Home » Business Continuity » Supply Chain

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 5

People must know they're buying something that's been stolen.

I would think so. Many times these fence operators are very popular in the community, because they provide a service. Even though buyers may think it's stolen, they're not going to turn in someone who's providing a service in their community.

The third kind of fencing is e-fencing on the Internet. If you think about the old days, if I was a crook selling stolen jeans out of the back of my car, maybe I could sell 10, 20, 30 pairs of jeans a week. But if I put it on eBay, I have access to a global consumer. The sky is the limit. Maybe instead of selling 30 pairs of jeans a week I'm selling 300. Well, where am I getting those jeans? It's a supply and demand issue. The more I can sell, the more they'll steal. [For more on e-fencing, see "Auction Blocks,"]

The fences are getting smarter. When I first started doing fence investigations, in the early 1990s, fences would keep all their product in their fence location. Then, your only risk was getting burglarized or held up by a rival gang or business; they never had to worry about being arrested. Now with all the attention around ORC, they're dividing up their inventory. Big fences have places where they do storage and processing.

We just shut down a big one in Queens, N.Y. It was called Corona Fashions, and it was open to the public in an area where there's a lot of fence activity. This particular place had a couple thousand units from all our brands. They had Express jeans, Victoria's Secret bras and panties, and some Victoria's Secret fragrance. We started to do surveillance of the location. We saw the owner of the place open in the morning, and at the end of the day we followed him to another location. At this other location, late in the evening booster crews would drive up with garbage bags filled with product. The store owner would process the product and separate it by brand, and then bring it over to the store as needed. We worked in close partnership with the New York Police Department's organized theft task force on this investigation, and when search warrants were obtained we were able to see the inner workings of the facility. That place had about $1 million worth of product when it was raided, of all different brands.