The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [131]
In this way, Rogers and his investigation team learned that the stolen goods were entering a highly organized distribution chain that often began with the hundreds of flea markets that had sprung up among the suburban sprawl of cities across the country. Crooked flea-market venders would buy stolen goods from boosters, then put a few samples out on their tables—“as a marketing ploy,” Rogers says. “Because the next-level-up buyer, a ‘middle buyer’—often ex-cons who had discovered this great opportunity—made a habit of going to flea markets looking for product. When he saw Tylenol on a vender’s tabletop, he’d say, ‘Can you get me more Tylenol in fifty-count gelcaps?’” The vender, if he did not have the item in stock, would tell his boosters what to go and steal. “We’d catch boosters with lists of stuff to steal all the time,” Rogers says. Typically, the middle buyers would sell the products to a “cleaning house”—in most cases, a three-to-five-thousand-square-foot warehouse staffed with undocumented workers whose job was to remove price stickers, E.A.S. tags, and identifying store labels. Often, products such as baby formula would sit in cleaning houses beyond their expiration date, in which case workers changed the dates stamped on the products. (In 2001, authorities in Texas arrested an organized retail-crime gang that had reportedly stored a million dollars’ worth of stolen baby formula in rodent-infested garages at an improper temperature.) The cleaned products were shrink-wrapped and put in master cartons to look as if they had been bought from the manufacturer, then sold to corrupt wholesalers who would commingle the stolen goods with legitimately purchased products and sell them back to retailers—often to the same store from which they had been stolen.
In 1998, Target began an investigation of an organized retail-crime ring in Atlanta that was stealing computers, DVDs, stereos, televisions, and clothing, along with over-the-counter medicines and razors. Target’s agents learned that the group comprised thirty Pakistani immigrants, most of them illegal, who operated a string of convenience stores. They shipped the stolen goods via UPS to large cleaning and repackaging operations in New York, Maryland, and Pakistan. “We got the Atlanta police department and county sheriff’s office involved,” Rogers says, “and were finally able to lure the F.B.I. into the situation, because at least one of the insiders in this group was a police officer. Then it became a public corruption case.” In October, 1998, the F.B.I. launched Operation American Dream, which resulted in the bust of one of the country’s biggest organized retail-crime rings. The gang used more than two hundred professional shoplifters, who stole up to a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise a day from various chain stores—Target, Wal-Mart, Kmart. The bust resulted in eighty-seven arrests, the seizure of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash, and the recovery of more than a million and a half dollars in stolen merchandise. Investigators learned that the gang was also involved in money laundering, illegal-alien smuggling, and car theft.
ROGERS RETIRED FROM TARGET IN 2001 and was succeeded as the head of asset protection by Brad Brekke. A tall, lean man of fifty-two, Brekke worked both as an F.B.I. agent and as a lawyer before being recruited by Rogers, in the