Thiefhunters in Paradise

Three female thieves with cardboard shields; two thefts from a park; one pigeon poop pickpocket; one postcard technique theft; one very prolific, multi-talented pickpocket; continuous 3-shell, or pea games; and more. No partridge or pear tree.

Bob and I just took three days to re-evaluate the street crime scene in Barcelona. I don’t know why it’s such a contentious topic. Visit any travel forum and you’ll find defenders who say street crime isn’t bad there, that it’s no worse than in any big city, that it’s the stupid tourists’ fault.

Bob and I love Barcelona and believe me, it pains us to say it; but yes, Barcelona is right up there among the cities with the highest rates of theft from tourists. Still. Then and now.

We did not spend every minute of our three days there seeking out thieves. We began by visiting a park with our friend and his children. We did not see the thefts that occurred there just then, but the perpetrator was apprehended, the police were still on site, and Bob spoke with the three victims, two of whom were a young French tourist couple. Their valuables and documents were stolen as they lay dozing, or semi-dozing. The gentleman was alerted when the thief tried to get into his bag, which he was using as a pillow. Must have been a thrill-seeking thief to attempt stealing items from right under a man’s head.

We did not loiter in dark alleys or hang around after hours. We tramped the beaten path. The pigeon poop perp targeted us in the middle of lunch hour on a broad business and shopping street, across from a big hotel. Kharem, whom we’ve found almost every year since 2001, was hard at work with a brand new style on Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s main tourist artery. Same with all the other thieves we came across in these days. If you do stray from the well-worn paths, you’ll find more and different crime, for sure.

We were strolling to our friends’ apartment for dinner, technically off duty with cameras put away, when we saw a young man steal from a restaurant table. We were not looking for crime.

The receptionist in our hotel (which has 90 rooms), said she gets reports of theft from the hotel’s guests about once a week in the summer, but much less during the rest of the year because then guests are mostly Spanish business people who behave differently. The next evening, the receptionist told us that her cell phone had just been stolen from her handbag as she sat in a coffee shop with friends.

A receptionist at another hotel, which was located closer to Las Ramblas, said he gets one or two reports a day from his guests. I don’t know how many rooms that hotel has.

An Australian doctor told us he had just spent six days in Barcelona at a pathology conference. One of his colleagues had her passport stolen and when she went to the embassy, fourteen other conference attendees were there reporting thefts.

Over the next week or so, I’ll be posting details of the above incidents and characters, and more from this research trip. I may not remember to mention what a good time we had in Barcelona, the good meals we had, the beautiful architecture we feasted our eyes on, or the lively ambiance we enjoyed. These are only a few of the delights the city has for tourists to discover. In some way, I’m sorry that my writing focuses on crime. I don’t want to hurt the reputations of cities I love. Neither do I want to scare anyone away from visiting just because there is a relatively high rate of theft.

For a cross-country flight, I packed a lunch of deconstructed sandwiches. Slices of homemade walnut bread, a handful of arugula, a tomato, and a repurposed deli-container full of homemade crab salad. The crab salad was moist with mayo, lemon, and chopped apple. Spreadable, if not quite liquid, mostly filling an 8 oz container.

I didn’t expect it to pass security, so I was ready with Plan B: I’d back out of the security area, construct the sandwiches, and try again with the less-dense contraband.

So I’m pushing my carry-on along to the scanner belt when the TSA man on the x-ray calls for assistance. “Log-jam,” he says.

“They’re moving now,” I say, having straightened someone else’s bag. Mine goes through.

“I’m just trying to keep her busy [wink],” the TSA agent says, jerking his chin toward his colleague as she inspects the flow of bags.

I lock eyes with him. “Good strategy,” I wink back, and he doesn’t even glance at the screen as my bags sail through, crab salad and all.

Ah, social engineering vs. security theater. I love it.

Over the years we minimized our equipment as we acquired smaller and smaller cameras of broadcast quality. With lighter equipment we became more maneuverable, better able to dash into subways, less reluctant to venture into deserted or potentially dangerous areas, and quicker on our feet. With hidden cameras and remote controls to operate them, we were later able to film con men like the bait-and-switch masters in Naples, and the pigeon poop duper in Barcelona. As we learned to recognize more sophisticated thieves, we were able to capture their deeds with more sophisticated devices.

We trekked through Florence as we did Rome. Wherever the tourists flock there, the urchins prey: all around the wedding-cake-like Duomo, outside the Ufizi, on and near the Ponte Vecchio, and at the outdoor markets. Women with children even operate inside the dimly-lit cathedrals, where tourists least expect them. The child-thieves can be shockingly aggressive, blocking a person’s progress while working busily under their cardboard shields. They’re so accustomed to visitors with video cameras, they repeatedly dug into our pockets while we shot them at point blank range.

At some point we began to carry a wallet stuffed with cut paper instead of money. That raggedy bait was stolen from our pockets by a hundred hands, with slow stealth, crude speed, cunning, or clumsiness. We almost always got it back just by asking. But we found the actual extraction of the wallet near impossible to film. The thieves got too close and covered their steals with a jacket, bag, or some other shield. We needed a creative solution.

After infinite ideas and frustrating failures, Bob had a brainstorm. He got an empty shoebox and filled it with sophisticated electronics. He fitted a pinhole lens onto one of his small cameras, and poked its miniature eye through the bottom of the shoebox. He made another hole for a tiny red diode which signified the camera’s record mode. Lastly, he connected a remote control to a short wire and let it protrude unobtrusively from the box, providing a means to start and stop the camera. With a brick-like battery and a tangle of wires completing the package, Bob’s ominous box would never make it through airport security.

I snapped a few rubber bands over the lid and Bob tucked the box neatly under his arm, lens pointing down toward his pocket. That’s how the shoebox-cam was invented.

Thus rigged, we’d created a space not easily blocked by a thief, a void full of light which preserved the camera’s view of Bob’s pocket. The shoebox-cam proved useful in many situations and became one of our favorite capturing devices along with the cellphone-cam, eyeglass-cam, and button-cam.

Excerpt from Travel Advisory: How to Avoid Thefts, Cons, and Street Scams
Chapter One (part-k): High and Dry on the Streets of Elsewhere

I did not intend to dwell on random negativity here, but when I came across this sign a few days ago, I took it as an open invitation. So here are a couple of gripes aimed against a new trend in corporate mentality.

1. “Yes, we owe our customers money, but make it difficult and they’ll go away.” This seems to be a growing, despicable, yet profitable attitude. Real examples:

a. Rebates. You send in all required forms and original box parts, but no rebate arrives. After many months, you are given endless runarounds, required to make endless phone calls, and send more letters re-documenting your claim. This has happened to us more than once. It really isn’t worth it. And who has time to fight for the principle?

b. Airlines. Due to mechanical problems, a flight is canceled and we are told to book a hotel. Send in the receipt with this form, and we will be reimbursed this (minimal) amount, and this (insufficient) sum for taxi. Took nine months of letters and phone calls to get our lousy $120.

c. Insurance. A mistake was made by a pharmacy, which resulted in the repeated denial of claims. Send in a form, document everything with originals etc., and the claims are denied again, except a check for $8.11, and instructions on how to appeal. Appeal. Denied. Write more letters, get another $150. Write more letters, get a promise of payment. This situation, ongoing for six months now, has not played itself out.

2. Front desk stoneface. I don’t know this, but I believe there must be some sort of staff training program making the rounds which trains front desk and customer service employees how to be helpless. They do not have access to billing records, a supervisor is not available, they will pass along the complaint, etc. Worse, I believe they are taught to document everything in reports, in which they are told to include random generic character attacks, in order to cast aspersions and denigrate the customer, the better to CYA. I have fresh evidence of this theory, too. They try to sidestep responsibility by accusing the complainant of spurious, irrelevant minutia. What happened to “the customer is always right”?

I’ve been listening to essays by George Orwell. Terry, a voracious reader, devoured Orwell after Proust and Vidal, and he’s now working on Paul Bowles. I downloaded some Orwell essays here, but I find that when I’m in front of my computer (which is a lot), I’m either working or making use of the internet, rather than reading material safely stowed on my hard drive. I can read those documents any time. Somehow, though, I don’t.

Then I ran across this hint, which makes it a cinch to convert text to an iTunes audiobook. The hint contains a downloadable script that practically installs itself, then shows up under the Mac’s Services menu. (Although this hint is for Leopard only, it can be tweaked for Tiger.) I’m sure my programmer friends are privately chiding me, but I’m glad that someone wrote and provided a script to make the text-to-audiobook conversion dead simple.

With the stories on my iPod, they’re sure to be listened to, and planes are the ideal place. I can only read so many hours in the dry air of airports and airplanes, before my contacts start sticking to my eyeballs. Right after converting a few files, I flew to Ireland.

At first, the pleasure of listening was only about half the pleasure of reading. I expected that for two reasons. First is that I prefer to read good writing, linger over it, reread lovely phrases. But okay, there’s deep-seated pleasure in being read to, too. I’ve listened to a few audio books lately, all read by their authors, and I enjoyed them, though more for their stories than their writing.

Listening to synthesized speech is not the same as being read to by an author. The lauded new Leopard voice Alex is synthesized and, though his diction is not bad, Alex lacks style, grace, sensitivity, timing, mellifluence, drama, and every other quality that makes George Guidall, my sister’s uncle-in-law, an award-winning reader of audiobooks (more than 800 books to his credit). But…

I got used to Alex’s style. And though it’s not like reading, nor the same as being read to, it’s better than osmosis. It’s better than not knowing the texts at all. It’s like the Cliff Notes version, but delivered slowly, a fleeting association to reunite with later. Maybe.

And now, after listening to a few more essays, I’m happy enough with Alex. I found that slowing his speech by about 15% improves the experience. I’ve converted a 13,000-word article on cybercrime to digest on my next flight.

…

Later: The cybercrime article was good, but I didn’t listen to it on a plane. I listened during a 2+ hour taxi ride from the south of England to London. It was too bumpy to read, too much strobe effect from the shade of trees on a rare sunny day. The cybercrime article, from Wired, was an hour and 22 minutes long. Perfect for the drive.

And: My computer suddenly lost all input and output audio devices. After a little troubleshooting, I removed the SpeakToItunesAudiobook.service from my system and all’s well again. If that was not an anomaly, I will just drop the service in when I need it.

Lastly: In his essay “How the Poor Die,” I was delighted to hear Orwell mention Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele.  Axel Munthe was a great-grand-uncle of Bob’s, and The Story of San Michele is a great grand-read.

What is on my ceiling? Looks like a thumbprint—gray, like newsprint. Except… my kitchen ceiling is the cottage cheese type. A thumbprint isn’t possible.

In the back of my mind was a recent dinner party, at which a bottle of zinfandel misbehaved or, rather, its cork did, and red splattered the ceiling. But not there. And anyway, I cleaned it all, didn’t I? Could this have been a remnant? I couldn’t imagine what caused the gray smudge. I made a mental note to clean it somehow.

Next day, having forgotten all about it, I did a double take. Was it that large yesterday? Looks like two thumbprints today. I got up on a ladder and looked through a magnifying glass.

Oh, it’s a dusting of something. Mold? In the desert? I rubbed my finger across the spot. Wait a minute, use the high-power portion of the glass. Yikes! Are those microscopic heads? They’re moving! They’re alive.

I got a camera and snapped a macro photo, having much trouble focusing while wavering on the ladder. I sent the photo off to Uncle Lenny. Handy to have an entomologist in the family. Lenny always responds right away, but he must have been teaching a class.

“You know I’m not the hysterical type,” I wrote him hours later, “but now that I know there are critters multiplying on my ceiling, right over my head in fact, I can’t think of much else.”

“It was likely a single egg sac that hatched. Chances are they’ll die anyway since there’s nothing to eat.”

A mist of diluted bleach took care of them. But what were they? Caterpillars, Lenny said. Probably laid by a moth.

Right. I leave the doors and windows open and we always have moths fluttering around. A moth laid an egg sac on my kitchen ceiling. I had caterpillar hatchlings. Cute.

City of Hugs and Thugs. Naples, Italy— At the next stop, two more suspects pushed on beside me. The bus remained crowded all the way to the park before the tunnel, then loosened up a bit. All the thieves stayed aboard, determined, as a group, to get Bob’s wallet. The gray-haired man tried forever, then finally turned the job over to a colleague while he blocked and pinned Bob in a ridiculously obvious way. The tram was no longer crowded; there was no excuse for him to be so close!

None of them got it, though they tried hard. We all got off at Piazza Vittoria, the end of the line. Bob touched the gray-haired man’s shoulder and asked him to talk to us for a minute.

He tried to get away but Bob was insistent and started touching him all over and jabbering at him. A criminal crowd gathered, curious thieves, intrigued and protective of their members. I circled around them all with two cameras rolling as Bob stole the gray-hair’s cell phone, then his tie. It was perfect. He had no idea what was happening, no idea anything was gone. It was hilarious to see his confusion in the role of victim. Funny to Bob and me, and funnier still to the criminal crew.

The other pickpockets burst into laughter. After a moment’s delay, so did gray-hair. Then Bob stole his glasses and another guy’s watch. Great reactions.

That, as usual, broke the ice and established instant rapport. There were introductions all around, and a suggestion for coffee at a bar across the square. Tony, a happy, funny guy who had only two large rabbit teeth, was the most outgoing. It took us, and him, several minutes to realize we’d met before. We had coffee with him and his partner, Mario, in 2001. Tony now made a laughing phone call to Mario to tell him he was with us again.

Salvatore, the youngest, asked a lot of questions about us and what we do, and was eager to meet again. [We did meet again.] He gave us his cell phone number, and wanted to know when we’d be back. Like the others, he had missing and mostly rotten teeth. All of them seemed to love when we dropped the names of other local thieves we know. It must sort of prove that we’re okay. We talked shop as best we could with limited language. They all had a great time with us, it was obvious.

Tony showed us pictures of his wife and children. He showed us how his own wallet was wedged tightly sideways in his back pocket so it couldn’t be removed. Then he demonstrated the local specialty: removing money from a wallet without removing the wallet from the pocket. Very slick. Gray-haired Nuncio then showed how he uses his bag of newspaper to shield an inside-jacket-pocket steal (considered the most difficult).

The question remains: why did this gang of veteran thieves fail to get Bob’s wallet? Unfortunately, we couldn’t ask such a sophisticated question without an interpreter. But we’ll return, and we know where to find them. After eleven years of observing street thieves in Naples, we’ll do better interviewing now, than filming on trams.

Too many thieves know us.

This is part 4 of 4. Part 1

City of Hugs and Thugs. Naples, Italy— We left Angelo and wandered around the corner, through the fish and produce market for a while. Pausing next to a table heaped with shiny mussels, I watched a woman force-feed her fat six-year-old. She roughly spooned orange goop from a jar into his face as the boy, round as a sumo-wrestler, held up a protesting hand. We shot a little video, then popped into an internet café. It was 1:30.

We decided to go to the train station before the criminals took their siesta at two. Crossing Corso Garibaldi, we paused on the median strip at the tram stop. So many suspects and others we recognized stood around there, and a tram was just arriving. We couldn’t resist jumping on. It was the most crowded I’d ever been on. Thieves were everywhere, maybe 20 just around us at the back door. One, a North African, looked at Bob and said to his partner in English, “professional pickpocket.” They must have recognized us from previous visits. They got off the tram.

Bob and I didn’t look at each other, pretending we weren’t together. I kept my camera running, aimed at a small, dignified, gray-haired man in a sport coat and tie, who got close to Bob. He had neat hair, glasses, and carried a plastic bag containing newspapers as a tool for covering his dirty work. Why did I suspect him? It was more than just his tool; it was his shifty eyes, his maneuvering, and my intuition.

This part 3 of 4. Part 1 — Part 4

City of Hugs and Thugs. Naples, Italy— Bob and I estimate that we saw 50 to 60 pickpockets in two hours on the trams today. We recognized many from previous years, others are new acquaintances. We were treated to coffee three times. Bob’s wallet was stolen repeatedly, and he stole it right back each time.

The day began in the usual corner, where we saw a gang of thieves we recognized leaning against the wall. Mario was one of them. We said hello and spoke with him for a few minutes, then let him get back to work. Just then a crowded tram came along and all four pickpockets ran to catch it. They gave us a wave goodbye or a beckon to join them (I couldn’t tell which), and squeezed themselves onto the tram.

Since we were hoping to ride incognito, we waited for another tram one stop away. Lots of suspects collected around us, waiting: a short balding guy Bob thought was a boss, several North Africans, a large, portly guy, and others. As the tram approached, the big guy positioned himself behind Bob and I saw him try for Bob’s wallet, using his own shoulder bag for cover. As Bob went up the tram steps, I saw that he still had his wallet and the pocket was still buttoned. On the tram, the big guy got behind Bob and eventually took the wallet. Bob then handed me the cell phone camera (a wireless hidden camera, not a cell phone at all) and stole the cigarette pack from the thief’s shirt pocket. Then he leaned toward the big guy and said, “I’ll give you back your cigarettes if you give me back my wallet.”

Immediately, the big guy got friendly. He said his name was Angelo. I asked how many scippatori (thieves) were on this tram. Angelo looked around and said six. Bob suggested coffee. Angelo brought us to the same café Mario and Tony had taken us to in 2001. Angelo was warm and jolly, insisted on paying, and tried to get us to have some pastry. He said that next time we come to Naples, he will be our host for lunch.

Naples hospitality: first they steal from you, then they want to buy you lunch.

This is part 2 of 4. Part 1 —    Part 3

A birthday invitation to my family and friends: please join me in opting out of the birthday-present tradition. Why do we deserve presents on our birthdays? If and when I find or think of the perfect gift for you, I want to give it to you right then and there, regardless of the date. Children, up to a certain age depending on the child, may get birthday presents. Then, after reaching an age of understanding, they should not. That’s my theory. But there’s more.

For many years, I have felt that only one birthday gift makes sense, and I’m embarrassed that it has taken me so long to implement the idea myself. On one’s birthday, the only person who deserves a present is one’s mother.

Birthday cards, calls, and emails are fine but not necessary. Personally, I like them, in both directions. Gifts on other occasions are fine. I’m not against gifts. I’ll accept them any time, even on my birthday. But I really wish that tradition would go away. Give me a gift when you find the perfect thing, or if I especially deserve one. Not just because the calendar flips to the anniversary of my birth.

I know why it’s taken me so long to actually do this: I’ve been chicken. It’s severely counterculture. I don’t want to be perceived as stingy, cheap, or uncaring. I don’t want to be the only one doing it. And I’m pretty sure this new practice will be an unpopular option.

But here I go. I’ll lead, and hope to start a new tradition. Who’ll join me? In whole or in part, in theory or in practice, scroll down a bit (or click here) and commit with a comment here, if you dare.