The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [136]
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