The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [135]
“I’m salivating at the mouth to pick him up,” he said. “It’s been a long time coming.”
“Your instinct is to jump the gun,” the director told me. “You want to arrest him the first time you catch him stealing. But you’ve got to be patient.” For one thing, the loss-prevention team needed to build a solid criminal case; for another, they needed to find out if he was working in collusion with another crooked sales associate.
“O.K.,” the vice-president of corporate asset protection said, addressing the two agents who had volunteered to go get Jeffrey: the muscular man and a bespectacled man in his late twenties who was the store’s lead investigator. “You’ve got to be ready for him to deny everything.”
The agents nodded.
“So if he becomes indignant and denies everything what’re you gonna do? Because the minute you approach him he knows what it’s all about.”
The muscular agent replied that he would not be thrown off by Jeffrey’s denials.
“Well,” the vice-president of corporate asset protection said, “the ones you think are going to be a problem often aren’t, and vice versa. Some confess to everything. They say they killed Kennedy.”
The two agents headed upstairs to make the apprehension, and the remaining loss-prevention team crowded around the monitor.
“He was a very nice guy,” one of the camera agents said. “Always said hello to me.”
“That’s when you know,” the female agent said.
On the screen, Jeffrey straightened a pile of clothes on a table, checked his hair in one of the mirrors, then walked across the sales floor. The camera agent picked up a walkie-talkie and radioed the arresting agents. “He’s going past fragrances,” he said.
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,