The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [42]
Three months after they met, Jocelyn and Ed departed for a New Year’s trip to Paris. Other travelers their age might have been backpacking, but these two spent their vacation in four-and five-star hotels, shopping at Gucci and skiing the French alpine slopes. They dressed for maximum impact: Jocelyn’s wardrobe included a rabbit-fur vest, red thigh-high boots and a crotch-length strand of pearls; Ed held his own in lavender button-downs and a leather man-purse. They snapped dozens of photos, which Jocelyn posted on Facebook (to the shock and heartbreak of both Verdibello and Thomas, who each thought he was dating Jocelyn exclusively). And the pair brought home a souvenir: a sign they’d swiped from a cafe, warning PROFESSIONAL BAG THIEVES OPERATE IN THIS AREA, PLEASE KEEP A CLOSE EYE ON YOUR PERSONAL BELONGINGS AT ALL TIMES.
Their year of living fabulously had begun.
ED AND JOCELYN SWIFTLY MORPHED into nouveau-riche brats, intent upon getting the things they wanted—no, deserved. Like their new two-bedroom apartment in the Belgravia, a grand building owned by Ed’s company. Their third-floor pad was a huge, high-ceilinged affair, decorated in ultramodern style with black lacquer and chrome furniture. Jocelyn’s walk-in closet was strewn with designer clothes; in Ed’s closet, everything was neatly pressed and hung. They used their second bedroom as an office—stocked with four computers, two printers, a scanner and, most curiously, an industrial machine for manufacturing ID cards. And squirreled away in their apartment was a lockbox filled with keys to many of their neighbors’ apartments and to all of their mailboxes (“Is the mail here yet?” they’d ask at the front desk); police suspect that Ed managed to procure the keys through his company, since it owned the building.
Their crimes seem to have begun fairly early. “These two have only been together since September ’06,” says Detective Sweeney, noting that they were arrested a little over a year later. “So they managed to do a lot in that short time. Which tells me this was a perfect meeting of the minds.” The police say that while neighbors were out, the pair would sneak into their apartments and steal their Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, bank-account info and, in one case, a passport. Then they’d open credit cards and bank accounts in their victims’ names, supplying a mailing address on the Penn campus—really a UPS Store, where the apartment number they’d listed (“Apt. 124”) was a PO box. As a finishing touch, they made phony driver’s licenses, using as a guide an article Ed clipped from Penn’s student newspaper titled “How to Spot Fake IDs.”
They also had Spector spyware—software that, once installed on their neighbors’ computers, they may have used to glean confidential information. When police had disconnected the pair’s computers, the entire building’s Internet access crashed—the police suspect that the tech-savvy Ed rigged everyone’s Internet accounts to run through his own computer.
Neighbors weren’t the only ones at risk. Morgan Greenhouse, an ’07 Penn grad, still has no clue how her identity was stolen—only that one day a credit-card company called to verify a check she’d written to herself for several thousand dollars. “I freaked out,” she says. Panicked, she checked her credit online and discovered seven unauthorized credit cards, many nearly maxed out to their $2,000 or $3,000 limit.
But while some of the couple’s capers seemed well-planned, others were stupidly obvious—including preying on their own friends. In the summer of 2007, the pair reportedly spent a weekend in Manhattan crashing with a Penn buddy of Ed’s. Weeks later, the guy and his roommate filed a report with the NYPD, claiming $3,000 in fraudulent charges. Even Sallie Cook, Jocelyn’s friend from Drexel, says she was fleeced, though in a decidedly low-tech way: Shortly after Jocelyn watched Cook punch her PIN number into a cash machine, Cook’s debit card disappeared, and $600 was withdrawn