"You don’t break the law until you walk outta the store."

David Diaz

The next time you spend fifty or sixty dollars at a Safeway or trudge from one shopping center to another comparing clothing prices, take my advice: don’t think about Albert Nelson. If you work hard for your money and are honest, then thinking about Nelson will fill you with a deep disgust. He’s a forty-two-year-old shoplifter (a self-titled “professional misdemeanor thief’’), and when he sees folks every day laying out all that money for items that he plucks like ripe pieces of fruit, he just has to laugh.

Does he think we’re fools not to steal? I asked him. “No, no ... I wouldn’t say that,’’ he replied, looking troubled. “I think it just boils down to this: you do what you have to. And if somebody can’t handle this [thievery]. I’m not gonna tell ’em they’re dumb for not doin’ it.’’ He says that when he laughs at someone who’s paying for merchandise, he’s just figuring, “Well, they got plenty of money.’’ Nelson is a bluff, jovial man — graying, scruffy-bearded, a bit paunchy, quick to slap you on the back or greet you so loudly you’d think he couldn’t be a crook; he’s not sufficiently furtive.

And yet he’s a masterly thief. He boasts that in fifteen years of stealing he’s been arrested only twice, and has spent only three and a half days in jail. “Once you get to the top baseball players and you start talkin’ about Mickey Mantle or Hank Aaron — these guys are in a class all by themselves, and you could argue ail day about who’s the best.” Nelson says it’s the same with San Diego shoplifters. So he assesses his own stature merely by saying, I'm up at the level where you can’t be any better than me.” Nelson’s voice carries like a bleacher bum’s and he made no attempt to lower it on the several occasions when we met and talked in public places. He was willing to talk, for one reason, because he doesn't have the slightest fear of being punished. In requesting anonymity (Albert Nelson is not his real name) he seemed primarily concerned to hide his profession from his family and friends. He’s living with his mother in Mission Valley at the moment and while he thinks she may be suspicious that her son doesn’t really work an 11:00 a.m.-to-7:00 p.m. shift as a laborer. Nelson says his eighty-year-old grandmother, who also lives in San Diego, would be brokenhearted to learn that “her little boy” is a career criminal.

But Nelson scoffs at the notion of the police tracking him down. He points out it’s not a crime to talk about one’s shoplifting and claims he’d have to be caught in the act of removing something from a store before he could be arrested. And even then, “What’s the most that’s gonna happen?” he shrugs. “I’m gonna spend a day in jail.” He says district attorneys invariably reduce shoplifting charges to mere “trespassing,” which brings a trivial fine. He mentions one associate, a heroin addict, who had seven or eight shoplifting arrests in the past year. While that man's fines have steadily escalated, he hasn’t yet served any time. ‘That’s the amazing thing! Nobody that I’ve ever known doin’ this has ever gotten any time. And they’re not gonna stiffen the penalties, because they [the authorities] don’t have the room. The jails are already overcrowded. . . . There’s no risk!"

Once, at the very beginning of his career, he used to be afraid of being caught. He says he was nineteen or twenty at the time, living in the big Eastern city where he grew up; he had only recently concluded he’d never make it as a professional baseball player. Throughout his teens, baseball had been his all-consuming passion. He’d trained devotedly, idolized baseball greats. “I could play defense pretty well, but I couldn't hit the curveball. They start throwin’ them off-speed pitches at me and I couldn’t hit ’em.” He dropped out of the eleventh grade, and about the same time that his ballplaying dreams were crumbling, a number of childhood friends began using heroin. To support their habits, they took to shoplifting (“boosting” in the lingo of the trade). The havoc which the drug caused in their lives robbed Nelson of any desire to shoot heroin, but he says he readily agreed to drive his junkie friends to various stores for a cut of their illegal proceeds. Impressed by the simplicity of their crimes, he soon was ready to join them. For his very first theft, he donned a pair of pants and a shirt in a store dressing room and then put on his own clothes over them. “I was very, very nervous. But nothin’ happened then — or since.’’

In 1965, at the age of twenty-four, he moved out to San Diego where his parents had settled after retiring from the Navy. Nelson says he worked at a few honest jobs, including a stint at NASSCO, but “work and I just don’t agree. There’s somethin’ about punch-in’ that time clock. And then, when you get the check, they take this out and that out.” The climate here struck him as being singularly conducive to shoplifting. (“Back bast in winter there’s three to four inches of snow. You can’t drive around.”) So he returned to thieving, principally cigarettes, which then — as now — provided most of his income.

Back then, in the late Sixties, Nelson says a retail pack of cigarettes cost thirty-five cents and he could sell a hot carton (of twenty packs per carton) for two dollars. Today, with cigarette machines charging $1.25 per pack. Nelson receives up to five dollars for every stolen carton (though he offers a discount price of four dollars to $4.50 per carton for high-volume orders). He says his customers range from individuals (“People who know that I do it and just give me orders. Like a guy and his wife might buy five or six cartons every couple of weeks”) to bars to cigarette distributors. The distributors benefit not only from Nelson’s lower price (two dollars to three dollars below the wholesale price), but also from the fact that the IRS has no way of keeping track of the sale of hot cigarettes — and thus the sellers can escape paying taxes on their profits.

Nelson is a “packer,” which means he is the one who conceals the merchandise that he or his accomplice (the “booster”) will take from the store. He only steals cigarettes with an assistant, invariably a woman. In fact, he says throughout his larcenous career he’s worked with at least one accomplice ninety percent of the time. He says the alternative — working alone — means “I take double the risk. With two people, you got all the directions covered. One person has blind spots; somebody could be stand-in’ there watchin ’ you do something." In contrast, he boasts, “I got it down perfect. I mean, no one could do it any better than me!” Eagerly, he recounts his modus operandi, learned from his buddies back East: He and his female helper drive from store to store together. Once they have parked, he enters the supermarket first while she waits a few minutes. “The first thing I do is get a shopping cart. Now, I can fill a shopping cart up in a minute. I know what to get: the big paper towels, the big bags of potato chips, two things of Pepsi, a big box of Tide. I can walk through that store and in a minute have that cart look pretty full.” He points out that ninety percent of all supermarkets display their cigarette cartons in a stand facing the row of checkers up in front of the store, an arrangement that usually gives shoppers access from the sides as well as the front of the display. Nelson says once he’s filled his cart he heads for the cigarette stand, and “I’d say seventy-five percent of the time I can get the cartons from the sides, so I don’t even have to go out front and show myself. Sometimes there’s a manager’s stand on one side, and if he’s there I never do that side.” At busy times, when shoppers form long lines in front of the check stands, “I’ll just stand there like I’m in line, get the cartons, and throw the potato chips over ’em. When I put five cartons of cigarettes in the cart, you can’t even see ’em,’’ Nelson brags, smirking.

At that point, he goes to the back of the store and walks up and down until he finds “a good aisle. . . . Now, I don’t want an aisle that faces the checker. Some aisles are longer; sometimes they have boxes set up in them that’s camouflage. I’ll pick out a good aisle and I’ll come back to the meat department and mosey along, and just about this time the girl will walk in and she’ll walk to the back.’’ Once she spots him, Nelson heads to the aisle he has selected. “I go down the aisle. The cart’s facin’ this way [toward the front of the store]. If there’s mirrors, they’re behind my back. She [the accomplice] walks up and drops the purse in the cart, and all the time she’s watching in back of me. Now, I don’t care about the [other] people [shopping] in the aisle; if they see me they’re not going to do anything. Then I’ll go like I’m searching for a can of beans and when I get the can of beans [down to the cart], two cartons of cigarettes go in the purse. I go back up for another can of beans — three cartons of cigarettes go in the purse. I get the purse, zip it. I say ‘okay.’ She picks the purse up. She’s in and out of the store in a minute. See — if they see her walk in the door, she’s walking back out a minute later and she never goes near the cigarettes.’’ Nelson, in the meantime, simply leaves his bulging cart and strolls out the door. He always wears an old pair of tight-fitting Levi’s and a sports jersey or some other casual top. “The store manager will look at me and he’ll say, ‘Well, there’s no place he could put anything’. . . . That’s how easy it is! We’re in and gone in five minutes.’’

Only occasionally do things go awry. Nelson’s biggest nightmare is the unexpected price check, in which a checker asks another employee to verify the price of an item on the shelves. He says just the other day he and a woman named Marti were in the Safeway on Pearl in La Jolla, standing in an aisle with four or five other customers. “And my hand’s actually in the purse, and as I’m comin’ out I look up and here comes a guy right up the aisle and he’s lookin’ right at me. And he walks by and looks in the purse and sees what we’re doin’! Well, in that case — see, you don’t break the law until you walk outta the store. So I says, ‘Marti, leave the purse and let’s go.’ ’’ Nelson says they hastened out of the store unmolested, drove to the Montgomery Ward’s in Mission Valley, bought another purse for seven dollars, and “went right back to work."

Nelson was stealing cigarettes in a Newport Beach grocery store on one of the two occasions when he was arrested, but he chalks that up to his own greed. “I went too early in the morning. And they weren’t real busy. I just had a big order to fill and they saw me put the cigarettes in the purse and followed me outside.’’ There, the store employees called the police, who made Nelson open his trunk. It contained about sixty cartons. If the police hadn’t found them. Nelson is confident he would have received only a ticket, instead of being hauled off to jail. Because his bail was placed at $2000 (he still doesn’t know why it was so high). Nelson remained behind bars over the weekend. But Monday morning he pleaded guilty to trespassing, paid a hundred-dollar fine, and walked away.

He says his only other arrest came in a Las Vegas drug store, where he grabbed a couple of expensive bottles of vitamins, then went over to a lunch counter to have something to eat, placing a newspaper over the vitamin bottles. He then left the counter to purchase some cigarettes and candy.

Walking back to the counter, he picked up the newspaper and vitamins, and popped the latter into his bag. “As soon as I walked out, this guy grabbed me. Turned out they had a guy behind the [counter] mirrors. I was just too cocky,’’ Nelson admits. But he had the last laugh. He says he managed to postpone the case for about a year. Finally he was ready to plead guilty in court. “They had me dead up. But the security guard that caught me quit his job, and they dropped the charges!’’ Nelson says he’s only heard of one supermarket chain in San Diego County using similar concealed spotters — namely. Alpha Beta. In fact, he’s so impressed by the security measures adopted by that chain that Nelson claims he avoids Alpha Beta stores altogether. In addition to the spotters. Nelson says Alpha Beta makes an exceptional effort to restrict access in and out of its supermarkets; shoppers usually can exit only through check-out lines where a checker is working. In contrast. Nelson judges the most vulnerable market in town to be Safeway. “When you go in Safeway, there’s usually two doors, one on each side. And usually there’s a wide-open area to walk through. In other words, after we [he and his accomplice] find the aisle and make the switch, there’s a lot of open room to get out. You can get in and out of a Safeway with no problem. But if every food store was like Alpha Beta, I’d be outta business.”

Most supermarkets, however, resemble Safeway more than Alpha Beta, he asserts. Almost every page in Nelson’s Thomas Brothers map of San Diego County is marked to show the location of supermarkets from which Nelson feels safe to steal. There are so many, in fact, that Nelson says he has about seven regular “routes”: one in the South Bay, a couple in North County, one that starts in Point Loma and winds over to Washington Street, another covering La Jolla, Pacific Beach, and Clairemont. Nelson says he’ll hit up to thirteen stores per route, and he aims for five cartons of cigarettes per store. For that he'll pay his helper $130 and he’ll take between $130 and $195 for his own efforts — maybe six to ten hours ’ worth of work.

He adds that he doesn’t steal only cigarettes from the supermarkets; he also takes home steaks or expensive seafood to eat or sell, and he finds ready buyers for vitamins. “I got a purse that can hold five cartons of cigarettes, two bottles of vitamins, and two steaks,” he brags. Nonetheless, cigarettes rank as the best booty. “I have never, ever, had problems finding people to buy the cigarettes. In other words, you steal clothes or something like that and it’s hard to sell. People want this size or that size. With cigarettes you get Marlboro. Winston, Benson & Hedges, Salem — you can sell ’em. You just walk into any bar and say, ‘Hey, I got cigarettes. ’ “The far greater problem, he indicates, is finding assistants to help him steal them.

“The girls are very unreliable,” he complains. “They get a little money and they quit. Or their boyfriend gets out of jail and the girl no longer needs Albert, mother words, they see what’s happenin’ and after they get good enough, they don’t need me anymore.” Nelson says he’s even thought about placing a classified ad for assistants; while he hasn’t done that yet, he claims he did consult the free ads which the San Diego Union recently offered to job-seekers, and got a girl to work for two weeks after telling her he had a job “a little on the illegal side” but not involving sex or drugs. “We did cigarettes mostly, and at the end of two weeks she had her thousand, and then she don’t want to work no more.” He often finds new recruits at the welfare office at Seventy-third and El Cajon Boulevard. “You see ’em go in and you see ’em goin’ out and they all got sob stories, and you stop and talk to ’em.” Some won’t have anything to do with him, but others quickly agree once they see how easy it is.

Nelson says three out of four of his supermarket shoplifting accomplices are such women on welfare. However, his biggest source of help for his other criminal activities isn’t the want ads or the welfare office, but the hangouts of local heroin addicts, particularly a pool hall in East San Diego. Nelson says one can sit in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant across the street and watch the addicts stroll over, buy a Coke or a coffee, borrow the keys to the washroom out in back, disappear within it, and walk out a moment later, rolling down their shirtsleeves. He says the junkies frequently need someone to provide transportation. “They never have enough money to get a car,” he explains, “because as soon as they get any money it goes right in their arm.”

He estimates that in addition to the legions of “amateurs” (“the young girls stuffing a few things into their purses” and their ilk), maybe twenty-five full-time professional shoplifters work in San Diego County (including himself), and the majority are junkies. Within that circle, illegal ploys come and go with the rapidity of hit songs on the radio. Although cigarette thefts may be the sustaining source of Nelson’s income, he says he can’t victimize San Diego County grocery stores exclusively. After a few months, the risk of recognition by supermarket employees grows too strong. “So then you gotta go to Orange County for a few months, then maybe up to L.A.,” or elsewhere throughout the Sunbelt until enough time has passed that a return to San Diego is feasible. Alternatively, Nelson says he varies the cigarette heists with other types of theft, most notably something he refers to generically as “returns” — that is, the return of stolen goods to department stores for cash.

When he can wangle a receipt to accompany such merchandise (either by buying an item and returning a second, stolen duplicate, or by getting a receipt from some other source), he is practically overcome with pleasure.

“A receipt is as good as gold!” he says, recounting how his biggest theft ever involved this kind of illegality. He says some friends were coveting a big, unfinished roll-top desk being sold for $299 at FedMart in Kearny Mesa. Nelson advised them to buy the item, which “was so big they hadda have a truck to put it on. So they got their father’s truck; we go over to FedMart and buy the desk, and the clerk tapes the receipt on it. They pushed it right out the front door by the security guard. And this guy was so dumb! When you walk by with somethin’ they usually stamp the receipt to show you walked out with it, but this guy didn’t stamp it. So we go back the next day when they’re real busy.” Nelson got a second desk, put it on a cart, taped the same receipt to it, and pushed it out the door. “Now this time he stamps it. But it doesn’t matter. We got two desks and one receipt!” he snickers.

He claims the technique has backfired on him only once. That incident occurred up at one of the Robinson’s stores in Orange County. Nelson says that ten minutes before closing time on Christmas Eve he bought his girlfriend a $ 165 coat, taking care to note that an identical coat remained on the rack. The day after Christmas, amid the traditional crowds, his girlfriend returned with the receipt, plucked the look-alike coat off the rack, then presented it to the cashier requesting her money back. Her mistake, however, was to try to return a size six when the receipt was marked for a size eight. “They caught it and checked the inventory and they ended up bustin’ her [but not Nelson]. They put her right in jail.” Nelson paid the hundred-dollar fine the next day, but today he adds, ‘‘She was cryin' and hysterical and she just wouldn’t work anymore.” (He says that was the only time he ever mixed his professional and personal life; he became romantically involved with the girl afer meeting her in Las Vegas, and only later did he introduce her to thievery.)

Nelson seems to gloat over the ease of returning merchandise accompanied by a receipt, but he sounds awestruck when he confides, ‘‘Here’s what’s amazing: you can also take stuff back to most major department stores without a receipt and get your money back!” Different stores set limits on the amount of cash they give for such receipt-less returns, according to Nelson, usually between fifty dollars and $150. Furthermore, most stores require the person returning such merchandise to sign a register and offer identification. Nelson asserts that he always gives his real name and shows his (legitimate) driver’s license when making such a return. This means he can’t pull the same stunt at the same store for quite a while — but he points out that a single such visit to the majority of the major department stores in San Diego County adds up to a considerable sum.

He says he started doing such returns here several weeks ago, and now has effectively ‘‘burned himself out” on no-receipt returns. A recent experience with the local Gemco chain was typical. Nelson and a long-time junkie accomplice were driving around one blistering day when Nelson’s aging Volkswagen broke down right near the Clairemont Gemco. The two men pushed it to the store parking lot, and while Nelson was calling a tow truck, the other man stole two shirts and two pairs of pants, which Nelson then immediately took back into the same store, emerging with cash. The two men then called a third accomplice, who drove them to another Gemco where they repeated the routine. Nelson says that evening he was returning something to yet a third Gemco when the employees there telephoned the other stores and found out about his two earlier returns. “So I said [to the angry store manager], ‘Look, pal. I’m not proud of this, but I get a girl who wants to go out to dinner or somethin’ and I tell ’em I ain’t got no money; why don’t they buy me some clothes and I’ll pay ’em back when I get my unemployment check next week. When I get ’em to buy me the clothes, I call ’em that night and say I can’t make it, my mother got sick. Then I bring the clothes back.* ’’ Nelson says he uses the story all the time and normally it suffices, but on this occasion the manager all but threw him out the door, telling him never to return, even with dollars in hand.

Nelson pronounces it “dollahs.’’ He says “sump’n” for “something”; “dem” for “them. ” In the years since he dropped out of high school, he says he’s tried to take the G. E. D. exam nine times but always fails the English section. “I just don’t understand English. Now math — they can’t trick me with math. I’m real good at math.”

Stealing is so easy, Nelson’s convinced, because the store owners and managers are apathetic. “They’re makin’ so much money anyway that they don’t care,’’ he says, an expression of disgust on his face. “They just mark the stuff up, on average I would say seven and a half percent. In other words, if it wasn’t for people doin’ this, something that cost $100 would only cost $92.50. The consumer is paying for it; he’s paying for what other people steal!” (In fact Nelson’s estimate is probably high. Industry experts generally figure that shoplifting accounts for less than one percent of total retail sales volume.)

On the other hand, Nelson does not give the impression that he yearns to be caught. Nor does he project even a hint of remorse or disgust over the blatant fraud and waste that he and his cohorts perpetrate. Stealing eighty-dollar tennis rackets, then slitting the strings and returning the goods as defective, is “all in a day’s work.” If anything. Nelson’s exasperation with his victims’ apathy sounds more like a yearning for a worthier adversary. It’s as if he wishes they were smarter so that he could enjoy a greater challenge in outfoxing them.

He says his idol is Robert Vesco, the crooked financier who escaped with millions. One of his favorite books recounts the scams of a character named Elvin “Titanic” Thompson, who Nelson says was the model for the Paul Newman character in The Sting. In much the same way elderly people look for obituaries in the daily newspapers, Nelson peruses the papers for accounts of new scams. They tickle him; he hints at participating in everything from counterfeiting concert tickets to bank frauds. “I love to sue people!” he declares. His favorite target is insurance companies. “I think to beat an insurance company is wonderful,” he says. Did some traumatic experience cause this animosity? No, he answers, “It’s just something that happened naturally.” His first encounter with an insurance company came back in the days when he worked at the NASSCO shipyards and a cable snapped and hit him across the head, cracking his hard hat and knocking him into the side of the ship. “I was dazed. But I could have gone back to work about the first week.” Instead, he stayed out on disability for nine months. “I couldn’t believe how they just kept givin’ me the money!”

For the last few years he claims he has staunchly resisted the temptation to commit any felonies. “I don’t want to do any time. It’s too nice out here on the streets.” Besides watching sports events, Nelson’s favorite leisure activity is chasing young women, preferably in their teens, and he points out that “there’s no young sweet little girls in them jails.” If his avoidance of felonies is thus completely pragmatic, however, he says there are other forms of theft he eschews for moral reasons.

“I would never go in anybody’s house and steal anything from a person,” he states. “Or I could show you this twenty times a week: a lady ’ll be pushing her shopping cart down the aisle and she’ll forget something and walk to another aisle and leave her purse layin’ right there in the cart. I couldn’t take somebody’s purse, and there’s been a thousand opportunities in my life. If I had to go out and steal from people to make living, I couldn’t do it. I’m not that kind of a person. ... I never stole from a person in my life. I’m like — who’s that guy that was on the cross with Jesus? The good thief. That’s what I consider myself, the good thief.”

But would he steal from, say, a small boutique? Naw, he answers, that’s too much like stealing from people. In contrast, “The stores that I’m dealin’ with are the majors: Safeway, Big Bear, Vons, Mayfair, Food Basket, Buffums, Broadway, Robinson’s, Bullock’s, Mervyn’s, Target, Gemco, K mart — the big chain stores.” When asked what he sees as the difference between stealing from people and stealing from stores, Nelson looks as if he hadn’t before considered the distinction. Finally he mentions reading a recent newspaper article that told how several grocery stores had been fined thousands of dollars for inaccurate meat weights. “Now, the stores can do that and pay fines. They don’t go to jail. They’re bearin’ the public. If they added two or three grams to every piece of meat they sold, that’s an ounce for every nine pieces. When you start talking about three dollars a pound for meat, an ounce here, an ounce there — that adds up to a lot of money. When I see things like that, sometimes I feel good about doin’ this.”

His rationale goes further: “The May Company or Broadway or Bullock’s — they got this big corporation and they got this guy, they’re payin’ ’im $50,000 or $80,000 and an expense account for doin’ nuttin’ and they got these bigwigs up there doin’ nuttin’ and gettin’ these high salaries. And the fact that I’m rippin’ ’em off doesn’t affect anything. Now you take some small store, or somebody that’s rippin’ a purse. They mighta just got their welfare check cashed, and somebody grabs their purse. They could be desperate for that money. I couldn’t do sump’n like that. I just couldn’t sleep. You know? But with the stores, the big corporation, it’s not gonna hurt anybody. It’s not gonna cause anybody to lose their job. It’s not gonna cause ’em to go outta business.”

But what if everybody did this? “If everybody did it — yeah, it’d cause a lot of stores to go outta business,” Nelson concedes. “But everybody can’t do it,” he says complacently. “There’s probably a couple hundred people around here [at Seaport Village, where this conversation took place that day]. I could interview everyone one at a time, and outta these 200 people I’d only get one person that would even consider doin’ this.”

And yet he adds, “You talk about dumb! I know people that’ll go into a store to buy somethin’ and they’ll take a price tag off something else and put a price tag on this and get the lower price. Or they’ll peel off a high-priced tag that’s been stuck over a lower-priced one. That’s stealin’! That’s the same thing I’m doin’! But they don’t look at it like that. A lady goes through the supermarket and she’s got ninety-seven dollars’ worth of stuff in her cart. And there’s an eight-dollar bottle of vitamins and she just happens to drop the vitamins in her purse. Now to her, she’s not stealin’ because she spent ninety dollars in the store. She’s just ‘getting a discount’ on something. There’s a lot of that petty stuff goin’ on.

“I’d say this. If you’re gonna do it, you might as well make good money at it. I’m not gonna go out and do penny-ante stuff. If I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it up to the limit of what I can get. I think in California it’s $400. Anything over $400 makes it a felony. So I’m gonna get as much as I can up to that $400.1 ’m not gonna go in and take no six-dollar belt. That’s ridiculous!’’

What he gets adds up to a living that is comfortable but not opulent. Nelson says if he worked five days a week, the very most he could earn would be $25,000 to $30,000 a year (tax-free, of course), but he says he doesn’t actually make that much; he doesn’t like to work that hard. “If 1 got three or four thousand dollars and I got a car that’s paid for, and no problems or anything, then I want to take a vacation.’’ Go to Florida or Vegas or Rosarito Beach. Lie around the pool and try to hustle the “little girls’’ into bed. “My bankroll motivates my workin’.’’ Back here at home, he says he dines pretty well (“I eat a lot of T-bones’’). He smokes marijuana but avoids hard drugs. “I live conservatively. ... I don’t have any problems.’’ About the only thing he seems to fret over is the growing sense of joylessness he feels toward his work.

Once, he says, stealing used to be a delight. “It used to be exciting. It used to be I’d get up in the morning and think, ‘Ah, we’re gonna go rip ’em off for the day!’ We used to get out there and sing the Safeway song; ‘Safeway, Safeway, here we come. Da-da-da, gonna steal you blind!* ’’ And in those days. Nelson says, he kept many more of the actual goods he filched. “I used to have twenty pair of pants, fifty shirts, five suede coats.’’ He would go out and carouse every night until two in the morning. “It was a different lifestyle,’’ he says.

But now he says he’s come to look at his former wardrobe as wasteful. “As I got older, you know, what do I care about havin’ thirty shirts? Seven shirts is enough. At the end of six days you wash ’em and you got your clothes for a week.’’ And with that realization has come other disenchantment. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just not fun anymore,’’ he says. “It’s a drag. It’s just like Pete Rose says. He says when baseball stops being fun, he don’t want to play anymore. And stealing has stopped being fun for me.’’

The problem with quitting, however, is economic. “I know this. I can go out tomorrow. I can pick this girl up at three o’clock and work two hours. All I gotta do is hit five stores. That’s twenty-five cartons; I make seventy-five dollars. Now if I can make seventy-five dollars for two hours’ work, why do I want to get a job and work eight hours and bust my butt and then I ain’t gonna make seventy-five dollars. . . . You make more money stealin’ than you can get workin’.’’

He clearly feels trapped. Yet Nelson is a naturally cheerful fellow, not one to indulge in self-pity. In fact, he’s dreamed up one possible escape from his current career. He says what he’d really love to do — what would be a challenge which could motivate him to work once more with alacrity — is if he could somehow go to work as a security consultant for one of the department store or grocery chains.

This, it turns out, was Nelson’s real ulterior motive in talking about his work to a newspaper reporter. He has the notion that if the chain stores read this story, it just might interest them in hiring him — an unusual and fairly incredible idea. But Nelson takes it seriously.

He says of course they’d have to pay him more than the puny wage that most security guards earn. “They hire these security people off the street for $3.35 an hour that have absolutely no idea what they’re doin’. . . . And they expect to put them up against pros. Well, they got no chance!’’ In contrast Nelson says it would take a salary of something like $500 per week to win his services. “Take the taxes out, even! Just give me $400 a week.’’ He’d be satisfied, and the stores would profit handsomely. Nelson argues. “Believe me, there are forty-five Safe ways. Five hundred dollars a week would be only like twelve dollars a store. ... I could save ’em a lot of money.’’ He says he would tell them how to move the cigarettes (“cause you put ’em out there and people Ye gonna steal ’em’’). He says he’s got lots of other ideas for cracking down on shoplifting, and he’s confident he could spot and squelch most any new scam the junkies could dream up; he’s thought like one of them for too many years.

Only that kind of personal change of course. Nelson believes, would make the slightest difference to anyone. “If I stopped stealin’ today and never stole anything again the rest of my life, that mark-up [which stores impose on goods to compensate for pilferage] would not come down. There’s enough other people out there. But if I stopped stealin’ and also stopped these other people — then the mark-up could come down, maybe a percent or two. I could create enough. ... It wouldn’t be a question of a tremendous amount of arrests. But the word would just get around, real quick."

Though Nelson may truly believe in this idea, he nonetheless isn’t very optimistic that any store will actually seek to contact him. He’s too convinced that the stores don’t care about shoplifting, that they’re perfectly content to tolerate it. If no stores want his expertise, then Nelson figures he hasn’t lost anything by offering it. Even if a store or two changed its procedures after reading this. Nelson is jauntily certain that he’s crafty enough to figure out new ways to beat them.

In fact, he’s nursing an alternative to going straight, a contingency plan for battling the tedium he has begun to feel in his work. He says he’s mulling over the idea of recruiting teams of assistants to steal for him (rather than with him). He’d be a sort of modern-day Fagin, he says, with eight or ten or twelve people whom he would train and schedule. In return, he’d get a small percentage of the take.

And if that doesn’t work, he thinks he’ll get by. “I don’t worry about the future,’’ he says. If anyone had told him ten years ago that he’d still be shoplifting today, Nelson says he never would have believed them. “So I have no idea what I’m gonna be doin’ ten years from today. A lot of people spend half their life worry in’ about the future. I worry about tomorrow. I don’t even want to think about the future. There’s other things to think about."