The Steal (7 page)

As the historian Elaine S. Abelson points out in her book
When Ladies Go A-Thieving
, the advent of moving pictures provided a new popular forum for skewering the disease as a rich woman’s euphemism for shoplifting even as it titillated audiences with scenes of shoplifters getting caught. She describes how, in the 1905 Edison film,
The Kleptomaniac,
the eponymous title character emerges from her brownstone one snowy day and takes her horse-drawn carriage to Macy’s, Herald Square. There, pretending to browse, she stashes gloves and scarves in her muff. A second sequence of shots follows, and a second character: An impoverished, single mother departs from her barren flat and her beloved children to grab a loaf of day-old bread the baker has left on the doorstep. Both women are arrested and appear in court. The police let the rich kleptomaniac go and imprison the indigent mother.

Headline-making American kleptomaniacs included a countess, a nurse, and Lizzie Borden, who shoplifted two porcelain paintings four years after allegedly slaughtering her father and stepmother with an axe. Mrs. Ella Castle, a wealthy San Franciscan, filched a fur muff while on vacation in London. Yet these celebrity shoplifters were the exception in that their names were revealed in newspapers. Jane Doe, Maria Miller, Mary Brown, and Mary Smith were aliases who wore thick veils to their court dates to protect their families from the shame of shoplifting. Husbands, though often shocked to receive requests to bail their wives out, complied. If the kleptomaniacs were wealthy, the stores rarely pressed charges. Today’s kleptomaniac is tomorrow’s big spender.

As European social scientists moved from classifying kleptomania as a biological imperative to classifying it as a new type of social and emotional expression for women, they linked the disease more explicitly to new theories about female sexuality. The pioneering sociologist Emile Durkheim attributed the disease to the temptations bewitching women to deviant acts; for him kleptomaniacs’ inability to resist beautiful objects in department stores was about modern life’s expansion of what women felt they needed. Although in his 1886 encyclopedia,
Psychopathia Sexualis
, Richard von Krafft-Ebing eschews the word “kleptomania,” the sexologist counts some stealing as a fetish, which he defines as a charged interest in an otherwise ordinary body part or activity. He writes that the unfortunate creatures who steal “are the subjects of a deep mental taint,” especially those individuals prone to shoplifting handkerchiefs, shoes, and aprons.

The birth of criminal anthropology codified scientists’ ideas that kleptomaniacs, mostly women, were born to steal. In
The Female Offender
(1893) Cesare Lombroso wrote: “Shoplifting, which has become so fashionable since the establishment of huge department stores, is a form of occasional crime in which women specialize. The temptation stems from the immense number of articles on display. . . . We saw that fine things are not articles of luxury for women but articles of necessity since they equip them for conquest.” This, according to Lombroso, resulted in “women’s organic inability to resist stealing.”

The idea that kleptomania arises out of female sexual repression was made popular around 1906 by Freud’s disciples, who attached the Oedipal myth to the disease, attributing it to infantile revenge fantasies and the castration complex, and sometimes equated shoplifting with sex. Best known as a charismatic anarchist, free-love advocate, and cocaine addict who influenced expressionism and Franz Kafka, Otto Gross was the first psychoanalyst to champian kleptomania as sexual release. Published in 1907, Gross’s major work,
The Freudian Moment of Ideogenity and Its Meaning in Kraepelin’s Manic Depressive Psychosis
, explores “Case #33,” a female kleptomaniac he treated at Emil Kraepelin’s visionary clinic in Munich.

Gross portrayed Case #33 more like a lover than a patient, writing that she shoplifted from a desire to “take hold of something forbidden, secretly.” In his second book, published two years later, he added: “This broad motive plays a tremendous role in the soul of women, especially of the women belonging to the better classes—not, of course, with regard to property, but in the realm of the erotic.” The next Freudian to tackle the disease, Karl Abraham, proposed that kleptomaniacs shoplifted to take revenge on their parents: “So-called kleptomania is often traceable to the fact that a child feels injured or neglected in respect of proofs of love—which we have equated with gifts—or in some way is disturbed in the gratification of its libido. It procures a substitute pleasure for the lost pleasure, and at the same time takes revenge on those who have caused it the supposed injustice.”

The most notorious exporter of Freud’s theories about kleptomania to America was Wilhelm Stekel, whom the master himself described as “wayward.” As early as 1906, Stekel was reading French case studies on department store kleptomania for a paper he was working on about the subject. In one study, a former seamstress becomes sexually aroused stealing silk blouses and is unable to remember what she does with the silk at home. Another silkaholic who was also an ether addict described the “amazing and voluptuous spasm” shoplifting the fabric gave her and ended this confession with a “shiver.”

In 1910, Stekel’s essay “Sexual Root of Kleptomania” married Gross’s theories to those of Abraham and the French studies, proposing that kleptomania, whether it substitutes for a primal sexual urge or expresses an infantile desire for revenge, is all about the repressed id. “The root” of kleptomania is “ungratified sexual instinct,” he wrote in one of his most provocative sentences. In 1911, when Mae West had yet to swagger across our stages, Stekel’s essay, translated into English, annotated, and published in the
Journal of American Criminal Law and Criminology
, shocked American sensibilities. Harry W. Crane, an esteemed professor at the University of Michigan, bristled in his response: “Doubtless there may be something of sexual symbolism in some of the abnormal acts of some of the psychoses, but to go to the extremes to which the writer in question goes seems absurd.”

Once America entered World War I, psychoanalysts on both sides of the Atlantic retreated from the sexual roots of kleptomania and moved toward theories explaining all stealing—including shoplifting—as the behavior of traumatized groups. The massive social and cultural upheaval made Victorian-era ideas about sex appear trivial. When the war ended, Stekel combined psychoanalytic theories with those of mass trauma; he theorized that the carve-up of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires into nation-states and allied protectorates at the Paris Peace Conference made it difficult to distinguish stealing from winning. In
Peculiarities of Behavior
, he writes: “It is not enough to discover the symbolic meaning of the stolen article. The act in itself has its significant stolen value; it stands for some other act which is a part of the subject’s past and it amounts to a game; it is a compulsive repetition.”

As psychiatry replaced psychoanalysis, the shift dealt the sexual roots of kleptomania another blow. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association, in the first edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
, did not mention sexual repression—or even define kleptomania at all. By the 1970s, the rise of pharmacology and the sexual revolution made attributing kleptomania to repression obsolete. Shedding its sexual reputation, shoplifting was reborn as a political action.

Shoplifting came of age in America in 1965, when the FBI reported that it had jumped 93 percent in the previous five years and was “the nation’s fastest-growing form of larceny.” The crime was part of President Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement (the Katzenbach Commission or the Crime Commission); his “Special Message to Congress on Crime and Law Enforcement in the U.S.” marked the first time a president ever mentioned shoplifting. The shoplifting spike also inspired three men in different parts of the country to launch the modern antishoplifting technology industry, which in the past half century has claimed multibillion-dollar profits, evoking both rags-to-riches tales and a morality play about the costs of trying to suppress the crime.

Arthur John Minasy was born in 1925 to a Hungarian mother and a Greek father who had settled in America only three years earlier. The family opened a teahouse, Leon’s, on Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan. As Minasy told the
Washington Post
in 1991, growing up on Queens Boulevard, he was not thinking about stopping shoplifting as a career. In fact, he and his friends used to “get marbles and erasers and pencils and tennis balls and kind of drop them in our knickers.”

During World War II, Minasy met Jayne Leary on a train from New York to her hometown, St. Louis. He was in uniform. In 1946, the couple married, moved to Woodbury, Long Island, and had their first child. Minasy liked family life, but he was restless. He got his BS in administrative engineering at New York University in 1949 and did graduate work at the Case Institute of Technology in Ohio. After that, he worked as an assistant general manager at the Bulova Watch Company. By the late 1950s, although a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, he had tired of inventing things for other people.

In 1962, while a vice president at Belock Instrument Corporation, Minasy worked on a project that interested him more: He helped NASA develop a gyroscope that could run on a spaceship. When his youngest daughter, Kathy, was in sixth grade, she wanted her ears pierced, and he made her clip-on earrings with magnets for clasps. He invented a napkin with a buttonhole at the top so airline diners would not spill soup on their clothes.

Minasy began to hang around the New York City Police Department, where he devised a facial recognition device he called Vaicom (variable image compositor). Noticing that the police hardly arrested any shoplifters, Minasy came up with the idea for what he dubbed “Chinese handcuffs,” after the novelty toy that traps your index fingers in a snare. The “handcuffs” would attach a sensitized tag to a piece of clothing and use a radio-wave frequency system to sound an alarm when the shoplifter passed two pedestals at the store exit. If the shoplifter tried to remove the tags, the garments were rendered unwearable.

Minasy’s tags changed shoplifter catching. Until this moment, the act was much the same as it had been since the time of Moll Flanders. A few things had been added in the nineteenth century—some stores now hired off-duty cops, called floorwalkers, to protect the merchandise. Their techniques resembled a game of hide-and-seek: Detectives stood for hours inside Trojan horses, or “observation perches”—hollowedout pillars—peering through one-way mirrors watching for shoplifters. Other stores installed rudimentary pinhole cameras behind mannequins’ eyes. But in general, when a store employee found garment tags on the dressing room floor, she would let the shoplifter go rather than arrest “the wrong person,” which might incur false-arrest lawsuits and alienate customers.

Analog waves, the technology that allowed Minasy to create the Chinese handcuffs, had existed since Scottish physicist Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt developed radar in 1935. Minasy began to build prototypes of tags and pedestals that could “read” analog waves and set off alarms. He dragged pieces of the prototype from his basement workshop into the living room. While he was at the office, Jayne checked the needle gauge. If the prototype system shivered when a car drove by, anything might set off a false alarm in the store.

Minasy applied for his first patent for an electronic article surveillance (EAS) tag in 1966, a year after the FBI announced the shoplifting spike. His inaugural theft protection device was a white plastic rectangular tag or wafer that a salesclerk could clip on a piece of clothing. The pedestal at the door would screech if a shoplifter tried to leave the store. The second version, a round dome with a nipple in the middle, looked like a diaphragm.

Minasy named his company Knogo and set up headquarters in Hicksville, Long Island, not far from his home. Shortly afterward, EAS made Minasy rich. The family moved to an eleven-room house in a swanky part of town. Minasy bought his
first
Rolls-Royce. But his dreams of persuading other industries to adapt EAS foundered. Although he convinced one old-age home to try it to prevent Alzheimer’s patients from wandering off, and he hoped hospitals would use it to protect newborns from kidnapping, neither of these applications ever gained traction. Minasy’s bread and butter remained retail shoplifting.

In 1977, the company went public. Minasy received a letter from Richard Nixon offering him a job in security. (He turned it down.) Stevie Wonder’s people called to ask if he could design something to prevent Stevie from falling off the stage during concerts. (He couldn’t.) With many American retailers increasingly concerned about customer lawsuits triggered by EAS, Minasy expanded into Europe. Soon that business generated 75 percent of sales.

Minasy became an industry hero. The
Congressional Record
honored him at the Library of Congress in 1984, a year when Knogo was making about $6 million in profits. Never shy about his accomplishments, Minasy compared his invention to Fulton’s steamboat. In 1991, the Smithsonian Institution placed Minasy’s tag in the National Museum of American History.

Ronald Assaf, who would supersede Minasy as a businessman, did not meet his rival until 1968, when Knogo’s EAS system was already installed in stores. But two years earlier, just as Minasy was applying for his first patent, Assaf was working on his own antishoplifting device. Of Lebanese and Irish origin, Assaf had attended the University of Akron for three years, then dropped out to manage a half dozen supermarkets in Ohio for the Kroger Company, a midwestern chain. All the stores had shoplifting problems, but the Case Avenue store in downtown Akron, which Assaf described as a “mixed” neighborhood, was the worst.

The store had already fired three managers. Assaf tried all the security methods then in vogue: mirrors, detectives, TV cameras. He moved the cigarette rack into the clerk’s line of vision; he stopped selling shoes, which shoplifters could wear out of the store, and hosiery, which they tucked into their pockets. He placed mannequins above the meat department so detectives could look down through their eyes and catch shoplifters stealing tenderloin.