It was Cecily’s dream vacation: she and her family had rented an ancient stone farmhouse near St.-Paul-de-Vence on the French Riviera. Recently renovated to luxurious standards, it stood between an olive orchard and a lavender farm, strolling distance from the sea, and it came with a Renault.
For their first morning, coffee, baguette, and fresh farm butter had been delivered by the agent. Cecily feasted lightly on the terrace, then drove into Nice and shopped for groceries. So far, excellent. She loaded the Renault feeling spiffy, pleased with her success, and rather… je ne sais quois. Perhaps rather French.
Just as Cecily got into the car a nice-looking man approached and asked her something: where could he buy a newspaper? where was a petrol station? Cecily’s French had rusted since high school, but she struggled to understand.
“Don’t worry,” the man said in English. “I am not going to steal from you.”
What? Cecily swiveled in her seat just in time to see another man, a partner, dash off with her purse which, sadly, still contained her entire family’s passports and return air tickets. The nice-looking man at her window was gone.
Caught-in-the-act criminals aren’t always keen on conversation. “Why I should talk to you!” some say. We’ve been threatened with rocks, hit, spit upon, flipped off, and mooned. But we’re constantly astonished at how many thieves talk to us. Why do they do it? We don’t flash badges at them, we don’t dangle handcuffs. The outlaws don’t know who we are or what’s behind our front. Might we be undercover cops? Hard to imagine, with our flimsy body structures and frequent lack of local language.
Interviewing thieves
My husband, Bob Arno, can usually find a common language for an interview, though he or the perp may have limited ability with it. Sometimes we have a translator with us or can snag one, impromptu. Most importantly, Bob has a unique advantage: he has worked for forty years as a pickpocket.
These pickpockets saw our video camera and let us know what they thought of us.
Inside knowledge, familiarity with moves and challenges, and level dialogue allay our subjects’ suspicions. Or perhaps they’re highly suspicious, nervous, and confused. Ultimately, they don’t know what to make of us.
Okay, so Bob’s a stage pickpocket. He steals from audience members in a comedy setting and always returns his booty. But the physical techniques are the same, the distraction requirement, the analysis of body language, the sheer balls. And Bob has that other illicit necessity: grift sense. He can sense a con, he can play a con.
No doubt our interviewees intuit that in only moments. Next thing we know they’re buying us a beer, accepting our invitation to lunch or, in our favorite case, offering us lucrative work as partners.
While victims relate their anger, inconvenience, and bemusement, their perpetrators tell tales of persecution, desperation, an unjust world, or alternative beliefs in the rights of ownership.
I can thank the Parsis for my passion for photojournalism.
Another man might have turned away, but when I saw a vulture picking the limbs of a dead child, I raised my camera. Perhaps that says more about me than I should reveal.
Instead of burning their dead and feeding the ashes to the River Ganges as Hindus do, Parsis lay the bodies of their dead on a grid suspended over a high tower. To attract vultures to the burial tower, corpses are smeared with rancid animal fat. The scavenger birds pick away the flesh and the cleaned bones then fall onto the earth, lime, and charcoal floor of the tower to decompose into the soil. How I came to witness this alien rite was through the same set of circumstances that so profoundly impacted my career.
At twenty I hadn’t yet decided whether to become an entertainer or a photographer. My true passion was travel, and the more off-beat and distant the destination, the better. To fund my expeditions, I took engagements as a performer for four to six weeks in faraway countries, and at the end of the gigs I would trek into surrounding villages and countryside.
Performing in the Far East in the sixties gave me a unique opportunity to visit cities that I otherwise would never have had a chance to visit for such extended periods. While my craving for photojournalistic excitement was supported by my show income, I made an effort to meet local authorities and make the right contacts intending to pursue photojournalism with a bent toward the absurd.
Bob Arno’s path to pickpocketing
Even way back then my show was unusual—pickpocketing had never been seen as entertainment. It was my ticket to the exotic destinations most people only dream of. And on my journeys I witnessed, sometimes inadvertently, headline news. Neither ordinary tourists nor visiting journalists could have had such easy access to behind-the-scenes briefings. For I was tied to the U.S. Military.
Bob Arno, 24
I had always had a strange desire to capture macabre images with a camera. It started as a hobby, then became a semi-profession during my first journey to Asia. In 1961 I toured Pakistan, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Japan as an inexperienced entertainer. I augmented my performance salary by taking freelance photography assignments in locations where Western photographers were still a bit of a rarity.
The world was hungry for unusual stories from Asia then. As a young and raw journalist with little comprehension of the underlying political issues of the area, I came face to face with the dramatic events of the day. Being in the right place at the right time was at the heart of my earliest photojournalistic adventures.
With the beginning of the war in Vietnam, U.S. forces were building steadily in the Far East. These were the darkest years of the Cold War and the fear was of China’s involvement in the Indo-Chinese conflict. Everyone was concerned about the war escalating and spilling over into the Philippines, Thailand, and Korea. The large U.S. bases in the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Okinawa, and Japan all needed entertainment for the troops.
Most of my performance engagements then were for these American soldiers. My comedy pickpocketing was new and different and audience participation was always a hit. I had long contracts on the military bases, as well as in the civilian clubs—camouflaged girlie-joints, really—which attracted the soldiers. It was this environment which fueled my taste for absurd and offbeat news stories.
Photographers in those early years of the conflict hung out together in the hotel bars of Saigon. That’s how I met Larry Burrows, a British war-journalist who worked for Life magazine and was one of the most-awarded photographers to come out of the Vietnam war. Burrows helped me gain contacts in Saigon, both with the American military command and with the opposing factors. Without leads and the contacts you wouldn’t get “the story.”
It was because of Larry Burrows that I was one of only five photographers in Saigon who were privy to the intelligence-leak that a monk was about to commit suicide. An immolation was to occur in the early hours of June 11, 1963, at a compound outside Saigon in front of a few select journalists. The Bhuddist leaders orchestrating the sacrifice schemed that the global reaction to the front-page photos of the monk setting himself on fire would create an anti-war movement. The goal was to speed up peace negotiations.
At three in the morning, we photographers were rushed from the hotel out to the compound. The unlucky monk who had been selected for the sacrifice had already been drugged into a semi-comatose state and sat on the ground. As soon as the media were ready with their cameras, other monks poured petrol over the “victim,” and he was then set alight. We let our Nikon motordrives spin throughout the ordeal and the resulting pictures, mine included, created enormous impact and news coverage in all major newspapers around the world.
[EDIT 1/2/13: See comments below for Bob Arno’s elucidation on this experience.]
My first photo essay was from Pakistan where I shot the story on the Parsis and their infamous Towers of Silence. Their disposal of the dead isn’t so gruesome when you understand their belief in preserving the purity of fire, water, earth, and air. So as not to pollute these elements, they will not burn, bury, or sink their dead. Still, mine were morbid photos by an immature photographer. It wasn’t the historical perspective of the burial rituals which sold the story, but the stark and grisly images of vultures ripping limbs from human corpses.
In similar stark but shallow style, I photographed Hindu cremations at the burning ghats in Benares on the Ganges River, morning bathing rituals in the Ganges in Calcutta, opium dens in northern Thailand, the Bridge at River Kwaii, faith healers in the Philippines, and leper colonies in India.
One particular photo project had a strong impact on my career path. The story was on beggars and pickpockets accosting foreign visitors in Karachi. This was my introduction to a cynical distraction method based on sympathy and compassion. The pickpockets were lepers, and they were exploiting pity for profit.
In the early sixties leprosy was still a serious threat to the populations of India and Pakistan. It was common to see sufferers in various stages of deterioration roaming the streets of Karachi, Calcutta, Bombay, and New Delhi. Banding together, they often surrounded Western visitors coming out of banks, hotels, and churches. The sight of an outstretched hand with missing or rotting fingers usually caused people to react with horror and drop some coins, if for no other reason to get the infected limbs to go away. Compassion and revulsion metamorphosed into currency. The ploy was effective, diabolical, and unique to Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent.
My story showed a team of lepers who specialized in pickpocketing under the guise of begging. While one tugged at the left side of the mark and held out his diseased hand for baksheesh, his accomplice on the mark’s right fanned—softly felt for the wallet. When the victim looked left, aghast at the touch of such ravaged hands, his reaction would be a sudden jerk to the right to get away from the loathsome encounter. The partner on the right would lift his wallet in that moment of abrupt contact.
This was the most primitive of survival instincts, where rules of civility, shame, and respect didn’t apply. Just raw confrontation between the haves and the have-nots. I was only 22 years old when I first witnessed this subterfuge, and I was both stunned and fascinated. Stunned at the callousness of using the primeval emotion, fear, to accomplish distraction. Fascinated by the realization that there were people so desperate they would go to any extent to find money to survive for the next couple of days. It was a rude awakening for a youth raised in the privileged shelter of socialist Sweden.
Watching this base encounter is what inspired my lifelong effort to document, and to unravel, the mind-games which nearly always attend pickpocketing. I was intrigued by the fact that wit was as much a part of it as was technique. This is what challenged me to explore the criminal mind. Pickpocketing is not an activity that one only practices now and then. It’s a daily routine performed several times in a fairly short time span. It’s an intense crime based on dexterity and, equally important, on psychological analysis of the opponent. A good pickpocket must be able to read many signals and make an instant decision on whether to go for the poke or wait for a better opportunity.
I was also intrigued, in those early years, by the cleverness of the set-up. Although the theatrical theft of a wallet on stage is entirely different from lifting one in the street, the principles of distraction are the same. By studying the real thieves, I realized I could incorporate their techniques into my performance. I began a fanatical collection of stratagems, always on the lookout for the clever, devious, cunning, slick, duplicitous, ingenious, innovative, inventive, and creative new trick.
Much later in my career, exactly thirty years later, I would find that the lepers’ technique—begging on one side of a victim, pickpocketing on the other—was nearly identical to the methods used by thieving gangs in southern Europe today.
Another pivotal moment arrived for me that same year in India when I realized that gangs of beggars and pickpockets usually worked under controlling leaders. Not protectors or father-figures to homeless children, these leaders were brutal mutilators who intentionally crippled children in order to make them better beggars, allotted them territories, and demanded daily payments from them. My discovery of this grim reality was the spark that fired my quest to find, understand, and expose the manipulators’ deception.
From Indian beggars to east European gypsy families to American inner-city street toughs to North African pickpockets to Colombian tricksters, I have always asked this question: how did you learn your trade? Was it passed down within the family? Was it learned in prison? Was destitution the motivator?
For more than forty years a rumor has been whispered among police forces in America that an organized school for pickpockets exists. The School of the Seven Bells is said to graduate a certified pickpocket when he can steal from all the pockets of a man’s suit while it hangs on a mannequin, without ringing little warning bells tied to the clothes. A pickpocket in Cartegena told us that the school is nestled high in the mountains of Colombia. An American cop told us of a variation in Chicago, in which razor blades buried in the suit pockets replace the bells. And yet I have never spoken to a policeman who has succeeded in getting any detail from detained pickpockets about the school. Perhaps it is mere myth. My search continues.
One of the most common questions people ask me after they’ve seen my lecture or one of our documentaries on con games is how I got so interested in tracking criminals. The easy answer is that one thing led to another: stage pickpocketing to observing street thieves to adapting their tricks for the stage. But that denies the force of my own personality in steering my expedition through life. It’s far more difficult to define the eccentric quirk in my psyche that attracted me to deceit, deception, and double-dealing—but always on the right side of law and morality. I am fascinated by confidence games and have the great fortune to enjoy my interest as my career.
In my younger years, my trio of passions—travel, photography, and entertaining—seemed to be in conflict; I thought an inevitable choice would have to be made. Maybe I never grew up. I still travel the world non-stop and I still love it. I’m still deeply involved in photography, though it has mostly evolved into videography. And I am still a full-time entertainer working theaters and private corporate events around the world. I’m having a blast. How lucky can one man be?
Over the years we minimized our equipment as we acquired smaller and smaller cameras of broadcast quality. With lighter equipment we became more maneuverable, better able to dash into subways, less reluctant to venture into deserted or potentially dangerous areas, and quicker on our feet. With hidden cameras and remote controls to operate them, we were later able to film con men like the bait-and-switch masters in Naples, and the pigeon poop duper in Barcelona. As we learned to recognize more sophisticated thieves, we were able to capture their deeds with more sophisticated devices.
We trekked through Florence as we did Rome. Wherever the tourists flock there, the urchins prey: all around the wedding-cake-like Duomo, outside the Ufizi, on and near the Ponte Vecchio, and at the outdoor markets. Women with children even operate inside the dimly-lit cathedrals, where tourists least expect them. The child-thieves can be shockingly aggressive, blocking a person’s progress while working busily under their cardboard shields. They’re so accustomed to visitors with video cameras, they repeatedly dug into our pockets while we shot them at point blank range.
At some point we began to carry a wallet stuffed with cut paper instead of money. That raggedy bait was stolen from our pockets by a hundred hands, with slow stealth, crude speed, cunning, or clumsiness. We almost always got it back just by asking. But we found the actual extraction of the wallet near impossible to film. The thieves got too close and covered their steals with a jacket, bag, or some other shield. We needed a creative solution.
After infinite ideas and frustrating failures, Bob had a brainstorm. He got an empty shoebox and filled it with sophisticated electronics. He fitted a pinhole lens onto one of his small cameras, and poked its miniature eye through the bottom of the shoebox. He made another hole for a tiny red diode which signified the camera’s record mode. Lastly, he connected a remote control to a short wire and let it protrude unobtrusively from the box, providing a means to start and stop the camera. With a brick-like battery and a tangle of wires completing the package, Bob’s ominous box would never make it through airport security.
I snapped a few rubber bands over the lid and Bob tucked the box neatly under his arm, lens pointing down toward his pocket. That’s how the shoebox-cam was invented.
Thus rigged, we’d created a space not easily blocked by a thief, a void full of light which preserved the camera’s view of Bob’s pocket. The shoebox-cam proved useful in many situations and became one of our favorite capturing devices along with the cellphone-cam, eyeglass-cam, and button-cam.
ROME POLICE OFFICER CELINI remembered us from previous visits and greeted us warmly. Without asking, he assembled an incident report with carbon paper, in triplicate. I filled out most of the report for Sugohara, and he wrote in his name and address. He had only lost about $100 worth of cash and two credit cards.
We offered to show our video of the crime. Celini first fetched Police Chief Giuseppe D’Emilio. Bob positioned the four-inch monitor of our digital camera and pressed play. The two policemen and Mr. Sugohara put their heads together and peered at the screen as the girl-thieves splashed their faces in the fountain.
A teenage pickpockets in Rome approaches a mark.
“Si,” Chief D’Emilio said tiredly. “We know them. They’re sisters. Maritza and Ravenna.” He and Celini straightened up and turned away from the video. Sugohara still watched with intense interest.
“They have both participated in pickpocketing since before they were born. Their pregnant mother worked the buses. Then, as infants, they were carried in a sling by their mother as she worked these same streets. And when their mother wasn’t using them, one of their aunts would.”
Using children?
A teenage gypsy pickpocket in Rome
Sugohara’s face was close to the screen. He watched intently as the sisters caught up with him so purposefully, arranging their sheet of newspaper and positioning themselves on either side of him. He watched himself leap and skitter backwards.
“The big one, Maritza, she has her own child now,” the police chief continued. “She usually carries her baby all day. A relative must be using the child today.”
Using the child?
Sugohara turned to us, his brow knitted. “Play again,” he demanded.
Bob rewound and Sugohara leaned in. The source of his frustration became apparent. The video showed the moment of contact, but from a distance. Still, that must have been when the wallet was stolen. Then the film showed Sugohara bolting backwards and the girls hurrying away ahead of him and turning the corner. After that, the next full minute was a swinging sidewalk and Bob’s right shoe. Sugohara had hoped to see what the sisters had done with his wallet. But as they hastened along Via Alessandrina, as Bob rushed to catch up with them, as they stowed or stashed or emptied and threw the wallet, the camera filmed only a sea-sickening flow of auto-focused sidewalk. Whatever the girls had done with the wallet was done off the record.
A gypsy pickpocket in Rome.
Sugohara watched the useless picture, depressed.
Chief D’Emilio went on. “The only time these kids aren’t stealing is between the ages of seven and eleven, when their parents sometimes let them go to school. Just enough school to learn to read and write, and that’s all.
“I’ve seen them work as young as two years old,” the chief said with eternal amazement. “The father carries the child and gets into a crowd. He leans close to a man. The baby is trained to steal from a man’s inside jacket pocket!” He threw up his hands and exhaled with exasperation. “No wonder we can’t fight this. We have an average of 50 pickpocket reports filed every summer day at this station alone!”
[Note: These photos are not from the book. Neither are they of Maritza and Ravenna. Notice that the girl carries a baby in a sling, as well as a newspaper, which she holds over the pocket or purse she is trying to steal from. Begging is just an excuse to approach marks.]
Bob and I began our field research on street thievery in 1993, when we quit our steady jobs in Las Vegas to combine freelancing with travel. As our work took us around the world, we got into the streets, among the tourists, in cities and at historical sites, watching who was watching the visitors. Our early successes gave us an enormous charge and encouragement to continue. We were hooked on tracking. But I don’t think either one of us believed, in the beginning, that we’d succeed in identifying so many perpetrators.
Rome was our teething ground as pickpocket hunters. We began with modest ambitions. We’d hang out at the Coliseum in hopes of photographing child and teenage pickpockets, who had become easy for us to recognize. They’d always carry a section of newspaper or, better for its stiffness, a slab of corrugated cardboard, with which they’d shield their dipping hands. Although the Coliseum was sometimes crawling with Carabinieri with not a thief in sight, we soon built up a healthy portfolio of red-handed-children on film and footage.
The following year, 1994, we were decked out like pros. We lugged a video camera monster, a JVC 3GY-X2U, which is 24 inches long and weighs 25 pounds without its case. I wore a battery belt of about 30 pounds, which threatened to slip off my hips if I didn’t keep a hand on it. Bob carried the camera and a huge, heavy tripod. In addition, we needed my purse, a 35mm camera, and a bag of video accessories. Thus burdened, we traipsed around the ancient city, filming ruin after ruin, milling crowds, establishing shots, and potential danger zones (pickpocketly-speaking).
Teenage pickpockets in Rome.
We usually began with the intention of filming the elusive urchin pickpockets who seemed always to congregate around the Coliseum, often in large family groups. But they, apparently, were polar opposites to video cameras, which repelled them in a great radius. I wondered that year if the police knew about this great tool for clearing the area of crime.
Sometimes we’d get a few minutes of unexciting footage and I’d take a few stills. Eventually, our prey would escape into the subway or onto a bus. We’d decide to go to the Spanish Steps, another popular venue for a theft-show. Then, perhaps in an alley or side street, a couple of girls carrying cardboard and babies would pass us. We’d about-face and follow stealthily, keeping downwind as if they were big game animals who might sniff us out. We’d get plenty of footage and photos before they’d notice us, then still, we’d follow. Round and around the back streets of Rome, we’d tail as they’d lead. But we’d no longer try to hide, and they wouldn’t dare try to steal.
Eventually we’d give up on the girls and go back to the exclusive shopping streets around the Spanish Steps. The area is always mobbed with tourists, and with police, too. If there was nothing happening, off we’d go to Trevi Fountain, another popular spot.
We were exhausted by the end of those days. If we hadn’t found much to raise our spirits, I’d be dragging around like nothing more than a pack animal pining for its stable. Except for quick lunches and a few standing-up coffees, that’s how we spent countless ten-hour days in Rome. True, it’s cheaper than shopping!
One day, on our way toward Trevi Fountain from the Spanish Steps, we spied a gang of suspect children. A pregnant girl of about 16 led the younger ones. Each carried a large square of cardboard, announcing their intentions. Incredibly brazen, they tried for the pockets or purses of tourists every few yards, but with little success. The children eventually noticed us and our huge, tv-news-style camera, but we continued to follow. They were confused by our interest in them. Why were we following? Why taking photos?
Finally, they came right up to us and asked. But as they spoke no English, we just waved them away. No polizia, we said. They walked on, pausing to try for pockets here and there, and every once in a while tried to duck away from us. We remained close behind. Then, just as they tried for a man’s pocket, a police car zoomed up, officers jumped out, and the kids were rounded up against a wall. The police questioned them angrily while the kids pointed accusingly at us. Bob kept filming. One officer grabbed the kids’ cardboard squares and threw them into a corner. They let the kids go, shooed them away as they were all too young to arrest, and drove off. We waited. Sure enough, the scoundrels came back for their cardboard and we all continued where we’d left off. They led, we followed and filmed. Eventually, they ditched us.
Excerpt from Travel Advisory: How to Avoid Thefts, Cons, and Street Scams
Chapter One (part-j): High and Dry on the Streets of Elsewhere
When confronted by a victim, two gypsy pickpockets, 16 and 13, voluntarily bare themselves to show they don’t have the wallet.
Yoshi Sugohara stood stoic and penniless in a phone booth, using our phone card. He called a number given him by the Rome police, where he could report all his stolen credit cards at once. A Japanese-speaking operator was put on the line for him. Next, he called the Japanese embassy.
Mr. Sugohara owned a small chain of sushi restaurants in Osaka, Japan. He was in Italy to design a sleek new amalgam of Japanese and Italian decor for the three new restaurants he was about to open. He had traveled to Milan for business, then Rome for pleasure. He had granted himself two extra days away from his family in which to see the splendors of the ancient city.
We first saw him in a little triangular park between the Coliseum and the Trajan Column, while everything was still all right. Bob and I stood behind a low fence on Via Cavour, steadying our video camera on a stone column. We were observing a pair of young girls on the far side of the park as they drank at a fountain and splashed their faces.
Maritza, we later learned from the police, was about 16 years old. Her sister Ravenna was about 13. The two girls looked like any ordinary children, except for a few subtle details. They weren’t dressed with the inbred Italian flair for style and color. And they seemed directionless, loitering in a tourist area where children had little reason to roam.
The girls cooled themselves in the punishing August heat, then turned toward Via Alessandrina. Maritza carried a telltale newspaper.
Mr. Sugohara had just rested on a shady bench. Now he, too, headed for Via Alessandrina. He wore a bright white cap and held a telltale map.
With their props displayed, both players advertised their roles in the game. The girls recognized the Japanese as a tourist; but a tourist couldn’t possibly recognize the girls as thieves. The two parties were on a converging course.
Maritza and Ravenna swiftly caught up with Sugohara. They skittered around him as if he were daddy just home from a business trip. Walking backwards, Maritza extended her hand as if begging. She had laid the folded newspaper over her forearm and hand, so only her fingers were visible. Ravenna trotted along beside Sugohara.
One of the girls must have made physical contact immediately. In our viewfinder from across the park, Sugohara leapt right out of the frame. He ran a few steps backwards, then turned and hurried off. It was a very brief encounter.
The girls skipped away ahead of Sugohara, quickly putting space between them. Bob and I, still on the far side of the park, picked up the camera and hurried to catch up. As we came around the corner, Sugohara was groping his front pants pocket, just realizing his wallet was gone. He looked ahead at the two girls and ran after them.
Maritza and Ravenna did not run away. In fact, they stopped and turned to face their accuser. Sugohara, who didn’t speak English or Italian, nevertheless made his charges quite clear. There was shouting and confusion. A group of British tourists got mixed into the melee. Their concern was for the girls.
“The child will not be injured!” one woman kept insisting.
“They’re pickpockets,” I explained while Bob filmed.
“I don’t care what they are, the child is not to be hurt.”
“That girl just stole the man’s wallet, that’s why he’s angry.”
“Jeez, Sally, they’re pickpockets, can’t you see?” someone in her group said with disgust. Sugohara was surprisingly aggressive; not what one might expect of a Japanese victim. The girls could have run away. Instead, they faced him, yelling back in their own language. Then, without warning, Maritza lifted her t-shirt over her head, revealing enormous breasts in a purple bra. She brought her shirt back down, and Ravenna followed suit, showing her bare little breasts.
Then both girls pulled down their pants and did a quick pirouette. Sugohara was dumbstruck. The girls then strutted off jauntily, having proved their innocence. They looked back again as they walked away, and pulled down their pants once more for good measure. Then they turned off the sidewalk onto a narrow path through the ruins of Augustus’ Forum and into the labyrinth of old Rome.
Where had the wallet gone? The girls had clearly taken it. By their comprehension of the Japanese accusation, by their practiced reaction to it, one could suppose that they’d been accused before.
To my mind, they’re guilty without a trial. So where was the evidence? Was the victim so bamboozled by bare breasts that he never thought to look in their pants pockets? Could the children be that brazen? Or had they tossed the wallet down into the excavation site of Nerva’s Forum to be later retrieved?
In any case, the girls scurried off, and Sugohara stood alone, high and dry.
“Would you like to go to police?” we asked him.
“You police?” said Sugohara. He appeared more sad than angry.
“No, we take you. We help.” I hate pidgin. “Suri,” we added, Japanese for pickpocket.
Sugohara looked mournfully at the Trajan Column as we hurried him past it on our way to the central Rome police station. He mopped his brow and followed us obediently.
Excerpt from Travel Advisory: How to Avoid Thefts, Cons, and Street Scams
Chapter One (part-i): High and Dry on the Streets of Elsewhere
I remember when I used to hunt for wild mushrooms in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I’d find nothing the first hour or so. But after spotting the first one, even if it wasn’t a candy cap or chanterelle or boletus, other mushrooms would practically pop into view. It was just a matter of focus and concentration. Likewise looking for pickpockets. “Watch their eyes,” our favorite New York subway cop, Lothel Crawford, used to tell us. The eyes—and the body language as well. With their ulterior motives, these interlopers belong to a crowd like an inchworm to a salad. A practiced eye will spot them. What is the crowd doing? Enjoying the sights, as they should be. And the perps? They’re looking at the crowd.
Too many travelers forget their good judgment when they pack their pajamas. High on excitement, relaxed after a beer or an unaccustomed lunchtime glass of wine, disoriented with jetlag, going with the flow—too many fall victim to the dreaded Tourist Suspension of Common Sense. I call it Holiday Headspace. It’s an easy-going, carefree attitude which gives us an unequivocal handicap in a city not our own. Or, even in our own backyard.
Like most Americans, I was raised to be kind, friendly, and open to strangers. Cynicism is an unnatural state for a traveler who has come far to experience a new land and unfamiliar customs. We’re prepared to accept our local hosts, however alien or exotic they seem to us. After all, it’s their country. We want to like them. Yet, we don’t know how to read these foreigners, even though they may seem just like us. We can’t always interpret their body language, their facial expressions, their gestures. We’re at a distinct disadvantage as tourists and travelers, due to our nature as much as our innocence.
Of all the victims we’ve spoken with, a couple robbed in Athens puzzled me most. The woman’s bag had been slit with a razor on the infamous green line train between the Parthenon and Omonia Square, the city center. Noticing the gash, we pointed it out to her as we exited the train. The couple was visiting Greece from Scotland, they told us as they inventoried the contents of the bag, and it was the last day of their stay. Their few remaining traveler’s checks were missing, but the woman’s cash was safe in a zippered compartment. The biggest loss was her passport, which would cost dearly in time and aggravation. They would miss their flight home the next morning, and have to purchase expensive, one-way, last-minute tickets, as well as an unplanned hotel night. The complications of a delayed return home were another factor, with work, childcare, and other obligations.
They suffered more inconvenience than financial loss, and perhaps that is why they didn’t seem as upset as most other victims we meet. Maybe they were secretly pleased to get another day away from the boredom or difficulties or sheer madness of their home routine—whatever it is they were escaping from.
In any case, we were amazed to hear them cheerily admit that they had been pickpocketed before. Bob and I tend to assume that an intimate encounter with a street thief bestows a sort of earned awareness on the victim, and he or she is thereafter unlikely to be had again. The Scottish couple, however, seemed almost to laugh it off, resigned to the fact that they were destined to be victims.
They had no concept of what made them so appealing as marks; and no idea that they had practically advertised their vulnerability. They were fascinated to learn that some pickpockets look out for a certain type of target, and that, even as tourists, they had a certain amount of control over their desirability toward pickpockets.
“Dress down,” Bob always tells his audiences. “Leave your jewelry at home. Don’t give off signals.” In other words, if you’re going to be in an unpredictable environment, try not to look like an affluent tourist. “Have pace in your face,” Bob says, meaning: know where you are and where you’re going. Try not to appear lost and bewildered. Lost and bewildered equals vulnerable.
High and Dry on the Streets of Elsewhere
Chapter One, part-g, Travel Advisory—
No more Flamenco on La Rambla.
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.
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.
