Monthly Archives: September 2009

When TSA confiscates your pocket knife…

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Mammut MicroTool pocketknife.

Mammut MicroTool pocketknife.

Brother-in-law, though a frequent flyer, forgot to move his pocket knife from his carry-on to his checked bag. He groaned when TSA discovered it. The knife was a gift from us, a gorgeous little oval less than two inches long, but heavy and well-made. Bob and I found it on a trip to Germany, and bought one for ourselves, too. A Mammut MicroTool, it’s called.

B-I-L, the self-proclaimed Swedish Okie and country bumpkin, was on his way back to Sweden. When the TSA officer dangled the contraband with its dangerous half-inch blade, B-I-L recognized a glint of proud ownership in the eye of the new beholder. The officer beheld a prize. B-I-L is a sore loser.

B-I-L snatched the knife away, determined that it should not slip beneath the crumpled handkerchief in the warm pocket of the TSO. He could not bear the thought of his fine knife snug among the unmentionables, in pilled cotton intimacy under an overhanging gut. B-I-L intended to destroy the little tool.

He hadn’t counted on the strength of the precision German instrument. He ripped, he stomped, he tried to bend. It took him fifteen minutes to render the tool unusable, the stubborn vengeful bumpkin.

Mammut knife, open

I know a man in Las Vegas who makes his living on the forgetfulness of travelers. He buys great lots of TSA’s confiscated pocket knives for pittance at auction, and sells them one by one on eBay. (The profit, they say, is in the “shipping and handling” fee.) He’s never seen a fine little tool like the exotic Mammut MicroTool. He must get an, um, filtered selection.

What we call “confiscated items,” TSA refers to as “voluntary abandoned property.” [sic] If I were a TSO, I’d protest the extra work involved in providing envelopes to passengers. I’d say it’s a bad idea. It would mean I’d have to hand over an envelope, wait for the passenger to address it, then collect a fat fee and provide a receipt. All that work! No more perks!

© Copyright 2008-2009 Bambi Vincent. All rights reserved.

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Hotel safe theft

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vault lock

What would you do if you opened the safe behind the hotel manager’s desk and found your passports gone? One woman took creative action.

Mary from Michigan and her two adult children just quit their jobs and sold or stored everything. They’re taking a year to travel the world. Oh, what a plan!

After seeing our show, Mary told us about her recent visit to Laos. She and her son and daughter stored their stuff in Bangkok and took a boat down the Mekong to Laos. There, Mary put her few valuables into the hotel lobby safe: the family’s three passports bundled with $2,000 folded into an envelope, and some very large camera lenses.

empty safe

When she went to retrieve her things, only the lenses remained. Mary quickly discovered that one key opened all twenty safe deposit boxes, and her interrogation of the hotel manager led her to suspect an employee (rather than a guest).

Mary channeled her fear and anger and made a plan. She and her kids fanned out among the alleys surrounding the hotel and shouted into the darkness with volume and authority. “I’ll pay $200 for the stolen passports!” Within half an hour, Mary was lightly tapped on her shoulder, the passports, still bundled, proffered.

And Mary paid up. She told me that people think she was crazy to pay, but she’d promised. The thieves hadn’t discovered the $2,000.

© Copyright 2008-2009 Bambi Vincent. All rights reserved.

Also read: Purse stolen off lap

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Airport bags for liquids

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bags-in-bubbles

The new 3-1-1 profit is here. Or in Ireland, anyway. For a euro ($1.47), you get two quart-size plastic bags in a plastic egg.

The retail price for a 1-quart ziptop plastic bag, if bought in bulk, is as low as 8¢. Airports pay a mere fraction of that and give the bags away.

Look at the expense the airport in Cork, Ireland goes to in order to profit from the bags. Elaborate packaging, huge vending machines, multiple instruction placards, packaging waste, and maintenance of the whole setup.

3-1-1 bag-in-a-bubble vending machines.

3-1-1 bag-in-a-bubble vending machines.

Something from nothing.
Anybody buying?
©copyright 2000-2009. All rights reserved. Bambi Vincent

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Aggressive hospitality

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hello

A reader of this blog recently wrote to me and described a suspicious encounter:

In Dublin, I noticed a tall young man in a green sweater keeping pace behind us, regardless of our window shopping. I turned down a busy side street, and he turned with us. We turned back to our original route, and the fellow with the green sweater appeared to be gone. Then I noticed that the same man was again following us, with the sweater rolled up and behind is back. I suddenly turned and said, “Good morning. How’s your day going so far?” The fellow said “Fine,” and then turned and walked off.

—Vern (and Pattie) Leming

may i help you?

I like the way Vern confronted his green sweater suspect. What he did is actually what many police and security officers do. It’s called aggressive hospitality: a friendly encounter meant to indicate “I see you, I’m watching.”

At a street festival, for example, police want to prevent incidents. When they spot a known suspect lurking, or an unknown person exhibiting suspicious behavior, they may confront the person with a friendly question: “Enjoying the festival?” or “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” A security guard at a theme park or in a mall will do the same. “Have you lost someone?”

good afternoon

Walmart practices the same principle to stem shoplifting. Called the “10-foot rule” there, store employees greet every customer who comes near them. If employees suspect shoplifting in progress, they offer to help the customer with his shopping.

how"s your day?

Hotels and resorts also engage in aggressive hospitality. While guests notice a friendly staff greeting them at every turn, thieves, rogues, and transgressors lose their anonymity and feel watched.

welcome

Richard Buske, Security Manager of Nordic Hotels, takes this philosophy a step further. All staff members at his hotels are trained in security matters. All are taught to be observant and are praised for alerting management to suspicious behavior. Security is considered a team effort to be conducted in a friendly, positive manner.

© Copyright 2008-2009 Bambi Vincent. All rights reserved.

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David Avadon dead at 60

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David Avadon

David Avadon, a friend and associate of mine, died of a heart attack in a gym in Los Angeles. David was recently billed as The King of Pickpockets. Although he wasn’t a close friend, we had many long and interesting chats over the years. Our intense passion for the research of stage pickpocketing was equal both in seriousness and determination to find hidden truth and facts. But we were competitors and, as such, we were cautious of sharing information.

I first met David in 1990 when he used to visit the Bally/MGM showroom in Las Vegas where I was the featured attraction for three years in the Jubilee! show. He would always come with Ricki Dunn, another pickpocket entertainer (and good friend of mine). Ricki and David were close friends for over twenty years, and Ricki was later profiled extensively in David’s book Cutting Up Touches, probably the best book ever written about stage pickpocketing and the artists practicing the art.

For his book, David managed to track down obscure facts about the jealously and infighting among stage performers. The anecdotes come fast and furious; the guarded secrecy surrounding techniques were a dominant factor in all relationships among vaudeville pickpocket entertainers then, and pickpockets now.

I never saw David perform in a live show so I cannot comment on his skill, but I know that he was a warm and outgoing performer with a tremendous knowledge about this very narrow and secretive performance art. I’m quite certain that his library on the art is far more extensive than any other private collection anywhere today. David was not a criminologist, but a collector of performance memorabilia on pickpocketing. It will be interesting to see where this library eventually goes—hopefully to an institution where aspiring performers can have access.

The art of pickpocketing is a tightly protected art form and it’s darn impossible to get the real facts or true techniques revealed. Basically because stage pickpocketing (versus stealing in the streets) depends on the individual persona of the performer and how he adapts his mannerism and personality to the extraction techniques. It is a marriage of the two that fosters a dynamic pickpocket show. Other related artists, like magicians and jugglers, might succeed without projecting a personality, on sheer finger technique and practiced skill. Pickpocketing incorporates psychology, reading the body language of a victim, creating good diversion techniques, and of course timing during extraction. It also requires a strong sense of comedy, and to some extent quick verbal skills and improvisation. Without those combined ingredients the show will fall flat.

This is why there are few pickpocket entertainers today (or ever). It’s extremely hard to learn and turn into effective entertainment. David’s book mentions many of the deceased pickpocket entertainers of the past three or four decades. Few had much impact outside the country or city where they worked. The successful ones could be counted on one hand: Borra, Dominique, Vic Perry, and Giovanni.

David Avadon b&w

Today, major production houses and television talent shows like Cirque du Soleil and America’s Got Talent attempt to incorporate the art of pickpocketing—without much success. Manufacturing this talent, from a producer’s point of view, is not easy. Cirque du Soleil tried by gathering all the known video tapes of successful performers and invited aspiring pickpocket talent to come to their workshop in Montreal to screen the routines of the masters with the intent of creating a pickpocket segment in their show. And when was the last time you saw a good pickpocket segment on a talent show, like America’s Got Talent? And yet, every season they send out requests to agents and managers for pickpocket entertainers. The art form has few practitioners.

David Avadon helped keep the spirit of this murky art form alive. His book and his research will live on. Cutting Up Touches was small in size but large in content. Goodbye, David. Let’s hope you meet your old pickpocket pals and mentors in the next waystation.

Other fine pickpocket performers:
Borra,  April 26, 1921—October 11, 1998
Ricki Dunn, April 2, 1929—January 29, 1999
Chappy Brazil, Nov. 26, 1964—June 27, 1998
©copyright 2000-2009. All rights reserved. Bob Arno

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How Bernanke’s ID thieves did it

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Shonya Michelle Young (Credit: U.S. Marshal Service)

Shonya Michelle Young (Credit: U.S. Marshal Service)

Anna Bernanke hung her purse on the back of a chair at Starbucks. It was stolen and, soon after, she and Ben became victims of identity theft.

It’s extremely simple to steal a purse that isn’t attached to a person. It could be on the back of a chair, on an empty chair, or on the floor. Bob’s done it many times for television news shows. Yep, even in busy coffee shops and mall food courts, where you’d think a few people would notice. It has to do with how you drape a coat over the purse.

In her handbag, Anna carried what thieves call a spread: credit card, identification, checks, and her Social Security card (shame on her!). This is the jackpot for a pickpocket and identity theft ring.

Not all pickpockets know how to exploit checks and credit cards. But by now they know at least to sell them. In the old days, some thieves would actually bother to drop them in a mailbox.

Some pickpockets have their own ID theft specialists on staff or on call. When they snag a bag containing a spread, they want to cash a hefty check or two, and they want a fat cash advance on the credit card. They could just buy murch—stuff at a store—but then they’d get just a fraction of its value from a fence. A cash advance is the best, especially in cities with casinos. The thieves can request several advances simultaneously, at different casinos. Each will be approved because none has actually been granted yet. A thief can easily make about $60,000 in an hour with just one credit card.

I wrote of this in a forum a few years ago, and someone asked:

How can they get a cash advance without showing an ID matching their face to the name on the card? Whenever I’m in Vegas I get asked for ID when using credit cards even for a 5.00 purchase.

That’s where the pickpocket’s staff comes in. These thieves have a covey of accomplices on standby. “A blonde, a brunette, an Asian, an older woman with gray hair, and a heavy-set,” a practitioner of this business told me. They call them look-alikes. When the pickpocket gets a check or credit card with ID, he phones the accomplice who looks most like the victim (and that doesn’t have to be much!). The accomplice practices the victim’s signature a time or two, then goes to collect the cash advance (which the thief applied for at a machine.) At this point, the accomplice is referred to as a writer. She writes the check or signs for the cash advance. The harried teller or cashier takes a quick glance, sees a vague resemblance (maybe thinks: oh, honey, you’re having a bad day), and doles out the cash under pressure to serve the next person in line.

The suddenly-infamous George Lee Reid was [allegedly] the identity theft ring’s writer of one of Bernanke’s checks, at a bank in Maryland. The ring’s main writer, Shonya Michelle Young (pictured above), has just been captured. In her possession, she had fake ID, credit cards in the name of others, and “wigs worn while cashing fraudulent checks.”

More on look-alikes later.

Reminder to women: don’t hang your purse on the back of your chair. Don’t put it on the floor unless you put your foot through the strap. Reminder to men: valuables in your coat pockets are vulnerable if you hang the coat on the back of a chair.
© Copyright 2008-2009 Bambi Vincent. All rights reserved.

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