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?
Police helicopter over my house.
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.
In school, I didn’t pay much attention to geography. This pretty much fits the American selfcentric stereotype. I did eventually learn the difference between the Pacific and the Atlantic, though, and came to understand the hierarchy of United Kingdom, Great Britain, and England. When I started to travel, I got interested in maps. I still am. I can’t resist poring over them in airline magazines, and maps stop me whenever I come across them in newspapers. My computer desktop image is a map of the world.
My interest in maps extends further, though maybe not as far as my friend Terry’s, who has actually mapped the potential mutations of the influenza virus (or something like that), except he calls it antigenic cartography.
I also like words. And I especially like when the two come together, as in mapping words. This is done brilliantly at wefeelfine.org, which maps feelings. Specifically, it maps feelings revealed in blogs. You, the user, can specify the feeling you’d like to map, the age, gender, or location of the feeler, the date, and/or the weather the feeler is experiencing. “Mounds,” one way that wefeelfine maps feelings, are wonderful living hills of quivering colorful jelly that recoil from my curser. They tell me that 34,541 bloggers are feeling better now, 7,452 are feeling empty, 383 are queasy, and at the far right of the mound map, 20 are feeling grotesque.
The creators of wefeelfine.org also gave us wordcount.org, to show us our most- and least-used words, and everything in between. No surprise that Figueres is at the end of the scale, the 86,573rd most used word. By great coincidence, my sister Jamie and I spoke of Figueres just a couple of hours before I visited wordcount.org tonight, and looked at the end of the scale. There was Figueres, birthplace of Salvador Dali.
Phylotaxis.com is marvelous, too, from it’s interactive opening page to its culture-meets-science representation of the news. Science stories are represented as perfect squares in an ordered grid. Stories on culture are round, messy, and can’t stay still. Verge back toward science and the round icons begin to behave, grow corners, and try to organize themselves.
On love-lines.com, which maps love and hate, I see that one person, just minutes ago, proclaimed “You all know I like my fics crackish and my pairings even crackier, as fickle as I am with them.” I have no idea what this means. Perhaps it’s pornographic.
Citizen mapping: From MIT’s WikiCity project in Rome.
Meanwhile, Rome is busy mapping the realtime density of citizens by their mobile phones. Or rather, MIT did the project, which mapped concentrations of urban activity moment to moment, graphically showing (glowing!) as about a million people gathered at Circus Maximus after Italy’s World Cup victory.
Meanwhile, I’ve got a nice world map, on paper, on the inside of my pantry door.
High and Dry on the Streets of Elsewhere
Chapter One, part-e, Travel Advisory —
“The Heaven-to-Hell-Express.” Bus 64, in Rome, travels between the Vatican and and the Termini bus station. It carries a dynamic mix of clergy, tourists, and pickpockets.
A somber crowd was gathered outside the police station. While Bob helped a Japanese tourist file a report inside, I interviewed the congregation of victims.
Mary from Akron was waiting with her daughter while her husband told his sad story upstairs. Her husband’s wallet had been stolen on bus 64. Mary still had her cash and credit cards, so she was rather jolly about the loss. The family was scheduled to go home the next day, anyway.
“We’d been warned about these nuisance kids,” Mary admitted, “but my husband is just too kind. He knew they were close but he wouldn’t shoo them away. Poor Wilma here, though, she never had a chance.”
Wilma from Tampa had just arrived that morning. She and her husband had flown into Rome and taken the airport express train to the city. They’d been hit at the airport train station.
“This was no kid!” Wilma spat out angrily. “It was a man, a regular Italian man.”
“Take it easy, honey,” Mary patted Wilma on the back.
“He lifted my husband’s suitcase onto the train for us, then came back down to get mine. Before I could even thank him he was gone.”
Wilma had fresh tears in her eyes. Mary rubbed and patted her arm.
“In that instant, he got the wallet from my husband’s pocket and the purse from my tote bag. He got all our money, all our credit cards, our airline tickets home, and our passports.” Wilma was crying now. “We have nothing,” she whimpered, “not even the name of our hotel.”
“Sure you do, sweetheart,” Mary soothed her. “It’s going to be all right. I gave her $100,” Mary explained to me. “They had absolutely nothing.”
These two women had only just met, here at the police station half an hour ago. Now they were sisters of misfortune.
I turned to two young men who had been silently slumped against their backpacks, listening.
“They got him on the bus, too.” the blond one said. He sounded like a Swede.
Tourists distracted by street entertainment are ripe pickings.
Every single summer day, one hundred tourists will be pickpocketed near the Coliseum in Rome; another hundred will be hit near the Spanish Steps, and another hundred in and around the Vatican. These three hundred individuals will report their thefts to the local police stations. Three hundred more victims will not file a report, for lack of time, late discovery, or other reasons. Florence reports similar numbers. So do London, Barcelona, Paris, Prague, and numerous other favorite tourist destinations. Multiplied by the number of days in the tourist season, dollars in currency lost, hours of vacation ruined, aggravation, humiliation, hassle, and havoc, you can see that pickpocketing is a small crime with huge repercussions.
Numbers are difficult to obtain, but as far as can be measured, they’re going up: “Among violent crimes, robbery showed the greatest increase, 3.9 percent … and larceny-theft increased 1.4 percent” says the FBI’s “Crime Trends, 2001 Preliminary Figures.” While that’s not a very impressive increase, anecdotal evidence indicates otherwise.
It’s estimated that at least half of all pickpocketing incidents are never reported at all. Of those reported, most, according to a New York cop on the pickpocket detail who wishes to remain unnamed, fall into the “lost property” category. “They don’t even realize they’ve been pickpocketed,” he said. “They think they just lost it.” Incidents reported as thefts are lumped under one of several legal descriptions. Larceny is the unlawful taking of property from the possession of a person, and includes pickpocketing, purse-snatching, shoplifting, bike theft, and theft from cars. Robbery is the same but involves the use or threat of force. The theft of a purse or wallet, therefore, may fall into either of these categories, and usually cannot be extracted for statistical purposes. Similarly, the figures collected under larceny or robbery include offenses this book does not specifically address; shoplifting, for example.
In Europe, where the theft of cell phones has skyrocketed, numbers help propel industry changes—the development of security devices in phones, for example. 11,000 cell phones were stolen in the Czech Republic in the first eight months of 2001. More than 20,000 cell phones were stolen in the city of Paris in 2000.
In September 2000, British Transport Police reported a 94.6 percent increase in pickpocketing on the London Tube, and pickpocketing on the streets rose by almost 30 percent in the same period. Spain experienced a 19.5 percent increase over the course of 2001, and street robbery was up 28 percent in England. In Paris, pickpocketing on the underground metro jumped 40 percent in 2001.
Frightening new trends are developing. What were simple snatches are lately turning into brutal grabs resulting in serious injury or death. Perhaps it’s the stiff competition from a glut of pickpockets that is turning some to violent methods. Strangulation from behind is one terrifying method. Another involves squirting flammable liquid on the back of a target’s jacket and igniting it. The victim throws down her bag and struggles to get the flaming jacket off while the thief grabs the bag and flees. Even ordinary bag snatches are becoming deadly, with victims being pulled to the ground, some cracking their heads on the pavement, or falling into traffic.
High and Dry on the Streets of Elsewhere
Chapter One, part-c, Travel Advisory
Luciano Barattolo, a pickpocket who works on trams and buses.
Bob and I hit the ground and I squinted at the gang.
“Luciano!” I said to one of the culprits as the tram trundled off. I recognized him as a pickpocket we’d interviewed four years ago.
“No, no Luciano,” he said, shaking his head. He backed away.
“Si, Luciano Barattolo, I remember you.” Luciano bent and fiddled with a window squeegee in a bucket of water abandoned on the median strip. He removed the dripping squeegee and touched it to the toe of each of his shoes. I got ready for a blast of filthy water; I was sure he was going to fling it at us.
Head still bent, he peeked up at me through the corner of his eye, dropped the squeegee, and bolted.
After more than a decade prowling city streets around the world, we’d become accustomed to finding known criminals freely plying their trade right out in the open. Here was Luciano, still out lifting wallets on trams despite police and public awareness of him. You’d think he’d be put away by now.
It’s a contentious political issue: law enforcement budget versus taxes, penal code versus perpetrator’s rights, unemployment, immigration. Same story in most of the world’s major cities and, therefore, street thieves abound, free to prey on the weakest, richest resource: the tourist. From a busy prosecutor’s perspective, or an overworked judge’s, or even an underpaid beat cop’s, pickpocketing is a pretty insignificant issue. Real bad guys are on the loose: murderers, kidnappers, rapists, drug-pushers. How much of a police force should be diverted to snag the bottomfeeders of the criminal hierarchy?
Most countries blame illegal immigrants from poorer nations nearby. “We can’t get rid of them,” said Inspector D’Amore Vincenzo, a frustrated policeman in Milan, Italy. “When they’re caught without work cards, we give them 15 days to leave the country. Then they are released and what happens? They just don’t leave! And if they have no papers, no passports, the countries they come from will not accept the repatriation of these people.”
The problem may seem small. One man loses his wallet, his money, his driver’s license, his credit cards. So what? But it’s not one man. In Westminster–that’s one small district of London–768 cases of pickpocketing were recorded in June 2002. That’s just June. Just one small section of the city of London. And only the reported incidents. How many victims did not file a report? And by the way, the figure doesn’t include the 142 bag snatches recorded in the same district in the same period.
Luciano paused a couple blocks away, having finally dredged up the memory of us from four years ago. He was 49 now, but still looked 30. He raised his children on a career of pickpocketing, and now was spoiling five grandchildren. Over lunch, he told us how he and his partners used legal loopholes to stay in the game.
“If the police catch us with a tool, they are angry and beat us up. If we don’t have a tool and they see us they just say …˜leave, get out of here.'”
Luciano makes it sound easy. He and his ilk hit on moving targets in tight spaces, then fade away into churning crowds. It’s a universal style. Police throw up their hands. “We must see the hand in the pocket!” they cry. “We have only six in our squad for all the city.” “Our officers don’t know what to look for.” “It’s impossible!”
The pickpockets aren’t about to stop.
“I started doing it to eat, to get food, because there were no jobs. Now it’s all I know,” Luciano told us. Others steal to support drug problems, or have no legal status to work, or simply believe in taking what they want.
Yuzu diver scallops at Pacific O, Maui
Chef McDonald had a farm, EIEIO. We had a gorgeous dinner in Lahaina last week, outdoors, on the beach, hibiscus blossoms in my hair (still attached to the shrub, which we were snug against, having begged the last outdoor table). A tacky tourist luau was taking place next door, but it was hard not to enjoy the music which visited us on the breeze. We’d only just arrived on Maui, and from the taxi, we watched whales spouting just offshore as the sun set. Lovely.
Our hotel receptionist, when asked for dinner recommendations, said “They’re all the same in town, and none are any good. The only place I eat here is Ruth’s Chris.” Then we found the quintessential local, a grown-up surfer on a bicycle, a food enthusiast. He pointed us to Pacific O, among other interesting options. Its chef, James McDonald, runs an organic farm for all the produce at Pacific O and his other restaurant, IO’s. We walked there and got a table right away, but it was under a roof next to the bar. Noisy, and not outdoors enough. I pushed hard and the manager created a spot for us on the patio out of nothing. We rewarded him with a hefty bill.
The following week we came ashore in Majuro in the Marshall Islands, by small boat. Only lightly touched by tourism, the jungle island was a delight in all its ineptness. The airport was mad with well-wishers, send-offers, and children running around as if it were the county fair. Almost every flying islander checked in an ice chest, and each ice chest (as each suitcase) was emptied, inspected, and repacked. The ice chests contained plastic baggies of frozen food, lobster, crabs, and frozen fish. Much of this was unwrapped. Just frozen and thrown in the chest.
Four pickpockets in Russia greet Bob, whose back is to the camera.
High and Dry on the Streets of Elsewhere Chapter One, part-b, Travel Advisory
If law enforcement can’t turn the trend, perhaps Bob and I can. Grandiose vision? As a two-person army out to fight street crime, we wouldn’t have a chance, we’d be laughable. But we’re not out to stop the thieves. We’re here to educate the public. We’ll turn the tide of loss from the back end. We also spread our knowledge base of current trends in thievery among the law enforcement agencies that deal with tourist crime. But it’s the ground level dissemination of information that has the greatest effect. We may be steering the horse by the tail, but we know it works.
Bob has spent a lifetime studying scammers, thieves, and con artists and their wicked ways. From Pakistan in the sixties, where leper pickpockets used emotions—fear and revulsion—as a means to their ends, to shortchangers in Vietnam, to destitute orphans in Peru, to modern day rogues in the capital cities of Europe and America, he has explored their methods and motivations.
Unlike police, criminologists, psychologists, or other researchers, Bob communicates with street thieves in their language; he can talk the talk and walk the walk because he is a thief himself. Bob is a thief who steals on stage and always returns what he takes. The techniques he learns from the thieves themselves he incorporates into his stage presentations. With the benefit of Bob’s backdoor perspective, we will give you the thief’s-eye version of thievery, connery, scamdom, and swindlehood; and more important, how to avoid becoming an unwilling participant.
“Hey! Hey! Hey! Get your fucking hand out of my pocket! You try to steal my wallet again and I’ll kill you!” The would-be victim slapped away the comforting hand of a middle-aged local. “No, you’re with him! I’m gonna call the cops.”
The victim, an American man, vocalized his outrage as the tram lurched and squealed along its track. His opponents melted into the crowd, impossible to discern from the legitimate passengers. Despite the team’s intricate choreography and precise techniques, they’d seemed as innocent and invisible as a white rabbit in a cotton harvest: beyond suspicion, even as they surrounded their mark. No one would detect the four functionaries of this tactical unit: the dip, his two blockers, and his controller. Not derelict losers, they looked like businessmen, like students, like men with respectable jobs.
Get your hand out of my pocket!
The dip carried a jacket. His thieving hand worked concealed beneath it, first fanning the tourist, a feather-like pat-down designed to locate the leather, the wallet. The blockers positioned the mark, turning him, impeding his progress, expertly taking advantage of the physical contact natural in any tight crowd. Leaning into him, they caused his distraction, subtly directing his attention away from the dip’s delicate work. A few steps away, the controller watched for cops and overly alert bystanders. Of the four, he alone was shifty-eyed. When the victim exploded, it was the controller who stepped in to defuse the situation. If it hadn’t been for a sudden sway of the tram, the team would have succeeded, as they do in thirty-five percent of their efforts.
Now, busted, they pushed through the standing crowd toward the doors at the other end of the tram. At the first stop, the thieves made their escape. Bob and I hopped off after them.
This scene, in endless permutations, is repeated thousands of times every day. The victim of choice is the tourist, rich beyond reason in the eyes of thieves, who employ methods as subtle as stealth and as brutal as mugging to effect the transfer of wealth. Theft from tourists is on the rise and, unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly violent, more and more organized, and harder than ever to fight.
Excerpt from High and Dry on the Streets of Elsewhere
Chapter One, part-a, Travel Advisory
I’m a world traveler, right? A “jet-setter,” some say. No arrogance here — just a fact. So how did I make such a cultural goof?
Here’s a typical work week: New York City, Connecticut for a family visit, Kansas, home for 24 hours, then off to Dubai. That was an actual week in January.
Other weeks might include Italy, Singapore, Australia, Peru, England… and I pride myself on having some awareness of basic cultural expectations. I bring gifts to Japan, dine late in Spain, offer and accept things with two hands all over Asia, eat with my right in India, and understand that “just now,” in South Africa, means later. As in, “I’ll call you just now.”
In Connecticut, I burned my right hand when the lid fell off my sister’s faulty tea kettle. Okay, there’s nothing wrong with the tea kettle. I just didn’t put the lid on tightly. Next day at a meeting in NYC, I nearly fell to my knees when a handshake reminded me of the scorch. There were lots of handshakes that day, and I quickly got into the habit of using an upside down left with “sorry, burned my hand.” This continued as blisters popped in Kansas.
By the time we got to Dubai, soft scabs were forming and my lefty handshake was second nature. I realized the gaffe in the midst of committing it in that muslim nation. Meeting the owner of one of Dubai’s spectacular hotels, he was gracious while I was a blubbering, blundering idiot with a mouthful of apologies.
