The Steal (8 page)

Nothing worked. Then Assaf’s cousin, Jack Welsch, an amateur inventor who, according to Assaf, had designed a novel pizza cutter, began to experiment with a device similar to Minasy’s—an antishoplifting gizmo with a sensitized label that could be attached to products and that pedestals placed at store exits would detect. One day, a big, burly guy came into Assaf’s Kroger store, picked up two bottles of wine, looked Assaf in the eye, and walked out. Assaf chased the thief to the railroad tracks but lost him. Fifteen minutes later, Jack Welsch came in to cash a check, and Assaf said, “Jack, if we can invent something to stop shoplifting, we’re gonna make a lot of money.”

The team hired two University of Michigan engineers to help. In 1966, they borrowed $10,000 and formed JKR—named after Welsch’s three children: Jack, Karen, and Randy. But like Minasy, Assaf couldn’t get financing at first. So he developed a franchise program to sell the marketing rights in each state; his salesmen formed the lab prototype into handmade units. Assaf’s first tag was a piece of paper and an aluminum antenna. The second, a small diode hand-soldered onto the antenna, cost a dollar.

Assaf paid Stephanie’s, a small retail clothing store in Akron, $400 a month to pilot the tag. In 1967, JKR produced and installed twenty-five pairs of pedestals on a free trial basis in Akron, Cleveland, and other midwestern cities. Assaf said, “Even more than today, there was no accurate way of calculating shrink; stores generally did inventory twice a year and couldn’t measure how much missing stuff had been shoplifted and how much just lost via other means. It was difficult to come up with numbers that could show the product’s effectiveness.”

Gradually stores began to install the systems. In 1969, now called Sensormatic, Assaf’s company went public and raised $12 million. Like Minasy’s, Assaf’s tags modernized stores’ methods of catching shoplifters. Before, the store detective had to see a person shoplifting with his own eyes. Once stores installed tags, catching shoplifters became more objective. Or that was the theory. The detectives were able to rush to the door after the alarm went off when the shoplifter was attempting to leave with the stolen goods. But she could still defend herself by saying that she had forgotten to pay. As more and more stores relied on tags and pedestals, the number of false-arrest lawsuits for shoplifting skyrocketed. Thus Sensormatic and state retail lobby associations worked to broaden existing retail laws or pass new ones allowing stores to stop people if they had probable cause.

Assaf’s first tags operated on microwave frequency—as opposed to Knogo’s radio frequency tag—and could be detected at a greater distance. Thus, they worked better in the new malls with wide entrances for each store. Called “alligator tags” because of their big “jaws,” these tags are removed from garments with a tool resembling a giant nutcracker.

Some retailers acknowledged that shoplifting comprised a significant part of inventory losses, but many others remained skeptical that Assaf’s product would help. The decadelong shoplifting spike and the computer revolution (stores used them for inventory) finally helped push Sensormatic into profitability. “Stores began to let salespeople go and shoplifting skyrocketed. Almost out of desperation, stores decided to give EAS an opportunity,” Assaf said, adding that his first client, Macy’s, installed the tags in the fur department, but years passed before the store used them on designer and ready-to-wear clothing.

Of the other basement inventors, garage engineers, and Saturday-afternoon entrepreneurs who created the antishoplifting technology industry, Peter Stern is typical. While Assaf and Minasy were tinkering with their tags, Stern, an engineer living outside Philadelphia who served as president of a branch of the local public library, asked the director about his problems. The director said: book stealers.

Stern designed his own antishoplifting device—a refined metal detector that picked up signals from small slips of paper lined with a laminate of lightweight conductive metals such as aluminum. These were pasted on books’ flyleaves. Libraries at New York University, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania used this system.

Albert “Ted” Wolf, a prominent local family’s scion who worked with Stern, became CEO of a new company founded by Stern dedicated to this technology, later called Checkpoint. Wolf set up headquarters in Barrington, New Jersey, and later, a little farther to the west in Thorofare. In 1974, the two men decided that the library market was too dull and switched to retail and to radio frequency tags. Soon Korvette’s, CVS, Walgreens, Urban Outfitters, and the U.S. Postal Service installed the tags Checkpoint manufactured.

EAS drove shoplifters to find new ways to steal, such as using booster bags—shopping bags lined with metal to deflect the electronic technology. In one of the scaremongering articles about the shoplifting surge in this decade,
Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
announced, “Strengthened security and crackdowns don’t seem to help much.”

Just when the technology began to boom, the counterculture introduced a new motive for shoplifting: the revolution. In 1970, a new generation of euphemisms for the crime came into vogue: “Five-finger discount,” “liberating,” and “ripping off.” The same year, two books endorsed the crime as one that belonged to the people:
Do It: Scenarios of the Revolution
and
The Anarchist Cookbook
. Jerry Rubin, a thirty-two-year-old yippie and hero at the trial of the Chicago Seven, wrote
Do It
. William Powell, nineteen, was responsible for the cookbook. Chapter 22 of
Do It
, titled “Money Is Shit—Burning Money, Looting and Shoplifting Can Get You High,” is not so much a how-to as a crude celebration of theft. The famous line comes after Rubin tells the story of destroying dollar bills with Abbie Hoffman at the New York Stock Exchange. But even that commemoration of American outlaw cheek fails to prepare readers for Rubin’s out-and-out endorsement of shoplifting as an exhilarating, revolutionary act: “All money represents theft . . . shoplifting gets you high. Don’t buy. Steal. If you act like it’s yours, no one will ask you to pay for it.” In “shoplifting gets you high,” the yippies found an anthem.

In a chapter on electronics, sabotage, and surveillance, Powell lumps shoplifting in with other pranks such as tapping phones, squirting glue in keyholes at the Stock Exchange, and hot-wiring cars. Like Rubin, Powell makes out liberators to be more discriminating than common thieves: “The revolutionary will steal from large corporations and the common thief will steal from anyone. If you can ever get over the Protestant ethic you will see what I mean.” But where Rubin provides epigrams, Powell gives readers “commonsense tactics” in the form of an eleven-point list. Two of the items instruct the would-be revolutionary (shoplifter) how to disguise herself as a civilian: “Operate in pairs with one person holding the employee’s attention, the other stealing him blind,” and “If caught for shoplifting or robbery never admit to being part of the movement. It will get you more time in jail.”

These handbooks of the counterculture mark the first time that any American had argued for shoplifting as a revolutionary act. While Elizabethan pamphlets noted that shoplifters wore silk to disguise themselves as nobility, and Enlightenment memoirs blamed stealing on class inequity, yippie books and articles advised liberators to gear up as establishment squares to steal for politics’ sake. In the underground feminist newspaper
Rat
, “Lizzie Liftwell” and “Pearl Paperhanger,” reportedly the pen names of Sharon Krebs, later a Weatherwoman, wrote one column, “Rip Off,” instructing the would-be shoplifter, who perhaps prior to becoming a revolutionary enjoyed the op-ed page on the commuter train from Connecticut: “If you read a
New York Times
, buy one before you go to the A&P.”

The figure most responsible for pushing the shoplifting-as-revolution meme into the mainstream, Abbie Hoffman, was not content with dressing up as the Man. In January 1971, after more than two dozen New York publishers rejected his manuscript, Hoffman scrounged $15,000 from friends and set up Pirate Editions to put out
Steal This Book
. Grove Press distributed the book, which endorsed Hoffman’s stealing from rage at bourgeois America’s materialism. Barney Rosset, Grove’s publisher, wrote me, “We chained the books to the counter (in other words, buy the book, don’t steal it).”

Reading
Steal This Book
today gives a sense of how innocent the world used to be: Scamming free plane rides simply by boarding without a ticket is unimaginable in our post-9/11 world. Even some of Hoffman’s notes on stealing are a bit dated. “Ripping off . . . is an act of revolutionary love,” he writes. A section on free food, invoking Robin Hood, offers a slightly more up-to-date line: “We have been shoplifting from supermarkets on a regular basis without raising the slightest suspicion, ever since they began. . . . We are not alone and the fact that so much stealing goes on and the supermarkets still bring in huge profits shows exactly how much overcharging occurs in the first place.” Hoffman includes helpful hints, photos with funny captions, and a bibliography. He also advises that “the food tastes better” shoplifted.

At his best, Hoffman elaborates on how-to: “Sew a plastic bag onto your tee shirt or belt and wear a loose fitting jacket or coat to cover any noticeable bulge,” he writes. “Fried chicken is the best and easiest to pocket, or should we say bag.” Other tips Hoffman incorporates: Work with a partner to distract security; slide sandwiches between your thighs; cart stolen goods into the ladies’ room and rewrap them in the stalls. “Specialized uniforms, such as nun and priest garb, can be most helpful.”

In four months,
Steal This Book
sold upward of 100,000 copies. No newspaper would review it. Few radio stations would advertise it. Many states banned it. In Ohio, stores wrapped the state shoplifting law on a brown paper band around the book. Canada seized copies at the border; Doubleday bookstores refused to stock it, blaming the title. Some authors might have seen this as failure; not Hoffman. He set up a table outside the Doubleday store on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street and sold books there.

Thirteen New York bookstores declined to sell the book. Only the
San Francisco Chronicle
ran ads. The New Left political journal
Ramparts
published an excerpt as well as an advertisement containing hints on how to steal
Steal This Book
from the nine stores in America carrying it. In Boston at BookMart, “second aisle on the left is the best bet.”

A June memo from the FBI’s New York office to the Washington office revealed that the government regarded
Steal This Book
as “a manuel [
sic
] for revolutionary extremists . . . foisted on the reading public by Grove Press.” And “In view of the contents of
Steal This Book
, Internal Security Division of Department being queried for an opinion as to whether authorship, distribution, and/or publication constitutes a violation of Federal Law.”

Regardless of its legality,
Steal This Book
incited controversy and censorship everywhere. In Coldwater, Michigan, a librarian resigned after the board objected to, among other things, his adding copies of
Steal This Book
to an exhibit about the Chicago Seven, as the mayor put it, “where a ten-year-old could see them.” No more than midwestern libraries, the American literary establishment was not ready for
Steal This Book.
In July,
Esquire
writer Dotson Rader convinced John Leonard, then
New York Times Book Review
editor, to let him review the book. Rader called the book “a hip Boy Scout handbook,” used its phobic reception to condemn the timidity of the publishing industry, and described Hoffman as a countercultural Thoreau. “It reads as if Hoffman decided it was time to sit down and advise his children on what to avoid and what was worth having in America.”
Steal This Book
“possesses its own peculiarly righteous morality.”

Basking in his one positive review, Hoffman descended on Boston, where, accompanied by a reporter, he shoplifted a Currier and Ives coffee table book, giving the clerk at the downtown bookstore the finger after learning that it did not carry
Steal This Book
. In Cambridge, he visited the Harvard Coop, where he demanded that the manager move
Steal This Book
from his office to a display in the front of the store: “Where the f——do you keep it—in the safe?”

In the wake of
Steal This Book
, Hoffman became a celebrity. He also seemed to have stimulated a shoplifting craze. A Sunday
New York Times Magazine
article, “Ripping Off: The New Lifestyle,” led with the lyrics from the Jefferson Airplane song “We Can Be Together”: “In order to survive we steal cheat lie” was one lyric, followed by “We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young.” The article then jumped to a scene in which a Harvard Divinity School dropout smokes pot and extols shoplifting’s virtues. “Ripping off—stealing, to the uninitiated—is as rapidly becoming part of the counterculture as drugs and rock music,” it warned.

The article pits Harvard sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset (“Stealing is stealing even if you call it revolution”) against Hoffman’s passionate contention that any crime the individual “liberator” commits will never add up to the volume of stealing the big corporations are doing: “Saying that shoplifting accounts for high prices is like saying that people using colored toilet paper are responsible for the ecological mess. All our ripoffs together don’t equal one price fixing scheme by General Electric.”

That fall, two yippies claimed that Hoffman stole ideas and research for
Steal This Book
from them. One of the malcontents wrote an article for
Rolling Stone
about how the über-ripper-offer ripped him off.
Time
and the
New York Times
covered the kerfuffle and the tribunal Hoffman held in Manhattan to air the charges against himself.