The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [134]
IT WAS THREE-TWENTY IN THE AFTERNOON, and the vice-president of corporate asset protection at the midtown Manhattan department store had resigned himself to allowing the suspected denim thief to leave the store. He now went into an adjoining room to greet the store’s director of shortage control, a small man in his thirties who wore a well-tailored black suit and had a neatly clipped goatee. His job was to reduce inventory losses due to shoplifting or employee theft. Mounted on one wall were twelve computer screens that showed images of several sales associates as they rang up purchases and moved about the sales floor, straightening clothes on racks and greeting customers. The two men watched the employees on the screens for a moment. “They’re persons of interest,” the director said. “All of them have been flagged for surveillance.”
Despite loss prevention’s current focus on organized retail crime and e-fencing, by far the biggest theft problem faced by retailers is internal—the actions of light-fingered employees. Shoplifting accounts for almost thirty-two per cent of shrink; employee, or internal, theft accounts for almost forty-seven per cent—although many experts say that these numbers are skewed, since organized retail-crime rings have begun to recruit store employees as accomplices, and even to send gang members to seek jobs at stores. Whatever the case, in 2006, employees stole about nineteen billion dollars’ worth of merchandise from their employers—which is why many loss-prevention departments devote as much time to conducting surveillance on their own employees as they do on customers.
The director of shortage control pointed to one of the screens, on which a salesman in his thirties—I’ll call him Jeffrey—was straightening piles of T-shirts and sweaters on an upper floor of the department store. He was a handsome man with close-cropped hair and a perpetual smile. “The first red flag was that he had the highest number of non-receipt returns in his department,” the director said. “Everyone else in his department was getting about three returns a week. He was getting five a day.”
That was four months earlier, in February. Since then, the loss-prevention team had been monitoring Jeffrey’s activities. Using “exception-based reporting” software—a program installed in all the computerized cash registers which looks for irregular transactions—the team learned that Jeffrey was ringing up returns for merchandise that had never left the store, then putting the credit on his own card. He had also been making out E.M.C.s (electronic merchandise credits, more commonly known as gift cards) in amounts of up to five thousand dollars, then giving the cards to accomplices who would come in and shop for merchandise. Camera surveillance revealed that Jeffrey was selecting clothing from the racks, removing electronic security tags, and leaving the clothing in fitting rooms for friends to come and collect at appointed times. In the four months that he had been under surveillance, Jeffrey had apparently stolen and embezzled an estimated hundred thousand dollars’ worth of false credit and merchandise from the store.
“The scary thing is that he’s coming to work every day,” the vice-president of corporate asset protection said. “But he’s not working for the store.”
The director looked at his watch. It was three-thirty—time to arrest Jeffrey.
Two loss-prevention agents came into the room: a woman in a black skirt and blouse and