The Steal (17 page)

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 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 who 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.

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.

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.

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.

 

 

I asked Tamara, the ex-booster, “Who buys boosted Crest Whitestrips and Rogaine?” She said, “Everyone.” Doctors, lawyers, she elaborated.

So if boosters are shopping warriors, that makes every person who buys boosted cosmetics and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals accomplices.

Economists disagree about how boosting affects the legitimate economy. One view is that boosting, which feeds the black market, is “constructive,” allowing people to buy luxuries that they could not otherwise afford. Another argument is that boosting is linked to terrorism, although there is little hard evidence. A third argument is that the creation of black markets where boosters operate suppresses competition and leads to violence. In this theory, boosting not only drains resources and saps productivity from legitimate stores, it fails to protect buyers from harm or faulty products. To me these theories—especially the second and third—miss the point. The majority of the most-boosted items are cosmetics, not necessities. If the explosion of boosted Crest Whitestrips, Rogaine, razors, and EPT tests furthers the American economy’s drift toward that of a third world country, then, though we will have shiny white smiles and full heads of hair and be clean-shaven and know whether we are pregnant, we will also be able to say that we have shoplifted until we dropped.

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural born thief.

—Jack Kerouac,
On the Road

Many shoplifters talk about the crime like a love affair. Here is how they sound: Shoplifting punctures despair, at least temporarily. Shoplifters enjoy stealing. The objects mean something to them, but taking them feels dirty. Shoplifting is a spasm or a seizure. The lesson they learn from the crime—yes, I can!—they might apply to other areas of life. Shoplifting gives them courage to take chances. One shoplifter, who, according to him, over the years stole $25,000 worth of merchandise, wrote: