The Steal (20 page)

Five years later, Myerson had to resign due to accusations of bribery and conspiracy. She had allegedly tried to lower the alimony payments of Carl Capasso, a wealthy, hunky, formerly married contractor who had been her lover for six years. Capasso himself was under investigation for tax evasion—charges that were eventually dismissed. In the spring of 1988, Myerson was already occupied with publicity from the pretrial investigation (the trial would be prosecuted by the up-and-coming district attorney Rudolph Giuliani) and had taken the Fifth Amendment in front of a grand jury. Capasso was in prison.

On Sunday, May 8, 1988, the
New York Daily News
reported that while vacationing in London eighteen years earlier, the then Consumer Affairs commissioner had shoplifted from Harrods. When the Metropolitan Police chased Myerson, she ran. In 1987, she paid a $100 fine. But neglecting to mention the theft when filling out paperwork for a stint as Cultural Affairs commissioner was a felony, the prosecution pointed out.

Nineteen days after the
Daily News
story, the police arrested Myerson for shoplifting at a Hill’s department store near Allenwood prison in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where she was visiting Capasso. Myerson had entered the store carrying a Hill’s bag. She walked out with a pair of white espadrille flats, a pack of AA batteries, several pairs of plastic earrings, and four bottles of nail polish. She left through the side entrance. When caught, she was carrying $160 in her pocket. She supposedly asked the store detective who caught her, “Can’t I just pay for the stuff?” as she signed the store’s confession. After being told at her arraignment that the court had to report the incident, she turned philosophical. “So be it,” she said. Publicly, she denied the charges. “I was leaving the store to go to my car to come back and pay for the merchandise,” she told reporters. With the help of a local lawyer, she made sure that the shoplifting charge could not be raised at the New York trial.

The photo of Myerson taken at the crime scene in the Susquehanna River town that spring bears no resemblance to the elegant sophisticate once beloved in New York. She looks nothing like the vibrant young woman who won the Miss America pageant, the habitué of swank nightclubs and power restaurants, and friend of the glitterati. Her hair is flattened back across her head, her face wan. In July, after failing to delay her hearing until after her New York trial, she pleaded guilty.

Twenty years after Abbie Hoffman and “Lizzie Liftwell” advised Americans to shoplift as a revolutionary tactic, the shoplifting of the ex–beauty queen with the sparkling smile inspired the first trend story blaming the women’s movement for the crime. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s shoplifting was understood to be part of the youth protest, now journalists were pinning it on women’s lib. Newsmagazines attacked Myerson as a menopausal shrew who, thanks to feminism, had missed out on stay-at-home wives’ happiness and stole as compensation. They borrowed clichés from nineteenth-century kleptomania to evoke women rushing stores to satisfy their desires. “Why Do Aging Women Steal?” “Midlife Shoplifters Often Feel Robbed of Love.”

Writing about Myerson in
Ms
., Shana Alexander intoned, “As for the women’s movement, I often think we may have opened Pandora’s Box.” In the group biography of four women involved in “The Bess Mess” that grew out of this article, Alexander painted Myerson as Venus, the goddess of love. She attributed Myerson’s problems to excessive self-sacrifice and to men and to what New York women “would and would not do for love.” Other unsympathetic articles about Myerson’s shoplifting that year expressed contempt for a celebrity who was stupid enough to make up stories about why she committed the crime.
Life
published a color photo spread of the shoplifted objects and depicted Myerson as representative of the shoplifting crisis trickling down to all Americans. “It could be you,”
Life
cautioned in an article highlighting the social problem.

Initially, Myerson was concerned that the shoplifting, along with her other erratic behavior, would cause the jury to find her guilty. In the fall, when the trial started, the defense was leery of calling character witnesses whom the prosecution might ask about the crime. But in the end, “the Queen of the Jews,” as she had often referred to herself half-mockingly in more prosperous years, was acquitted of the charges levied against her. She disappeared from the public eye.

The most far-reaching consequence was that after “The Bess Mess,” the media outed more celebrity shoplifters than they had in all the previous decades in the twentieth century. Some of these were celebrities’ children, but a surprising number were adults. An incomplete list includes pool shark Minnesota Fats, a Miss Minnesota, gymnast Olga Korbut, tennis player Jennifer Capriati, ex-spy Felix Bloch, ex-secretary of the army John Shannon, Felicidad Noriega, Noelle Bush, and Al Goldstein. Since 2002, the Internet aggregator Notable Names Database (NNDB) has included shoplifting as a celebrity category—a criminal best-dressed list. NNDB lists which celebrities have allegedly shoplifted, when, where, and whether they pleaded guilty. What’s next, a Hollywood map of which boutiques shoplifting stars have hit and a reality TV show about the crime?

From the Gilded Age, when Emma Goldman and Mark Twain ridiculed the light punishment for kleptomaniacs in comparison with the severe penalties for starving single mothers, there has been in America the idea that treating rich shoplifters as sick, not criminal, reveals an ugly class bias. But in the 2000s, the contrast between how rich and poor shoplifters were sentenced was amplified: Now rich shoplifters became fashion icons, and poor ones were given life sentences. At Christmastime of 2001, the case of Winona Ryder, or SA044291, as it was later known in the Los Angeles Superior Court, redefined celebrity shoplifting. This trial, examining the relationship between fame and shoplifting, trivialized the crime. Another case—a Supreme Court case involving shoplifters serving life sentences under California’s three-strikes law—magnified the sense of a double standard.

“Anywhere else, this petty crime by a first-time offender would have quickly ended with a plea bargain,” a
New York Times
editorial concluded during Ryder’s trial, deploring the municipal resources squandered on it, which by some accounts added up to hundreds of times the amount typically spent on a shoplifting offense. The Ryder trial also provided a poignant contrast between decades of glamorizing shoplifting on the screen and the real-life tawdry crime.

On December 12, 2001, when the Beverly Hills police arrested Ryder for allegedly shoplifting just under $6,000 worth of designer clothing from Saks Fifth Avenue on Wilshire Boulevard near Rodeo Drive, she was a thirty-year-old icon. Like many earlier celebrity shoplifters, Ryder had transcended her beginnings. She started out as Winona Laura Horowitz from Minnesota and later Northern California, daughter of the rare-book dealer Michael Horowitz and goddaughter of Timothy Leary. She began acting at age twelve. In the 1980s, she became one of the young actors known as the Brat Pack, starring in
Beetlejuice
,
Heathers
,
Edward Scissorhands
,
Little Women
, and
The Age of Innocence
. At twenty, the actress lauded for her portrayal of characters on the edge and for her brown eyes was briefly hospitalized for depression. In 1999, she played Susanna, a mentally ill young woman in the movie adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir,
Girl, Interrupted
. In one scene, Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg) tells the Ryder character, “You are a lazy, self-indulgent little girl who is driving herself crazy.” That description hung over the proceedings.

Right away, Ryder’s case raised questions. It is company policy for Saks to call the police in instances of felony shoplifting. But it was not long before the district attorney’s office began to pursue the case with more prosecutorial zeal than some observers thought it merited. “Money Talks, Celebrities Walk” was the campaign slogan that got Steve Cooley elected, referring to the previous administration’s lax handling of the O.J. Simpson case. But in the Ryder case, a blooper made Cooley’s ferocity look vindictive or worse. The day after Ryder was arrested, Lieutenant Gary Gilmond, the spokesperson for the Beverly Hills Police Department, read a statement at a press conference: “The security officers observed both visually and by video Ms. Ryder to remove Sensormatic tags . . . and place the items in a bag that she had, and then she was observed to leave the store without paying for the items.” Based on Gilmond’s statement, Sandi Gibbons, the media relations person for the district attorney’s office, wrote a press release asserting that “the actress was seen on the store security camera using a pair of scissors to cut security tags off the merchandise.”

On March 12, 2002, still eight months before the trial, a
Los Angeles Times
reporter viewed the video and discovered that Ryder was not seen anywhere cutting off tags. In May, the star used it all performing the monologue on
Saturday Night Live
with Tracy Morgan, producer Lorne Michaels, and the rest of the cast.

Ryder: “They set up security cameras because of me?”

Morgan: “No! No! No! No!”

After the two stars scrutinize the cast in their dressing rooms with the security cameras, Morgan says: “See? They watch everybody. Nobody thinks you’re gonna take anything.” A video of Ryder thanking Lorne Michaels for inviting her on the show the previous day extends the joke. After Ryder exits, the camera catches Michaels checking to see if he still has his wallet. In a later skit, “Winona Loves Mango,” Ryder, Chris Kattan, and Moby go shopping at Barneys. After all of them confess to having left their wallets at home, the two men stare meaningfully at Ryder. Kattan, who is struggling to hold the heaps of clothing he supposedly intends to purchase, recommends that they shoplift, and Ryder announces, “Stealing is wrong,” twisting her face into a wry grin. A security guard swoops in to detain Mango (Kattan), who goes to jail. But not before he vogues for his mug shots in the stolen merch, including a Marabou bed jacket. He even blows kisses at the camera. Later Ryder visits him in jail.

The jokes at the expense of the district attorney—at anyone who dared accuse Ryder of shoplifting—continued. Over the summer, Y-Que, a T-shirt company whose name in Spanish means “So what?” printed “Free Winona” T-shirts, which quickly became hipster best sellers. In June, Ryder vamped on
W
magazine’s cover in one of the shirts, which, as Y-Que’s founder Billy Wyatt pointed out, “hit a Warhol level of parody.”

In September, after negotiations over Ryder’s plea halted,
National Review
columnist Joel Mowbray defended her as a victim of big government run amok: “According to an NBC News study of L.A. County records, none of the other 5,000 people prosecuted for shoplifting in the last two years has been hit with such harsh charges—and in two specific cases in Beverly Hills where the alleged amount stolen exceeded that in Ryder’s case, both defendants pleaded out with misdemeanors—something that prosecutors have adamantly refused to do for the movie star.”

Asked about Mowbray’s allegation, Sandi Gibbons wrote in an e-mail:

Gibbons said that
Ryder
declined the attempts of the district attorney’s office to strike a plea bargain. It was speculated at the time that one reason Saks pursued the case so assiduously was that the star was unwilling to plead guilty even to a misdemeanor.

The trial was not televised. The 1,019-page transcript begins on October 24, with a hearing. Before the attorneys presented their motions, Ryder asked, “Your Honor, may I approach the bench?”

The court: “Not at this point.”

The defendant: “Do you have a gavel? I’ve never seen a gavel.”

The court: “No gavels.”

The defendant: “A real one. Really?”

The court: “Judges don’t use gavels—honest . . .”

The defendant: “It’s only on TV?”

The court: “The only gavel I have is a crystal gavel, and that was a gift. I’d never bang that.”

A few pages later, Deputy District Attorney Ann Rundle raised the question of Ryder’s two prior alleged acts of shoplifting, which she characterized as a “scheme”—a series of linked crimes. According to police records, Ryder shoplifted three times in 2000 and 2001—twice at Barneys New York in Beverly Hills—and a third time at nearby Neiman Marcus. Arguing that these alleged thefts should be inadmissible, Ryder’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, contended that the security guards’ search of Ryder’s purse for the scissors she supposedly used to snip the tags from the clothing was illegal, since only police officers could legally conduct searches. After listening to Rundle read from the transcript in which one of the security guards asked Ryder to hand over the scissors (she supposedly said, “I need those scissors,” and Ryder allegedly reached into her pocket and took them out), Judge Elden Fox ruled the scissors in.

Geragos’s final attempt at suppression involved one of Ryder’s alleged explanations for her shoplifting. At the hearing, Ann Rundle, riffling through the pages of her transcript, summarized them: