Thiefhunters in Paradise

Bob Arno in Quartieri Spagnoli, Naples, Italy.

Stung by a Wasp: Scooter-Riding Bandits
Buzz Bob and Bambi

I didn’t think it could happen to me.

There was no forewarning. One moment Bambi and I were walking down a narrow, cobblestone alley in Naples’ Centro Storico, having just looked back at an empty street. The next moment I was grabbed from behind, like a Heimlich maneuver—except I wasn’t choking on chicken. I was being mugged and there were three of them.

There was nothing slick about it; they were just fast and singularly focused on my 30-year-old Rolex. Without finesse, it was merely a crude attempt to break the metal strap. What these amateurs didn’t know was that they had selected a mark who had himself lifted hundreds of thousands of watches in his career as an honest crook.

Until now, I had never been on the receiving end of my game, even though I’d strolled often through ultimate pocket-picking grounds in Cartegena, the souks in Cairo, and La Rambla in Barcelona. I’d been pushed and shoved using public transportation like the Star Ferry in Hong Kong and rush-hour subways in Tokyo, London, and New York; yet I’d never been a victim.

A typical street in Naples' Quartieri Spagnoli.

Finally my luck turned—I’m not sure for the good or bad—during a visit to Naples, Italy. Though I hadn’t been there in some fifteen years, I knew full well about its slick pickpockets, and particularly about the infamous scippatori. This latter is a unique style of rip-off which involves speeding scooters and short Italians with long arms. Little did I know that I would finally become a statistic in what must be one of the world’s highest concentrations of muggings and pickpocketings in an area of less than a square mile: Quartieri Spagnoli, a district even the police avoid.

Scippatori are marauding teams of pirates on motor scooters. The scooter of choice is the Vespa, a nimble machine with a plaintive buzz which, when carrying a pair of highway bandits, delivers a surprising sting. Scippatori ply their vicious bag-snatching chicanery on unsuspecting tourists in Italy, and in Naples particularly. Handbags and gold chains are plucked as easily as ripe oranges by backseat riders in daring dash-and-grab capers.

It was therefore with extreme caution that Bambi and I walked these streets, popular with tourists primarily as a gateway city. It’s the starting point for ferry trips to Capri, bus tours to Pompeii, and drives along the spectacular Amalfi-Sorrento Coast. Let me emphasize starting point. Even Naples’ car rental companies urge tourists to drive directly out of town.

Though it hardly matches the beauty or historical magnitude of Rome, Venice, or Florence, Bambi wanted to photograph the colorful Quartieri Spagnoli. Its old section, the Centro Storico, has a seedy, rustic, old-world fascination, with its dismal balconied apartments stacked on minuscule dreary shops. As we walked, I reminded my wife that this was the birthplace of pickpocketing, and I scrutinized every scooter that buzzed by, making sure we were out of reach.

Shot from the back of a moving Vespa.

It was mid-afternoon, siesta time, as Bambi and I strolled the deserted lanes. Little light filtered down through the seven or eight stories of laundry hanging above the narrow alleys. Almost all the shops were shut, their steel shutters rolled down and padlocked, and it was quiet except for the snarl of traffic on Via Toledo, the perimeter street. A lone shellfish monger remained, amid shallow dishes of live cockles, clams, snails, and cigalo glittering in water. Though we were practically alone in the area, we frequently glanced behind us.

Still, they caught us completely off-guard. With silence their foil, they rolled down a hill: three young thugs on a Vespa scooter, its engine off. One guy remained on the scooter, ready to bolt; another held me with my arms pinned to my sides, and the third tried to tear the watch off my wrist. It was sudden, quick, and silent. No shouts or vulgar threats.

It’s a joke, I thought that first crucial instant, expecting a friend or fan to say “Gottcha!” I’m quite often grabbed by people who’ve seen me perform; they like to make me faux-victim as a sort of role-reversing prank. Although this vice-grip felt deadly serious, my thought process, instant and automatic, cost me several seconds. I didn’t fight back with a sharp elbow or kick. And because my reflexes never got into gear, I didn’t have a chance to coil my muscles into a protective stance.

Decorative street marking in Quartieri Spagnoli.

Fortunately, pickpockets are generally petty criminals who can easily be scared off. They prefer stealth, diversion, and speed to violence as their modus operandi. Bambi reacted a moment before I did, bravely smashing my captor on the head with her umbrella. Other than breaking the umbrella, this had no effect at all.

As soon as my adrenaline kicked in, I yelled at the top of my voice “Polizia, polizia.” Years of stage speaking enabled me to project my voice throughout the neighborhood. Instant reaction! They scrambled away as fast as they had appeared.

We walked away, lucky but shaken. My steel watchband didn’t give despite considerable force applied in attempting to snap its pin. All I had lost was my own track record. I could no longer claim that pickpockets had never tried to steal from me.

Bambi still tenses at the buzz of a motorcycle behind her—not a bad legacy, perhaps. And both of us now strip down to skin and cloth when visiting this most colorful district. The proof of my own stupidity, namely, wearing a Rolex in Naples, was a scratched up wrist. I should have known better.

Scippatori in training?

First rule for avoiding pickpockets: don’t attract them. Don’t signal you’re worth their while. Second rule: acknowledge that it can happen to anyone. Whether you’re strong, confident, aware, or careful, you are not immune. Even a veteran pickpocket can become a victim.

Excerpt from Travel Advisory: How to Avoid Thefts, Cons, and Street Scams
Chapter Two (part-e): Research Before You Go

Holger Enge

How did I learn to become a pickpocket? That’s the most common question I get after my presentations and during television interviews. They want to know if I started out as a street pickpocket and if I had a thief mentor à la Fagin.

No. I had a comedy mentor.

As a teenager, I had a strong sense of sarcastic observation humor, which later became my stage persona and trademark. But as a young Swedish entertainer, I had a difficult time grasping the finer points of comedy writing. One man helped me tremendously. This post is in memory of a great comedic mind, a supportive buddy, and a long-time close friend.

His name was Holger Enge, and no other creative mind had a stronger impact on my career. Holger will be sorely missed, not just by me but by the hundreds of friends, business associates, and all the comedy acquaintances who came in contact with him at trade shows, business dealings, and in private.

Holger died too young. Only 61, he became a victim of a rather rare illness called Cushing’s Syndrome.

He and I were friends for more than thirty years. In the early seventies most of my engagements were in production shows at various casinos around the world. By that time, I had established myself as a respected ‘specialty act.’ There was no shortage of offers and I was lucky in that engagements usually lasted for a year in each venue. It gave me a tremendous opportunity to experiment with new material.

Although I had my pickpocket act down pat, a twenty-two-minute audience participation presentation that was foremost a mélange of visual situation humor, I craved strong ‘lines’ and clever patter. I was obsessed in my search for better banter. Having English as my second language didn’t make this challenge any easier. I taped comedians on talk shows at every opportunity. My goal was to analyze the structure and the set-ups of the jokes. My heroes were Don Rickles, Shecky Greene, and Richard Pryor.

It was at this time that I met Holger Enge. He quickly became my main writer. While other specialty acts were concerned with buying comedy props, I was dreaming heckler lines twenty-four hours a day. Holger lived in Toronto and I was working in Freeport, Grand Bahamas, when I saw a small ad in Variety newspaper. Holger was offering a comedy newsletter with generic comedy lines for disc jockeys. I bought a few issues and was impressed.

In 1973 I asked Holger if he would write specifically for my show and especially for my watch routines. In those years he charged around $25 for each line I approved. A lot of this was on spec. I would receive a fresh lot of pages every two weeks or so. There was a lot of correspondence back and forth defining material, declining and/or approving structure and re-writes. He nailed it. He really understood my style, but it soon became obvious that he had to come and see my show to take this collaborative effort to a higher plateau.

I invited Holger to come and visit me in Freeport for a week and see what we could do together, as a team, versus a long-distance affair. And so started a long and productive friendship. I invited him to come and stay with me in different places around the world, mostly in the West Indies, and in London. And I introduced him to a few other comedy performers who also liked his style and creative mind. His lines were snappy and fresh, often a tad risqué, but no more blue than other comedians’ lines at the time. I eagerly waited for his envelopes with the usual pages of comedy lines.

This went on for many years. It was a rush to open up the pages, try out some of the lines, and see what hit home and what only got lukewarm response. Eventually my own style changed, and I was finally able to create my own comedy, often at the spur of the moment. The need for an outside writer was no longer as important. But it was Holger who gave me the confidence and the direction I needed to realize my dream of success as comedy performer. I was no longer remembered only for my pickpocketing stunts, but for my comedy attitude, too.

Holger was very much instrumental in this achievement. I wonder how many successful entertainers, or other artists, can attribute their success to one particular individual? Or how many would like to acknowledge the influence of one source?

In the last four months, since the onset of his illness, he wrote some of his best observation humor—about his own health and his many experiences with hospitals, tests, and experts. On meeting his surgeon “with the gravest face you have ever seen,” he said his “palpitations sped up to match the heartbeat of a hummingbird on crack!”

With the swelling in my face, I look a bit like a pink gold fish. Better yet, if you can find some bright yellow hypo-allergenic face paint, you can do up my face like a giant SMILE button, slap a string on my ass, and take me out on Halloween! You’ll get a lot of candy!

An eye.

[Finally, a few words from Bob Arno.]

As we travel the world every year, we interact with organized crime figures, street criminals, and security personnel along the way, observing and absorbing the latest trends in criminal behavior and the latest techniques. Over the past twenty years, I have maintained dialogs and communications with some rather interesting criminal minds on four continents. But talking about security issues and criminal behavior, on the internet or to media in general, is always a dilemma. Yes, it’s useful to reveal the latest scoop about the rogue fringe of society, but by bringing revelations into the open we might tip our hand to the bad guys.

Striking up conversations with criminals usually means we first have to detect them, identify them, and somehow confirm that they really are thieves—unless we have direct cooperation from law enforcement agencies. We’ve developed unique skills in detecting criminal behavior and patterns that we recognize before the crimes take place. Modern crime prevention is often based on similar methods and techniques, and written into algorithms for computer analysis. Yes, they are obviously very different depending on the country where the criminals are active, the type of crimes anticipated, and other cultural factors. In security circles, a common word for this analytical activity is “redflagging.”

Bambi Vincent, Kevin Mitnick, and Bob Arno.

The kick-in-the-pants for this post came from an incident we became privy to in Atlanta last week, while there to address the ASIS annual conference—the world’s largest security convention. Kevin Mitnick, the famous (or infamous) former hacker—is there such a thing as former hacker?—was also there, as a presenter and panel host on Internet abuses. Kevin, always full of new anecdotes and intriguing ‘backend’ stories, is an old friend of ours. It was his exhaustive airport encounter earlier that day (with ICE, US customs, and the FBI) that got me thinking about redflagging, which is what entangled Kevin.

In the past few weeks, two books have been published which both indirectly focus on redflagging, how to isolate a certain behavior from the norm, and then to draw conclusions. This is not exactly science, but reasonable speculation. Behavior is an extension of human emotion; it’s difficult to completely suppress our emotions, and therefore our behavior.

The new books are The War Within: Secret White House, by Bob Woodward, and The Numerati, by Stephen Becker. Both books allude to new and secret formulas used by the U.S. government as well as the private sector, to fight terrorism and crime in general. Woodward’s book speculates about isolating terrorist leaders and taking them out with precise weapons. In his blog, Schneier on Security, Bruce Schneier wagers that Woodward is talking about “tagging.” The speculation centers around new technologies, but we can be quite certain that some algorithms on behavior are reasons for the new successes in the war on terrorism.

Lips

The other book, The Numerati, is not about politics or security developments. It’s about the latest trends in analyzing emerging patterns by drilling through data banks. A good review, “Drilling Through Data,” can be read in The Wall Street Journal, and there’s an interview with the author on NPR. The book discusses security software analytics. The last part of the book covers irregular pattern recognition and Jeff Jonas’ work in the casino industry. A good introduction to the world of Jeff Jonas and his contribution to the security industry is posted in O’Reilly’s Etech Conference pages from March 2008. Jeff Jonas works for IBM (and we assume for divisions of our National Security Agency, in some capacity or another). To get the gist of his talk on casino scams and how to detect crime in casinos using surveillance technology coupled with databases of known criminals, you have to drill further. This is very good reading for those with an interest in irregular pattern recognition.

Neither book sheds any precise information on what we want to know most: what are the security agencies concentrating on when they assemble their “trip wires” for redflagging? And that’s good; why should we let the other side know how they’re spotted?

Forehead

In its most simplistic application, analytics are used in surveillance software in the retail and hospitality industries, and in public places. For example, the scanning of individuals hovering or loitering around an entrance or in a hotel lobby; the number of seconds a cash register’s drawer stays open in a store; how the hands of the employee at that cash register move; the angle of the hand holding the credit card (think portable skimmers).

All of which is just foreplay to the real issue: the behavior of terrorists. What speed or pace and how do they walk when approaching a target? How does a female terrorist behave differently from a male? How do they behave when stopped or challenged? And most important, what about their face reactions? Can a telephoto video scanner pick up micro-expressions and can the latest research by people like Dr. Paul Ekman and Mark Frank map these movements with accuracy?

Fake smile.

For some interesting current examples of micro-expressions, watch again the recent Sarah Palin interview on ABC Evening News with Charles Gibson.   The moments for interpretation come at three minutes and 59 seconds, when Charles Gibson asks her if she has ever met with foreign heads of states. More of the same expressions when Gibson asks whether Russia was provoked to go into Georgia, five minutes and 13 seconds into the interview. And finally, at eight minutes and 34 seconds, at the question about the Bush Doctrine. Whether the clenching, lip protrusion, closing of eyes, and swaying can be interpreted as precise proof of one thing or another is up to the students of Paul Ekman.

Redflagging as a form of profiling is controversial. My points above illustrate how complex and far-reaching the conclusions may be to our society. I have not even touched on the privacy angle, the national security aspects, and what the bad guys can do to counteract the revelations made by media on the latest security innovations. Ultimately it comes down to the old argument: what do we keep secret (for national security) and what do we allow the public to know in order to protect privacy and maintain open political dialogs?

My objective today is to draw attention to the constant need to fine-tune information analytics. It is the lack of qualified experts drawing useful conclusions, which has triggered all kinds of recent mishaps, near financial ruin, and security lapses. This article is not meant to start new political discussions on security secrecy or privacy protection. Others who specialize in advancing and protecting both viewpoints are far more qualified.

[The facial features above belong to confirmed criminals, photographed during interrogation.]