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Shoplifting and Organized Retail Crime: Mall Rats

John Talamo of The Limited knows exactly how profitable shoplifting can be. He explains the fight against organized retail crime.

By Sarah D. Scalet

Page 4

Because the malls are more crowded?

Yes. When the mall is crowded, it's easy to blend in and take advantage of a busy store team. Sunday is also busy, but it declines; sometimes Sunday is a travel day for the crews. From that data analysis, we know which stores are targeted most frequently, what time they're targeted.

We continue to focus on data analysis, trying to come up with that elusive predictive model. What we're trying to work at now is if you're in New Jersey and someone steals from Woodbridge, I'd like to know that 70 percent of the time they're going to Menlo Park. If we have ORC staff in the area, we can send them there, apprehend the crew and recover the products stolen from Woodbridge. If we don't have any ORC team members in the area, we could call the mall and let our stores know to be on the lookout. We have over 3,800 stores, and we only have 30 people on the ORC team, so we have to be smart at deploying our resources.

Is most of your effort focused on the thefts versus shutting down the fencing operations?

We spend a lot of time on the fences also. They all link together. One of the things we're experimenting with is, in the New York City area, we've actually created what we call a fence operations team. But all the ORC teams work the malls and work the fences. We try to give fences a priority, because if we shut down a fence then the crews have no one to sell to.

Can you describe a big fencing operation?

There are three kinds of fences that we work. The first is fences that are open to the public. These are street-front stores, and anyone could walk inside. Second, there are fences that are completely underground, where you'll need either an invitation or a referral to get in. They'll be in the basement of someone's home, or we've seen many times the whole home is a fence.

Would a small shop owner go to one of these places, or is the buyer actually going to use the product?

In these types of locations, the clientele is mainly the local population that's buying retail product to use themselves or give as gifts. These are people who probably wouldn't pay $48 for a bra at Victoria's Secret because they can't afford it, but they'll pay half the price for it. But we also see people coming in from other countries and buying suitcases full of product to take back to resell. I was involved in a fence operation where a woman had three suitcases stacked inside each other and $7,000 in cash, so she was planning on bringing the stuff overseas to sell.