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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.

We have a two-pronged legal strategy, criminal and civil. On the criminal side, we want to ensure that when we apprehend these professional criminals they receive the maximum penalty, and we put them out of business for as long as we can. On the civil side, if they have any assets, we're going to sue them for any damages they cause to our organization.

We're also weighing in at certain key points in the criminal justice process. For example, we want to monitor and attend bail hearings to influence the bail amounts. Lots of judges and prosecutors may not think that this person is part of a larger organized crime group. They may just think they're a petty shoplifter. They set the bail way too low, and then [the suspect] leaves. Like this guy we're chasing around the country now—he keeps making his bail. There have been cases where we've been able to influence those decisions, and they've made the bail really high. Then these guys sit in custody until their trial. It has a deterrent value. And you know what? If they're sitting in custody or they're incarcerated, they can't be stealing from our stores.

We also attend arraignment, sentencing and restitution hearings. In one case, at a sentencing hearing in Crescent City, Calif., the defendant was convicted of a felony and received a one-year sentence, and was also ordered to pay $132,000 in restitution, which is unheard of in a retail case. This was someone who was actually a booster and e-fencing ring. They were boosting the product themselves and selling it themselves online at eBay. One of the good things about Internet fencing is that it leaves an audit trail; that $132,000 was what they sold. At our retail, it was probably a quarter of a million dollar case. We also meet with prosecutors and try to make sure [professional criminals] do get prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Our people will testify and fill out impact statements. What we try to do is put a human face on a corporate victim.

There's also a theory that some of these ORC groups have a link to terrorism. They're not the terrorists committing the terrorist acts, but they're fund-raisers for terrorist groups. I attended a counterterrorism conference a few weeks ago, and they had four or five clear examples of where this was the case. A lot of the groups that we investigate don't fit that criteria, but there are some that might.