the old Brentano’s on Forty-eighth Street in New York, that “it was very easy to shoplift from when I was a teenager.” In his salad days, Sante stole
Death of a Salesman
and
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
by Martin Luther King Jr., among other titles. On his first day at Columbia University, browsing at the Papyrus bookstore on 113th Street and Broadway, he tucked a copy of Kafka’s
Amerika
into the waistband of his pants. He left the bookstore and crossed Broadway. When he reached the median, he saw that a young man from Papyrus had followed him. The two men stood there, not looking at each other, waiting for the light to change. Then the man turned to Sante and punched him in the stomach, where Kafka was hidden. The light changed and Sante crossed the street. He did not look back.

Thanks to Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet is the most famous writer–book shoplifter in history—the Saint Genet of the famous biography’s title. Genet himself describes theft’s rush with more depth and humanity than any other writer. “I went to theft as to a liberation, as to the light,” is a chapter title in Sartre’s opus, a fictionalized account of Genet’s love affairs and time in prison. And in
The Thief’s Journal
, Genet detailed his pleasure in stealing. “I know the extraordinary calmness one feels at the moment of performing the theft, and the fear that accompanies it.” Genet’s most memorable phrase about theft categorized it as “a succession of cramped though blazing gestures.”

Genet did not start his shoplifting career with books, nor did he limit himself to stealing them. He shoplifted as a child, an adolescent, and an adult. He was arrested for shoplifting a dozen handkerchiefs from the Samaritaine department store in Paris in 1937, at age thirty-six. Genet also stole liquor, bolts of linen, and suits. To accomplish the last, he would enter a tailor’s store, try on the suit, and run out the door.

During the German occupation, Genet began shoplifting books from vendors along the Seine. Although he resold them, at a hearing in 1940, he defended shoplifting to the jury as part of his sentimental education: He could list the ten books honored by the Académie Goncourt—“few critics could do as much,” he bragged

Book shoplifting is the only type of shoplifting about which entire books have been written, and which even has a book named for it,
Steal This Book
. Book shoplifting is also the only theft to merit its own disease, bibliomania, the disease of wanting to possess books. The literary journalist Nicholas Basbanes, whose six-hundred-plus-page book,
A Gentle Madness
, tells the history of bibliomania, focuses on the theft of rare books—he does not use the word “shoplift”—as the extreme of that disease. Basbanes frames his investigation with the story of Stephen Carrie Blumberg, a rare-book thief who stole 23,000 volumes from archives and libraries across the country, not to sell but to hoard them. Blumberg’s defense was the only time that any lawyer used the insanity defense in a theft case, Basbanes said. In 1991, Blumberg was convicted and spent seventy-one months in jail. Basbanes argues that Blumberg’s dedication to hoarding Victoriana, though sinister and weird, is more excusable than shoplifting books to resell them. Still, Basbanes wrote: While bibliomania is “the only hobby, so far as I know, that is recognized in the
DSM
of the American Psychiatric Association as a bona fide disease, I don’t excuse book theft on the basis of being a disease. Had I been on the Blumberg jury—and I witnessed the entire trial—I would have voted to convict.”

I read a passage to Basbanes from the famous 1944 essay
Notes on Bibliokleptomania
by the bibliophile, collector, and classicist (and during World War II, FBI special agent) Lawrence Sidney Thompson. “The moral questions posed by book theft are considerably more difficult than those involved in deciding the guilt or innocence of a bank robber or a kidnapper.” Thompson quotes the collector Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux: “Book theft is not true theft if the books are not resold.”

Basbanes responded, “It is true, but I wish it weren’t. We don’t equate book theft’s gravity with other types of crimes. But book theft defaces and destroys books. It’s a crime. You’re attacking a cultural artifact.”

In the age of the memoir, some writers confess to shoplifting to advance themselves, and others profess to be aghast at the crime. Ron Rosenbaum, the author of provocative books on Hitler and Shakespeare, once wrote a column for the
New York Observer
lampooning the white, middle-class shoplifter he labeled “Bukowski Man,” whom he described as a “drunk, suburban” poseur “likely to shoplift the Beats, Kerouac’s
On the Road
, Ginsberg’s
Howl
, Abbie Hoffman’s
Steal This Book
, anything by Paul Auster and William S. Burroughs, some French writers, Kafka, Bukowski, and books about sex and marriage.” Rosenbaum pointed out that “Bukowski Man” was laboring under the delusion that by stealing he was embracing writers who wallowed in “the lower depths.” He said, “Petty and debased ideas of liberation” drive Bukowski Man to shoplift.