Stung by a Wasp: Scooter-Riding Bandits
Buzz Bob and Bambi
I didn’t think it could happen to me.
There was no forewarning. One moment Bambi and I were walking down a narrow, cobblestone alley in Naples’ Centro Storico, having just looked back at an empty street. The next moment I was grabbed from behind, like a Heimlich maneuver—except I wasn’t choking on chicken. I was being mugged and there were three of them.
There was nothing slick about it; they were just fast and singularly focused on my 30-year-old Rolex. Without finesse, it was merely a crude attempt to break the metal strap. What these amateurs didn’t know was that they had selected a mark who had himself lifted hundreds of thousands of watches in his career as an honest crook.
Until now, I had never been on the receiving end of my game, even though I’d strolled often through ultimate pocket-picking grounds in Cartegena, the souks in Cairo, and La Rambla in Barcelona. I’d been pushed and shoved using public transportation like the Star Ferry in Hong Kong and rush-hour subways in Tokyo, London, and New York; yet I’d never been a victim.
A typical street in Naples' Quartieri Spagnoli.
Finally my luck turned—I’m not sure for the good or bad—during a visit to Naples, Italy. Though I hadn’t been there in some fifteen years, I knew full well about its slick pickpockets, and particularly about the infamous scippatori. This latter is a unique style of rip-off which involves speeding scooters and short Italians with long arms. Little did I know that I would finally become a statistic in what must be one of the world’s highest concentrations of muggings and pickpocketings in an area of less than a square mile: Quartieri Spagnoli, a district even the police avoid.
Scippatori are marauding teams of pirates on motor scooters. The scooter of choice is the Vespa, a nimble machine with a plaintive buzz which, when carrying a pair of highway bandits, delivers a surprising sting. Scippatori ply their vicious bag snatching chicanery on unsuspecting tourists in Italy, and in Naples particularly. Handbags and gold chains are plucked as easily as ripe oranges by backseat riders in daring dash-and-grab capers.
It was therefore with extreme caution that Bambi and I walked these streets, popular with tourists primarily as a gateway city. It’s the starting point for ferry trips to Capri, bus tours to Pompeii, and drives along the spectacular Amalfi-Sorrento Coast. Let me emphasize starting point. Even Naples’ car rental companies urge tourists to drive directly out of town.
Though it hardly matches the beauty or historical magnitude of Rome, Venice, or Florence, Bambi wanted to photograph the colorful Quartieri Spagnoli. Its old section, the Centro Storico, has a seedy, rustic, old-world fascination, with its dismal balconied apartments stacked on minuscule dreary shops. As we walked, I reminded my wife that this was the birthplace of pickpocketing, and I scrutinized every scooter that buzzed by, making sure we were out of reach.
Shot from the back of a moving Vespa.
It was mid-afternoon, siesta time, as Bambi and I strolled the deserted lanes. Little light filtered down through the seven or eight stories of laundry hanging above the narrow alleys. Almost all the shops were shut, their steel shutters rolled down and padlocked, and it was quiet except for the snarl of traffic on Via Toledo, the perimeter street. A lone shellfish monger remained, amid shallow dishes of live cockles, clams, snails, and cigalo glittering in water. Though we were practically alone in the area, we frequently glanced behind us.
Still, they caught us completely off-guard. With silence their foil, they rolled down a hill: three young thugs on a Vespa scooter, its engine off. One guy remained on the scooter, ready to bolt; another held me with my arms pinned to my sides, and the third tried to tear the watch off my wrist. It was sudden, quick, and silent. No shouts or vulgar threats.
It‘s a joke, I thought that first crucial instant, expecting a friend or fan to say “Gottcha!” I’m quite often grabbed by people who’ve seen me perform; they like to make me faux-victim as a sort of role-reversing prank. Although this vice-grip felt deadly serious, my thought process, instant and automatic, cost me several seconds. I didn’t fight back with a sharp elbow or kick. And because my reflexes never got into gear, I didn’t have a chance to coil my muscles into a protective stance.
Decorative street marking in Quartieri Spagnoli.
Fortunately, pickpockets are generally petty criminals who can easily be scared off. They prefer stealth, diversion, and speed to violence as their modus operandi. Bambi reacted a moment before I did, bravely smashing my captor on the head with her umbrella. Other than breaking the umbrella, this had no effect at all.
As soon as my adrenaline kicked in, I yelled at the top of my voice “Polizia, polizia.” Years of stage speaking enabled me to project my voice throughout the neighborhood. Instant reaction! They scrambled away as fast as they had appeared.
We walked away, lucky but shaken. My steel watchband didn’t give despite considerable force applied in attempting to snap its pin. All I had lost was my own track record. I could no longer claim that pickpockets had never tried to steal from me.
Bambi still tenses at the buzz of a motorcycle behind her—not a bad legacy, perhaps. And both of us now strip down to skin and cloth when visiting this most colorful district. The proof of my own stupidity, namely, wearing a Rolex in Naples, was a scratched up wrist. I should have known better.
Scippatori in training?
First rule for avoiding pickpockets: don’t attract them. Don’t signal you’re worth their while. Second rule: acknowledge that it can happen to anyone. Whether you’re strong, confident, aware, or careful, you are not immune. Even a veteran pickpocket can become a victim.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
