Bambi Vincent – Page 8 – Thiefhunters in Paradise

Guilty as charged

And the charges are: against him, breaking and entering; against his sister, poisoning by E.coli.
It started with a loud thud in the dead of night, immediately followed by heavy breathing. I jumped out of bed and looked out the window, but it was too dark to see a thing. The labored breath was right outside. I also heard a wet trickle.

Mating dance of the blue-footed boobies.

Exactly one year ago, I spent a magical week in the Galapagos. My sister chartered the 14-passenger yacht Parranda for the family. Besides our two onboard naturalists, we were six adults and six teens. I was asleep in my stateroom when I heard the intruder. Our yacht was in motion, sailing from San Salvador Island to Bartolome Island, so I couldn’t fathom who could have come aboard, or how. The chef’s provisioner? The captain’s wife? Pirates of the Galapagos?

I learned in the morning that it had been an 800-pound sea lion that had launched itself aboard for a free ride. It wasn’t alone, either. Several other beasts had made the aft deck their lounge for the night. The crew hates their visits, as they leave quite a mess behind.

A few days later, snorkeling off the coast of Floreana Island, we were joined briefly by a penguin and a couple of sea turtles. Then a flock (pride? school?) of sea lions surrounded us, jetting playfully among us with speed and grace never betrayed on land.

Sea lions on the beach in the Galapagos Islands.

Close, close encounters with wild animals are thrilling, and I’ve had more than my share. I held someone’s pet bat in Ponape. I wrestled with a pair of 14-week-old lion cubs in Johannesburg. I had my hand in a kangaroo’s pouch in Sydney. I swam with hammerhead sharks in Maui, stingrays in Cayman Islands, and giant clams in Palau. To visit wild animals in their own milieu, to feel a clumsy foreigner in their domain, like an interloper and a trespasser, is wondrous. Mind-blowing. Jaw-dropping.

Snorkeling with sea lions in the Galapagos Islands.

Jaw-dropping. Joyous. Laughing while snorkeling gets one a mouthful of seawater. The giant sea lion was just inches away from Geri when it let loose an opaque cloud.

That night onboard, all six kids got seasick at once. By morning, they had all recovered except for Geri, who deteriorated slowly. It wasn’t until she saw her doctor back home that we realized she’d been poisoned ingesting sea lion turd.

islands travel

Souvenirs

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. Click to hear it!

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?

music travel

Debauch

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.

Feeding security-types

From left: Bambi, Bob Arno, Lieutenant Bob Sebby, Cynde Beer, Detective Kim Thomas, Jo Allison, Willy Allison.

Dinner at Bob & Bambi's house — Dinner at Bob & Bambi’s house

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:

Menu

Neon cocktails (Campari, Aperol, Midori, Absinthe, Ricard)
Aunt Diane’s special spinach salad
Grilled snapper filet on sweet potato mash, with
Orange-avocado-onion-cilantro-chili salsa
Watercress
Black rice
Garlic broccoli salad
Fresh melange of pomelo, pomegranate, jackfruit, mango,
and strawberries, with jackfruit-flavored coconut milk

food police security surveillance

Looking up

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.

Bambi Vincent Las Vegas

A map of quivering jelly

Citizen mapping: From MIT's WikiCity project in Rome.

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.

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.

creativity map Words

A cultural gaffe

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.

Bambi Vincent Dubai travel

Criminal on the loose

Evening. A sudden, deafening heartbeat jars my bones, and a vague anxiety revisits. The helicopter is back. Hovering low, its searchlight swings over my window, invading my private space with public urgency. I feel consumed by the thrumming and vibrate with it. The beam of light passes over my window again before it flies away, but it doesn’t go far. It circles, again and again, as usual.

“Criminal on the loose again,” I say. This happens at least twice a week, sometimes twice a day. If it’s daylight, I feel compelled to run outside and stare up at the police chopper, or look for glimpses of it between the trees and rooftops. This is the nester in me, the homeowner afraid for her safety and security. And it’s the thiefhunter in me, trying to triangulate the position of the fleeing perp, guess the scene of the crime.

If it’s night, I mentally confirm that all doors are locked. Who is being hunted? What did he do? Where is he now? Where would I go, if it were me? My neighborhood’s a good one for hiding, with all its mature trees and shrubs and shadows. Lots of walls to leap over. Did I leave any lights on to light up the yard? Sometimes Bob and I turn on a police scanner, but it’s never interesting. Sometimes we only get valet parking attendants, or something to do with golf. We haven’t learned how to use it properly.

Sometimes the helicopter is accompanied by sirens on the ground, but not always. Today the police cars actually drove onto the street behind my house. There, they always turn off their sirens before entering the neighborhood.

I don’t live in a war zone, but in a city center. Having grown up in suburbia, I can’t ignore these incidents as life-long city-dwellers might. The searches are never resolved to my satisfaction. I never learn what happened, or if the subject was caught. In fact, I’m always left with the vague assumption that the helicopter just gave up and left the criminal on the loose. It’s always a criminal, by the way. Never a suspect. In my mind.

I lived in Atlantic City for a year and heard more sirens there. Many, every day. But no helicopters. Maybe it was just a budget thing. Maybe Atlantic City police didn’t have a helicopter.

Bambi Vincent Las Vegas

Stalking a moving target

Bob Arno films thieves, pickpockets, con artists.

Preface, part-a, Travel Advisory

If Bob’s and my first priority is putting pickpockets and con artists out of business, our second is to encourage international travel. Nothing would disappoint us more than to learn that we discouraged a potential traveler’s journey. Travel opens the mind and broadens the perspective. It’s the ultimate supplement to education. Plus, it’s fun.

This book is the culmination of ten years of intensive research in the streets of the world. Our hunt has taken us through more than 80 countries on six continents, to countless islands, and through the grit and glamour of cities from Cairo to Copenhagen, from Mombasa to Mumbai. In the places people love to visit most, distract theft, con games, credit card scams, and identity theft are rampant.

Bob and I are stalking a moving target. We haunt the public frontiers where tourist and street thief collide ever so lightly, ever so frequently. We don’t go off searching among the dim, deserted corners of a city; we merely join in the tourist parade, visit the guidebook highlights, and lurk where the crowds are. There, hovering near the tourist buck, waiting for or making opportunity, can be found the thieves, swindlers, and con artists. And, very close, anonymous as sightseers in a tour group, we stand, cameras aimed.

After we observe a thief in action, we usually try to interview him (or her, of course). Because Bob speaks many languages, because he has “grift sense,” that undefinable faculty for the con, and because he can absolutely prove himself to be a colleague, the thieves talk. Some remain reticent, but most seem to enjoy our chats. Some refuse to speak on camera, others don’t mind at all. Kharem, a thief we found at work several times over the course of a year, is one who spoke openly with us, demonstrated his techniques on video, and arrived promptly for a meeting scheduled a week in advance. When we finished our third interview with him, Kharem had a surprise suggestion for us.

“Now I will steal and you can film me. I want to be the star of your movie,” he offered.

“That’s impossible, Kharem. We work on stage, not on the street. We cannot be part of real stealing. We cannot be with you knowing that you’ll steal.”

“I think he smells a big payment,” our interpreter, Ana, said in English to us.

“We can split three ways,” Kharem said, dispelling that theory.

“It would be great footage…” Bob mused. “But we can’t. No way.”

I agreed.

“What if he gives it back?” Ana tried.

“I don’t think he’d understand that concept.”

“He’s going to steal anyway,” Ana said. “If not now, later. Whether you’re watching or not.” She was well aware of the crime statistics in her city.

“No. We’d be accessories. We’re treading morally murky water as it is. We have to draw a line and this is definitely it.”

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

Bob Arno steal street crime theft thieves tourist

PICKPOCKETS, CON ARTISTS, GANGSTERS, THIEVES, AND TRAVEL