Otto Penzler - The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

Suddenly, the two loss-prevention agents appeared from the right side of the screen. Jeffrey stopped, looked at them, and his eyes briefly widened. Then he smiled and shook both agents’ proffered hands. (Later, the lead investigator told his colleagues about the arrest. “I said, ‘Can you please follow me?’ He was calm but scared. You could tell by the way his lips turned pale a little bit.”) With one agent behind him and one in front, Jeffrey walked to the elevator, then rode down to the asset-protection complex. When they passed the open door of the internal-theft camera room, the woman in the black skirt and blouse left the camera room and followed them. She was the lead interviewer. They disappeared into one of the interview rooms down the hall and shut the door.

The purpose of the interview was not to get Jeffrey to confess-they felt that they had the evidence-but to get him to reveal details of where the stolen merchandise was going, how long he had been stealing and how much, and whether he was working with others in the store. The team was particularly interested in Jeffrey’s colleague, a young man I’ll call Alex. Many of the customers to whom Jeffrey had issued fraudulent gift cards had gone to Alex to redeem them, and Alex had also been overriding the computer denials on stolen credit cards.

At five o’clock, after an hour and a half of questioning, the woman emerged from the interview and joined the vice-president of corporate asset protection in the camera room. “He admits to the fraudulent E.M.C.s and credit cards,” she said. “And he talked about boxing up merchandise for his friends. He was getting four hundred for each item.”

“Did you get him to roll over on Alex?” he asked.

“I can’t get him to give up Alex,” she said.

The vice-president scratched his head. “O.K.,” he said at length. “Bring the other schmuck down-Alex. I don’t see any reason not to. I wouldn’t get him in a headlock.” He meant this figuratively; the team uses no form of physical persuasion in interviews, he told me. “I don’t want him going back to the sales floor and bitching to H.R. Just ask him, ‘Why are these guys coming to you with fraudulent E.M.C.s?’ Offer him soda. Water. Whatever he wants.”

Two agents were dispatched, and a few minutes later Alex, a tall man in a summer-weight beige jacket, appeared in the hallway, his head hanging low. He was led into a neighboring interview room. (It later turned out that Alex was not involved.)

The director of shortage control dropped into a chair in the hallway. It was now six-thirty. The woman in the black skirt and blouse went back into the first interview room to continue talking to Jeffrey.

“Who knows how long it’s going to take?” the director said. “He’s got a lot of explaining to do.” One thing, he thought, seemed certain. The amount of merchandise involved meant that Jeffrey would probably be charged with a felony. “He’s going to jail,” the director said, but without relish. “You stare at this expensive stuff all day as an employee-stuff you can’t afford to buy. It’s a temptation.”

“You’re on commission selling,” the vice-president added. “When times are good, you make a fortune. September through the holiday season, you’re raking it in. Then Christmas is over, no one is shopping, gas is four dollars a gallon, and your paycheck went from fifteen hundred to five hundred a week and you have to pay off those bills from that Caribbean vacation you took when the money was rolling in. So you think, I’ll credit my card for a thousand dollars and make out a fake return. When it works the first time, you try it again. But next time you load a little more onto your card.” He shrugged. “And the way this economy’s going?” he added. “We’re going to be busy.”

JOHN COLAPINTO was for several years a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he won a National Magazine Award for a story about a famous case of infant sex change (he expanded the story into a book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, which was a New York Times bestseller). In 2001, he published a comic crime novel, About the Author, which is in development for the movies with producer Scott Rudin. Since 2006 he has been a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Coda

The world of loss prevention is a secretive, not to say deeply paranoid, one. I knew that, for this story to really work, I would need to get a retailer to allow me to go “backstage” in a store so that I could watch a loss-prevention team in action. This proved harder than expected. Even a store like Target, which was happy to invite me to its corporate headquarters in Minneapolis for long interviews with its top antitheft people, balked when I asked if I could hang out in one of the stores and watch how they actually catch bad guys. I spent five months romancing various loss-prevention VPs at major chain stores and got nowhere. Folks at Loss Prevention , the industry trade magazine, laughed when I told them that I was trying to get inside a store. None of them had ever done so; and they assured me that I wasn’t going to, either. And then, in one of those mysterious strokes peculiar to journalism and perhaps homicide detection, I cracked the case with a single random phone call in the eleventh hour before the deadline. I happened to call a big Manhattan department store that I hadn’t bothered to call earlier because it was such an obvious long shot, and asked if I might be allowed to come in and watch how they stop thieves from shoplifting. The loss prevention honcho said, without hesitation, “Sure, come on down.” The next day, I spent an eye-popping six hours with the store detectives described at the beginning and end of the story-scribbling away madly in my notebook as they revealed one secret after another of the profession. I remember that I had been at the store for about four hours and had not yet brought up the touchiest subject of all: internal theft, shrinkage that results from light-fingered employees. I was trying to summon the courage to raise this embarrassing, almost taboo subject, when one of the detectives motioned me into a small, windowless room with a wall of screens that showed grainy images of employees working on the sales floor. It was several seconds before I realized that he was, spontaneously, inviting me into the Internal Theft room. And not only that. He was going to let me watch them arrest one of their salespeople. Afterward, I ran home, wrote up the story in a rush of adrenaline, and everyone was happy. Or so we thought. When The New Yorker’ s fact-checkers called the Manhattan department store to run my facts by them, the loss-prevention people were horrified. They could hardly believe that I had put everything that I had seen into the story. They thought I just wanted “background.” Whatever that is. I found myself on the phone trying to calm the detectives who had been so generous with their time and so open in revealing the tricks of their trade. I felt a little like I’d performed an act of theft right under their noses. We agreed to obscure all identifying details about the store and they reluctantly, grudgingly, gave their blessing to the story. But they aren’t talking to me anymore. Which is why, unfortunately, I cannot give a follow-up on the fate of the store employee who was arrested. (I was never told his full name and thus can’t look up his case.) But suffice to say that there is every reason to believe, in the current state of the economy, that loss-prevention departments are busier than ever.

FROM Details

SHAFI AHMED WAS 5 YEARS OLD, too young to understand what a tribe was or why the men in these tribes had turned his city into a war zone where, without warning, you could be pulled from your car and shot dead. He and his seven siblings could hear the explosions and crackle of gunfire coming from the streets outside their house in Mogadishu. His mother was terrified, his father desperate to protect the family.