The Steal (16 page)

When it was built in 1974, Woodbury Common did not look like a mall. Developers had modeled the outdoor emporium after a colonial village with gables peeking from gently sloping slate roofs. All the stores are on the first floor. A steeple rises from a clock tower—if you don’t look too closely at the big windows, you might be strolling through eighteenth-century America. The riches of Fendi, Gucci, Versace, Bose, Tory Burch, Tod’s, Burberry, Calvin Klein, Jimmy Choo, Kate Spade, Ralph Lauren, Godiva, Frette, Barneys New York, DKNY, and other luxury brands promise silk on every limb, leather on every extremity.

Over the past thirty years, Woodbury has expanded again and again. Today it spans 840,000 square feet and houses 222 stores. Two thousand people work there, or one-fifth of the population of the town. These days, Woodbury draws upward of 10 million people a year, more than Niagara Falls, although still less than Disneyland. Buses slide in six times a day from the Port Authority terminal in New York City.

“It’s like an open-air market in the Middle East,” said Cliff Weeks, a balding, skinny Central Valley Police Department lieutenant then doing double duty at the mall.

Weeks added: There is a “downside” to the mall’s swollen “waistline.” Since 9/11, the authorities have declared Woodbury a potential target for terrorists. The FBI and Homeland Security monitor “suspicious” license plates in the parking lot.

But the biggest problem that Woodbury has introduced to the town is a king-size amount of shoplifting. When I asked Michele Rothstein, the senior vice president of marketing for the Chelsea Group, which owns the Simon Property Group, which owns Woodbury Common, about shoplifters there, she said, “A center of that size plopped into the boondocks. There’s going to be a juxtaposition of two worlds.”

Robert Kwiatkowski, Weeks’s boss, the chief of the Central Valley Police Department, was less blasé: “West, north, east, south, they all come to steal. They’re like Fuller Brush salesmen up and down the highway,” he said. In 2005, the “Fuller Brush” shoplifters required Kwiatkowski to triple the police force from seven to twenty-two men. The thirty-two-year veteran of the force, who grew up in Woodbury and resembles Marlon Brando in his
Godfather
days, cautioned that just as there is no typical Woodbury shopper, there is no typical Woodbury shoplifter: Miscreants range from a member ofthe Montreal Expos to a pregnant woman who shoplifted $4,000 worth of clothes; from an Asian diplomat’s wife to the Newburgh-born pro Willie Mae Adams. Adams was “always a lady,” and with twenty-eight aliases, she taught the department “everything we know about shoplifting,” Kwiatkowski added, grinning at her memory. “She passed a little while ago.”

The chief continued, “There’s what we call ‘back to school shoplifting’ in the third week in August.” Once, he said with a smile, after a high school senior at Monroe-Woodbury won “best dressed” in her class thanks to her $2,600 collection of pilfered clothes, she was arrested. The town court ruled that she return the clothes along with her ill-gotten title. Fortunately, the yearbook had not yet been published.

 

 

In the squad room at the Central Valley police station, Cliff Weeks showed me a folder containing what he described as a shoplifting manual written by boosters or professional shoplifters. “If you are arrested, don’t give your name and address,” the manual advised. And, “Always carry $500 so that you will be able to make bail.”

I asked Weeks how he knew a high schooler who had watched a few hours of
Law & Order
could not come up with the same talking points, which were available for anyone to see on the Internet. He shrugged.

We went down to the basement of the Woodbury PD, and Weeks dragged a couple of the booster bags—also called magic bags or bad bags—from storage to show me. One was from Macy’s. It had a false bottom and deep white creases etched into the waxy red paper, and it was lined with tinfoil. A large blue-and-gold-striped wooden box—meant to look like a Christmas package—was suspended inside the bag by a wire attached to the bag handles. At the bottom, a trapdoor swung in and out so that the booster could rest the bag on top of a pile of shirts and suck them inside, where the electronic sensor could not detect them. If she suspected security was watching, she could dump the shirts.

When I cracked that the booster bag had seen better days, Weeks went into the storage room and returned with a booster coat—a long beige wool coat with different-size pockets hand-sewn into the lining—which he hung over the back of the door. It reminded me of what a flasher might wear to a peep show in the old Times Square.

Weeks assured me that the booster bags were effective tools for shoplifting, as were booster aprons, bras, pants, girdles, harnesses, and bloomers enabling “booster pregnancies” to swell, collapsing nine months into a few minutes as the shoplifter stuffed in hundreds of dollars’ worth of garments where the child should be.

Kwiatkowski sat in his fake-wood-paneled office and confided that the shoplifting epidemic at Woodbury had overwhelmed his men: If they’re at the mall, they can’t be in town. “The Common is a pain in the ass,” the chief said in a conspiratorial tone. He pulled from his desk drawer an Excel spreadsheet documenting “calls for service” for the Common.

In 2000, the year before Kwiatkowski became chief and a year after the department opened a satellite office at the Common, the police department made 626 arrests there—about two a day. That’s not taking into account the thousands of calls the police answered without arresting anyone. Kwiatkowski was quoted in the local paper, the
Times Herald-Record
, as saying that shoplifting accounted for 70 percent of the town’s criminal cases.

Shoplifting had plagued Woodbury well before this most recent spike, townspeople said. The difference was that until the late 1990s, no one cared. According to Sheila Conroy, who sat on the town planning committee in those days, Woodbury’s first owner hired janitors to moonlight as security guards, until the town planning committee put the kibosh on that cost-saving measure. Then, for a while, the emergency medical team doubled as shoplifter catchers. “They [the mall leadership] thought all you had to do was change your shirt to be part of security,” said Conroy. The Simon Group said that the cleaning crew was only charged with this responsibility for a brief time and only at night.

In 2000, Woodbury created a Business Improvement District (BID) to handle the extra need for policing, to shift the cost of that policing from the taxpayer to the Common, and to siphon more of the Common’s taxes to the town. Because of an archaic New York State law, sales tax from the Common goes to Orange County, and Woodburyites thought they were bearing the mall’s burden with fewer payoffs than they deserved. After the BID, the mall gave money not just to the police department but also to the schools and the water and sewer systems. Still, the chief complained, it was not enough. When in 2004 the police department exceeded the budget by $30,000 because of overtime and rising benefits and Social Security costs, he assumed that the mall would make up the difference. The mall thought otherwise. “As a major taxpayer, we were entitled to a portion of police and other emergency services,” said the Simon Group representative Rothstein. Kwiatkowski took his men off “mall duty” and threatened to keep them out for four months.

Kwiatkowski’s lip curled when he talked about this time, because even though Woodbury eventually came through, nothing was ever the same. “I had an understanding. Shame on me. Big business will cut costs whenever they can. Crime goes up when they cut corners. And they’re continually cutting corners.” He thought for a minute and looked out his tiny window into the parking lot. “What do I think about Woodbury? It’s a nice place to shoplift.”

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.