The Steal (3 page)

Where shoplifting begins depends on where you think the crime falls on that spectrum. Eve was the first shoplifter, a security expert once quipped, adding that being banned from the Garden of Eden and cursed with mortality was not too severe a punishment for a petty thief. Certainly every ancient culture was preoccupied with thieves and how to stop the crime. Around 2500 BC, the laws of Hammurabi, the first set of recorded directives guiding how a society should work, ruled that the penalty for stealing from a rich man should be harsher than that for stealing from a poor one.

In the Iron Age, at the dawn of the eighth century BC, the Greeks invented myths in which clever heroes steal in order to create; sometimes they endure terrible fates, sometimes they escape discipline. Prometheus takes fire from Zeus and gives it to mankind; birds pick at his liver. Hermes, the god of thieves and shepherds, steals cattle from Apollo and presents human beings with milk; Zeus does not punish him at all.

Greek legislators tackled the ethics of theft. In the sixth century BC, Draco—the word “draconian” comes from his name—advocated death for any amount stolen, no matter how small. It took a hundred years for Athenian thinkers to begin to distinguish between the small theft, which society punished, and the large, abstract one committed by a despot, which, defined as tyranny, often went unpunished. These philosophers searched not just to explore whether petty theft merits a lesser punishment, but to understand the sources of different-size and differently ordered thefts, the connections among them, and how who steals matters.

In
The Republic
, Plato asks whether thieves are made or born. His strikingly modern answer is that theft is the fault of both society and the individual. He also connects theft, earning, and hoarding.

Socrates asks, “Then he who is a good keeper of anything is also a good thief?”

Polemachus: “That, I suppose, is to be inferred.”

Socrates: “Then if the just man is good at keeping money, he is good at stealing it.”

Musing about theft’s causes, Aristotle, anticipating the Enlightenment and the 1960s, concluded that thieves reflect a sick social body. The Stoics were less meditative. Once, while beating a slave who said, “It was fated that I steal,” Zeno quipped, “And that you should be beaten.”

Saint Augustine believed that petty theft was as tantalizing as sex. He begins book 2 of
The Confessions
by nodding to divine law’s condemnation of the crime. Recalling Eve’s temptation, he describes stealing’s sensuous allure and his theft at age sixteen of pears from an orchard with a group of friends: “Yet I lusted to thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger, nor poverty, but through a cloyedness of well-doing, and a pamperedness of iniquity.... Nor cared I to enjoy what I stole, but joyed in the theft and sin itself.” Augustine and his friends never even tasted the pears. They fed them to the hogs.

To put an end to this sort of chicanery, the Byzantine emperor Justinian amplified the amount of restitution required, concluding that thieves caught red-handed should pay four times as much as the object’s worth, whereas those caught later on without the object should merely pay double. Justinian also made the first observation about the crime’s clandestine nature. In “Concerning Theft,” a chapter in
The Justinian Institute
, his legal textbook on the subject, he attributes the Latin word for theft,
furtum
, to the jurist Marcus Antistius Labeo, who connected it to
furvus,
the word for black, since theft mostly happens secretly at night.

After the Inquisition, English judges began sentencing thieves to be branded on the thumb instead of the face, since the latter, it was acknowledged, condemned criminals to a life of crime. In France, the brand was in the shape of a V, for
voleur
.

Christian thinkers in this era sought to soften the law’s severe sentences for petty theft when it arose out of necessity. On stealing to satisfy hunger, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote, “It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another’s property in a case of extreme need: Because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need.”

Aquinas also examined the relationship between theft and shame. He concluded that theft was sometimes synonymous with shame; it could sometimes arise out of shame, and sometimes cause shame. He perceived, in other words, the complex web between shame and stealing that still haunts and confounds. Distinguishing between theft and robbery, Aquinas noted that guileful theft is considered more serious because thieves steal at night—a concrete manifestation of their shame. He went on to observe that robbery, which happens during the daytime, is punished more severely.

Aquinas was not the only Christian writer to object to the law’s punishing petty theft by death. Responding to the regular hanging of thieves caught in the act, Thomas More asks in
Utopia
, “Be we then so hasty to kill a man for taking a little money?”

For the next three centuries, the answer was yes.

In Elizabethan London, milliners, mercers, pawnbrokers, booksellers, opticians, cheese mongers, bird sellers, curriers, serge makers, soap boilers, sailcloth makers, and linen weavers opened beautiful stores with glass windows to display their wares, inviting theft. The first shoplifters, called “lifters,” were roving bands of men. In 1591, the year that Shakespeare began the Henriad, the history plays in which “thieves and robbers range abroad unseen,” a privately printed pamphlet,
The Second Part of Cony Catching
, described the lifters—and the act itself—the “lift.”

The Second Part of Cony Catching
(the title refers to a con artist “catching” a dupe) was written by Robert Greene, a rake, playwright, journalist, and friend of Shakespeare and Marlowe who died the following year at age thirty-four. In the chapter “The Discovery of the Lifting Law,” Greene, under the pretense of being shocked by this vile crime, instructed would-be “shoplifters”—lifts—how to carry it off.

“Attired in the form of a civil country gentleman,” the lift should stride into the store, wearing only hose and doublet (cloakless, he would avoid suspicion), and call to the merchant, “Sirrah, reach me that piece of velvet or satin or that jewel chain or that piece of plate.”

The lift should continue to ask the merchant to pile more and more goods on the counter, and eventually, while the merchant’s back was turned, a second thief should creep into the store, grab some of it—“garbage” in the trade—and pass it out the window, where a third thief, whom the second pretends to engage in conversation, is strolling by.

“Sir, a word with you. I have a message to do unto you from a very friend of yours, and the errand is of some importance.”

If caught, Greene advised, the three thieves should swear innocence and “call for revenge” against those who accused them.

Although these lifters were men, Greene anticipated centuries of women dominating the theft when, in yet another pamphlet, he wrote, “Women are more subtile than the cunningest . . . lift.” If “starring the glaze”—slang for breaking glass shop windows with a diamond, nail, or knife—was men’s work, lifting was a female crime. Lifting suggested illicit sex and the shame that it incited. “So young and so old a lifter,” Cressida jokes about Troilus, punning on “limb-lifter,” slang for having sex with a prostitute against a wall.

The word “shoplift” first appeared in the tsunami of pulpy biographies, novels, and guides to criminal haunts printed at the end of the seventeenth century. One picaresque tale depicted the underworld setting that shoplifters prowled through. “Towards Night these Houses are throng’d with People of all sorts and qualities . . . Lifters, Foilers, Bulkers”—the reader is dragged on an anthropological tour of the city’s nightspots.
The Ladies Dictionary
, in addition to providing tips on losing weight and fixing hair, described the female shoplifter who might “go into a mercer’s shop and there pretend to lay out a great deal of Money; Whereas her whole intent is to convey into her nap a piece of some silk or satin that she may the better facilitate her purpose.” Another manual to the criminal element helpfully portrayed this shoplifter as “commonly well clad.”

Beneath the shoplifters’ fancy clothes lay prostitutes, bounders, con artists, female pimps, and actresses. Mary Frith, aka Moll Cut-Purse, procured, shoplifted, and picked pockets. An anonymously written pamphlet attributed
her
stealing to her “being born under Mercury.” But
The Newgate Calendar
, a short, weekly biographical pamphlet about the lives of executed criminals, offered another explanation: Moll stole because she “was so ugly in any dress as never to be wooed nor solicited by any man.” Nor,
The Newgate Calendar
added, did this androgyne ever have her period or fall in love. Another Moll, sometime prostitute Moll King, shoplifted to dress better, or maybe to attract better clients. She stole a red petticoat (part of the prostitute’s uniform), Flanders lace, and a hair fringe, the front piece of one of the enormous powdered wigs that conferred status on men and women.

Lady shoplifters, sometimes called Amazons or roaring girls, wore pants to pass as men in the underworld and to more easily rob the drunks and scoundrels whose rooms they shared at notorious lodging houses. Diarist Samuel Pepys dwelled for several entries on Maria Carlston. Also called the German Princess, or Mary or Maria Carleton, Carlston performed in a play about her own larcenous adventures. As Mary Blacke, she shoplifted before she was executed.

In the century since Robert Greene’s guide was printed, London had doubled in size, becoming the largest and wealthiest city in the world. Londoners scrutinized clothes; the luxury-goods business exploded. A partial inventory of a mercer’s shop might include silks and brocades, cloth of silver and gold, Genevan and English velvet, satin, mohairs, and crepes. Such shops were crowded—sometimes as many as sixty customers vied for one salesperson’s attention. The shops also established credit, extending the possibilities of what people could buy—if not up front, then by paying usurious interest. Whatever the reasons for the rise in shoplifters, they crimped merchants’ profits.

By 1699, under William III, Parliament passed a group of laws increasing punishment for theft. The Shoplifting Act was one of over 150 laws pertaining to theft passed between 1688 and 1800, creating what historians call the Bloody Code—capital punishment for petty crimes. The Shoplifting Act decreed that shoplifting an item worth more than five shillings could get you hanged. (An alternative since 1660, shoplifters’ transportation to the North American colonies or to Botany Bay was becoming less practical, as those places were increasingly reluctant to accept England’s convicts.) Another part of the law spared those who turned in shoplifters to the police from the duties of serving in public office. William also eliminated “benefit of clergy” for some crimes, including shoplifting items valued over five shillings. (From the fourteenth century, any criminal who could read verse 1 of Psalm 51—the so-called neck verse—from the Bible had escaped with branding on the “meat” of the thumb or, for a few years, on the cheek near the nose instead of transportation or death.)

The Shoplifting Act did not stop shoplifting. Although the murder rate remained low, shoplifting flared, as did theft generally in London, where most historians agree that it comprised the majority of all crimes. Shoplifting was the third most prevalent offense among transported women.

Found guilty, a shoplifter might be rushed to Newgate Prison, where, if she could pay the weekly half-crown rent for the “Master’s Side,” she could also fill her apartment with comfortable furniture, carpets, books, wine, and even, in one case, servants. There, while waiting to be tried, hanged, or transported, shoplifters and other well-to-do criminals consorted with radicals such as Lord George Gordon, after whom the 1780 Gordon Riots were named. Sentenced to death, the shoplifter might go to the Tyburn Tree, a gallows built in the Middle Ages on the site of what is now Marble Arch in Hyde Park—today one of London’s busiest shopping areas. The Tyburn Tree was shaped like a long triangle and supported by three legs, so that the cart from Newgate could be backed directly up to the gallows and groups of criminals could be hanged at once. Thousands of people watched. During the eighteenth century, two-thirds of all executions were for property crimes. Not every shoplifter did the “Tyburn jig,” and some merchants protested the Shoplifting Act’s severity. By the 1720s, when London’s population was 700,000, by one estimate, 10,000 thieves called the city home.

Among the first printed books were biographies of thieves. In these books and in eighteenth-century court records, shoplifters were young, unmarried women fleeing villages and towns (although at least one, Mary Robinson, was a senior citizen) for London. They were anonymous, desirable, available. They also shoplifted differently from men. Whereas men wore cloaks (or went without and used teams), women depended on the pocket, a recent innovation initially designed to protect female shoppers against “purse cutting,” a form of pickpocketing. Since the pocket hung freely under the skirt and on top of the hoop, and could be reached through slits in the cloak, shoplifters used it to stash rolls of “Holland,” as linen was called. When women were caught shoplifting, they fainted, or tried to sell the merchant stolen fabric, or as a last resort, staged a fight.

Yet for all her popularity, the shoplifter might never have become illustrative of the era if Daniel Defoe had not made her the heroine of the first modern English novel. Published in 1722,
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
, supposedly set forty years earlier, traces the rise of Moll, beginning with her mother, who began
her
life of thievery thanks to “the devil, who began, by the help of an irresistible poverty” as she described it, “even when my necessities were not so great.” Written from Moll’s point of view at age seventy,
Moll Flanders
is supposedly based on the life of Moll King. The book follows the heroine as she becomes a prostitute, marries, and loses her husband and her income. To support her children, Moll gets drawn into shoplifting.