AS breaks omertà . I film feet.
Naples, Italy— For most of this day, we’ve been accompanied by Mario, a friend and fabulous translator. Born in Italy, educated in Australia, now settled in Las Vegas, Mario grew up speaking textbook Italian at home while secretly imitating his parents’ Napolitano dialect, which he wasn’t allowed to use.
Pacco men secretly switch bags before finalizing a sale.
“No way!” Mario had said earlier, as Officer DC explained why the pacco men are allowed to continue their bait-and-switch scam year after year. They were now offering Bob a cell phone as we traversed their territory, not noticing our plainclothes police pal. When they recognized DC, they flocked around him like awestruck fans. DC eventually pushed through the gangster gauntlet, complaining that we’d never get to lunch if we stopped to talk with every crook. [More on bait-and-switch, eventually.]
Two scippatori cornered Bob. Five or six scooters buzzed us repeatedly, eyeing his Rolex. It’s a fake. Of course our cameras were at great risk, as well.
We turn into the Quartieri Spagnoli telling Mario how it’s not just your ordinary neighborhood. We pass the spot where Bob had been pinned from behind so long ago, a two-handed Rolex-robbery attempted on his old model by three of AS’s butterfingered predecessors. DC selects an empty trattoria. He orders “a mixture” for all of us, and a feast arrives, plate by small plate. Crisp-fried sardines, miniature arugula, zucchini flowers, and the tenderest calamari we’ve ever eaten.
Balconies, laundry, and steep stairs personify the quarter as much as crime.
“Watch your bag,” DC cautions Bob, who sits closest to the open door. DC, of course, has his back to the wall. “Do you know how they steal a watch when you’re driving a car?
“Yes,” I say. “When you’re stuck in traffic, they squeeze between cars on their scooters and fold your side mirror to get by. You reach out to fix the mirror and the next scooter-rider grabs it.”
DC seems disappointed that I know.
“How would they do it if you wear your watch on your right wrist?”
I say I don’t know.
“They make you shake hands, for some reason,” Bob suggests. DC doesn’t say.
Naples, Italy— We’re introduced to AS, tattooed and be-dogged, in front of his female family members. Women of several generations sit in plastic chairs in the shady alley—shady as in dim and dubious—surrounded by lots of girls, one with an arm in a cast. The men, presumably, are mostly in prison. The boys, presumably, are out on scooters, scippatori-in-training. Two little boys, six or seven years old, buzz by on the cutest little scooter, a perfect replica with authentic speed and a full-size spine-chilling whine. If you’ve ever been the victim of scippatori, scooter-riding bandits, as we sort-of were in 1994, the beginning of our street-crime research, you never forget the sound.
Much of my filming here looks like this.“One Rolex Presidente is worth about $16,000—with diamonds.” Officer DC introduced us to AT in 2002.
When we first met DC three years ago, he and a colleague gave Bob and me a tour of this hillside hood on the backs of their souped-up motorcycles. He introduced us to AT, another of the top three Rolex thieves, who is now taking a five-year chill. When we asked, AT had copped to stealing about ten Rolexes a week. And that was in the presence of a police officer. But AT was skittish about the video camera we held in plain sight. He wasn’t worried about being identified; he said he didn’t want to show a bad image of Naples.
Two-handed steal: AS opens the first clasp with his thumb, then pulls and twists and runs.How to steal a Rolex: demonstration by a Rolex thief.
Like AT three years ago, AS speaks in front of Officer DC as if he were a collaborator, not a cop. At Bob’s request, he shows some methods of stealing Rolexes. One style is to grab the face and twist it. But it depends on the age of the watch. The old ones could be swiped by a single person. New ones take two. AS snaps a Rolex on Bob, who sports plastic today, and demonstrates a two-handed rip-off. I ask if I can videotape the demo from behind and AS allows it.
Quartieri Spagnoli, a scenic but dangerous part of Naples, Italy.
Naples, Italy— Here’s something you didn’t know about Rolex theft. It takes two men to steal a new model Rolex, while the older ones can be snatched by a single person. That’s the sort of gem our research nets, if we don’t piss off the mafiosi by pointing a camera into their faces (while they’re looking). Their rottweilers look like overstuffed pups, but you know there’s a reason the dogs are kept close, and you know the animals’ allegiance is backed by ferocious power, flesh-shredding choppers, and bone-crunching jaws.
Nice doggy!
I wonder if Rolex is aware that it doubled labor requirements in the hostile acquisitions market? Still, everyone wears a Rolex in this neighborhood. The children of thieves wear them. “They don’t have one euro in their pocket,” we’re told, “but they wear a Rolex.”
The manpower numbers come straight from an expert: one of the three major Rolex thieves in the capital city of Rolex theft. “AS” [can’t use real names, sorry], our source today, is currently at large; but his two buddies are in jail, arrested by our guide and host, Officer DC, of Naples’ Falchi Squad, the tough undercover cops who fight power with power.
The steel door is opened for Officer DC while Bob peeks in. Blasé womenfolk wonder: another raid?
So it’s a strange sort of respect and cooperation and turning a blind eye when DC knocks on the big steel door in the heart of Quartieri Spagnoli, Naples’ no-go zone if you’re not mafia (or police). A peek-a-boo slot opens and words are exchanged. “No video,” Officer DC says to me, drawing a big square around his face. I take it to mean that I can film, but not faces.
High and Dry on the Streets of Elsewhere
Chapter One, part-g, Travel Advisory—
Barcelona, a fusion of passion and creativity, chaos and order, where art is in every detail, is a living laboratory of street crime. It’s one of our favorite places in which to study this bizarre subculture, and it supports a great diversity of practitioners from the various branches of thievery. With patience and practice, the keen-eyed observer will be rewarded with abundant examples of pickpocketing, bag snatching, and three-shell games.
On duty, Bob and I saunter and prowl, observant and suspicious. It’s the height of summer and the crowds are thick as—well, thick as thieves. We’re hypertuned to inappropriate behavior; suspects pop out of the crowd as if they have TV-news graphic circles drawn around them. One of us merely has to say “ten o’clock” and the other glances slightly left and knows exactly who, of the hundreds in view, is meant.
What are those pop-art pictures called, the wallpaper-like fields of swirly pattern that, when stared at long enough finally push forward an object or scene? Stereograms, I think. Blink, and the object disappears into the repetition of the pattern. Likewise our suspects: with concentration, we force them to materialize out of sameness into a dimension all their own.
But in two ways, they easily return to the background. First, we may lose them: they’re too fast; they turn a corner; they duck into an alley we don’t want to enter; or we turn our attention elsewhere. Second, their behavior is suddenly validated: for example, a fast moving pair of men looking left and right, darting ahead of clusters, purpose in their pace and us on their tail, eventually catch up to their wives. Perfectly innocent! In Venice, in Lima, in Barcelona, we wasted energy observing the bizarre behavior of deviants who turned out to be perverts. They just wanted to rub up against women, not pick their purses. Once, we tracked a pair of plainclothes police. Sure, we follow lots of dead ends-just as directors audition endless rejects.
Martyn Jacques, lead singer of The Tiger Lillies. Photo by Schorle.
As Bob and I travel the world in our role as thiefhunters, we hang with outlaws and shady characters. The Tiger Lillies sing songs about the underworld culture we study. I like their twisted take on taboo subjects, their lullabies of filth and scandal. Their genre is macabre cabaret: upside down ballads of misery and despair. Lots of songs about pimps, pushers, prostitutes, pickpockets, and other perps and perverts — but they’re sung disarmingly sweet and harmonic, with catchy rhythms.
National Public Radio has a little segment in its Weekend America series called Weekend Soundtrack. Listeners submit a favorite song for weekend listening and talk about it on the radio.
Back in October, I submitted a song. I wanted to get The Tiger Lillies some good exposure, and I know how good NPR exposure can be. When we were on our book sales spiked and we got calls from media around the world.
A week after my submission, Michael Raphael, from AmericanPublicMedia.org, emailed:
Bambi, I would love to talk to you about your weekend soundtrack. When are you available?
I gave him some open windows but heard nothing back. I wrote him a few times and got replies like:
Sorry Bambi, I’ve been swamped. Are you in the US this week?
and later:
Sorry Bambi — it has been a mad scramble toward the end of the year hear [sic]. I will be out of town until 1/5. I hate to do this, but let’s try and pick this up the week of 1/7.
After that I gave up.
Shucks. I really wanted to do it. I’m surprised at the rude behavior of American Public Media, too. Screw ’em, though.
When my “weekend” comes around, I like to play Souvenirs, by The Tiger Lillies. I like the body-twitching sound of it. I like the unusual voice of singer Martyn Jacques and — who would expect to love accordion as accompaniment? Go ahead—click the link to play the song, if you dare.
The song is about someone who has a huge collection of souvenirs from around the world, but they’re all scars and sicknesses. Bob and I travel around the world about 250 days a year, so we have a lot of souvenirs, too. None as ghoulish, though. My collection is mostly intangible and made of memories, cultural experiences, and awareness of the wider world.
The character in the song now has a regular job — he works in a fairground — and he deals with people he has little in common with, people with ordinary lives and jobs. He has trouble relating to these people, and would rather find an excuse to tell about his travels. Being on the road and out of the U.S. so much for the past 15 years, I’m mostly out of touch with popular culture and can’t participate in conversations about television shows, celebrities, or sports.
For me, the “weekend” is really a trip-end, no matter the day of the week. Souvenirs is my unpacking song, as I sort the laundry from the unworn, put away things, and pull out my own souvenirs. Over the years we’ve brought home a lot. No diseases that we know about, and no serious injuries, as in the song.
The Tiger Lillies made a wonderful record based on unpublished poems given to them by Edward Gorey, recorded with the Kronos Quartet, called The Gorey End. My favorite Tiger Lillies songs are a bit too risque for radio: Maria, about a murdered woman, Trampled Lily, about a girl who gets sucked into a life of abuse and prostitution and dies young; Angel, and Pretty Lisa, both with similar themes, and Weeping Chandelier (the Gorey End version), which is a beautiful and haunting tango with Kronos Quartet. I guess their lyrics keep The Tiger Lillies off the radio, which is a terrible shame. Since I started listening to them only two years ago, I find other music rather boring. Lucky for me, the Tiger Lillies have more than 20 albums out.
Here are some of the souvenirs I’ve carried home:
Lamps from Holland, South Africa, Spain,
Germany, and Poland.
Beaded necklaces from Kenya, Italy, South Africa,
Peru, Tahiti, and Costa Rica. Amber from the Baltic,
and old silver from India.
Masks from Borneo, Indonesia, Thailand, Peru,
Alaska, Papua New Guinea, and Panama.
I’d like to hear what you think of Souvenirs. Care to comment?
Terry, on a slow and controlled Orwell kick, quoted a couple of paragraphs on debauchery. I guess considering it was 1946, Orwell can be excused for excluding vegetarians from the pleasure. We can debauch as well as the rest of them. But to quote Terry quoting Orwell,
… vegetarians are always scandalized by this attitude. As they see it, the only rational objective is to avoid pain and to stay alive as long as possible. If you refrain from drinking alcohol, or eating meat, or whatever it is, you may expect to live an extra five years, while if you overeat or overdrink you will pay for it in acute physical pain on the following day.
Which made me think of the Danes. I can’t remember (or find) where I read this recently, but the article said that the Danes are among the happiest people in the EU, have the shortest life expectancy, and are among the biggest smokers. Their attitude? Live life to the max. Debauch! Who needs a few extra years?
A 1995 abstract (Institute of Risk Research, University of Waterloo, Canada) measured smoking in three principal dimensions and applied it to the Danes:
…Danish data on smoking; the cost for a typical pack-a-day habit is equivalent to a 57% reduction in personal income, 8.6 years loss of life expectancy, or a 4% drop in the Life Quality Index.
I’m going to have a glass or Ricard while I cook dinner now. Hmmm… think I’ll make a rich linguine with clam sauce, French provenÏ‚al baked butternut with tons of garlic and parsley, arugula and tiny sweet tomatoes, a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, and fresh mango for dessert. I’ll have my feast and five extra years, too.
Ever the facilitators, Bob and I hosted dinner for a few security types the other night. Attending were Jo and Willy Allison, who put on the annual World Game Protection Conference in Las Vegas, at which Bob presented last month; Lieutenant Bob Sebby, who runs the quintessential fraud detail at LVMPD’s Financial/Property Crime Bureau; his wife, Cynde Beer, who is a mortgage fraud investigator; and LVMPD’s Detective Kim Thomas, an international authority on forgery. Kim’s also written a damn good book, Vegas: One Cop’s Journey. I reviewed it here.
Among us, we pretty much cover the gamut of theft. But on this night, the featured topic was how high-tech theft is moving into casinos. There’s nothing new about abusing credit cards, the magnetic data on them, shared-value cards, and washed or stolen checks. But bring those into the virtual money palace of a casino, and security-types begin to quake. With Eastern European organized crime gangs getting more sophisticated than ever, a cop’s gotta be well-fortified to stay on top. Or keep up. I’ve done my part:
High and Dry on the Streets of Elsewhere Chapter One, part-f, Travel Advisory —
One man loses his wallet. It’s a small crime, a small loss, a small inconvenience. Or maybe it’s a huge loss, devastating, with trickle-down repercussions.
One man steals a wallet. Usually, he steals three to six of them each day. And so may his peers, possibly hundreds in his own city. That’s a lot of wallets, a lot of money, inconvenience, and tears. Small crime, enormous problem.
Awareness works wonders.
Bob and I are on a mission. From a pro-active angle, we teach travelers what to beware of, how theft happens, and how to protect themselves. Our jurisdiction is the world: as we roam and research, we’re informed by local law enforcement, innumerable victims, and the thieves themselves.
“But,” he deadpanned, “that will make my job harder.”
Exactly.
We also assist law enforcement. No police department has the budget to travel and gather intelligence at street level, as we do. Trends travel, as do perpetrators. As Bob and I acquire video of street thieves and con artists from Lima to Lisbon, from Barcelona to Bombay, we put together teaching tapes and show them to law enforcement agencies worldwide. Having seen our previews, cops are better-prepared when foreign M.O.s roll into town.
Even at a local level we’re able to help police forces. Rarely — or never — does standard police-issue equipment include hidden video cameras. Bob and I, who look nothing like law enforcement, are able to get in the faces of thieves-in-action, and often provide the best, if not the only, descriptions of local criminal pests. We provided photos to the Barcelona tourist police, for example, who had received numerous reports of a devilish thief who “wore shorts.” Yep. That’s all the victims could ever describe about him. The police were ecstatic when they received our shot of his mug.
We do much of our research in summer, in the height of tourist season. We put ourselves smack where the crowds are, just as the thieves do. We carry video cameras, just as the tourists do. Then it’s a game of eyes.
The tourists gawk at the sights, common sense abandoned. The thief has head bent, eyes downcast; he’s scanning pockets and purses. Bob and I stare at the thief — but not too much. We don’t want to blow our cover.
My Mac’s power cord is stretched taut. I’m on my patio on a glorious spring day. Just a little too windy for my taste, and it could be warmer. Careful what I wish for, right?
I’ve got a perfect view of the spaceship-like top of the Stratosphere Casino, with its fun-fair rides 900 feet above ground. I can also see a police helicopter hovering somewhere between the Stratosphere and me. Closer to me, of course. There are sirens to match, as usual.
A wild cat just landed behind me, jumping down from a tree. It must have come over my roof. It trotted quickly to my side gate, looked up toward the top of the five-and-a-half-foot wall, then glanced back at me. Did I appear threatening? Then it used its paw to pull open the heavy wooden gate the full three inches it gives without being unlatched, and slipped through. The cat’s obviously been doing this for some time.
NABI members, mostly law enforcement officers, want to squelch organized crime families whose favored targets are seniors. The gangs do home repair scams, sweetheart swindles, fortune telling, home invasion burglaries, and many, many other crimes. They’re perpetrated by self-proclaimed “Travelers,” large families who make these crimes their business, know the system inside-out, and usually manage to avoid prosecution. They live largely off the grid and outside of our system, under numerous aliases, and move from city to city, state to state.
Unfortunately and all too frequently, neither victims, officers, prosecutors, nor judges see these individual complaints for what they are: massive, ongoing, organized crime. Property crimes are easily swept aside to make time for violent crime. The perps, many of whom are functionally illiterate, are wily, slippery, and even seem to enjoy the chase as a game. When arrested, they’ll often pay restitution in exchange for having charges dropped. They employ their own legal experts to get them released. They’ll pay enormous bonds and abscond–it’s just a cost of doing business. And they’ll do everything possible to avoid positive identification of their true identity and where they may be wanted. The end result is an unrecognized criminal population on the loose, free to carry out their scams and frauds perpetually.
NABI’s raison d’etre is information-sharing. And they mean enthusiastic information-sharing with whatever agency needs it–a unique attitude in the world of law enforcement, where competitive, anal-retentive agents and officers hoard every tad, shred, and iota in hopes of bagging credit for the big score. NABI maintains a database of these specific organized crime family members, complete with color photos, FBI file numbers, descriptions of crimes, relationships to other suspects, and who knows more about them. Many arrests and prosecutions are thanks to NABI’s network.
Seniors are the favored victims of these fraudsters. With our population aging rapidly and life expectancy growing, the pool of potential victims is expanding. It includes us! The same attributes that make seniors good victims from the criminals’ perspective (poor vision, mobility, hearing, memory), make them poor victims from a prosecution perspective.
Bring on the bunco squad! Do you even know the word bunco? It’s not much in use these days, even among cops. The word is about as old NABI’s founders, who are still active in the association. To me, bunco connotes tricky, clever, complicated, convoluted, non-violent con. The bunco squad in my mind, before getting to know NABI, was comical and cartoonish. The victims, I thought, were motivated by greed. This couldn’t be further from reality. Crimes can be as simple and innocent-seeming as this one.
The Bunco Investigators toss around the idea of updating their association name to something that reflects their objective in today’s terms. National Association Against Elder Crime? A name like that might work better today, but it would be sad to lose bunco. We might lose the word entirely, without NABI to keep it alive.
Regardless, their mission remains unchanged. They’re a passionate and dedicated group of individuals, all giving their time in order to help eradicate these crime families. In my experience of working with police officers around the world, I most often sense a protective culture of silence, a preference to withhold information rather than to share it with other agencies. NABI is just the opposite.
