Eberhart slid his laptop off his dashboard and showed me evidence photographs of devices that thieves and fences use to evade electronic scanners (aluminum-lined shopping bags) and unfasten sensors (talonlike skeleton keys). In a video, we watched a man blowtorch open a plexiglass lockbox at a Walgreens. “The tools are constantly evolving,” Eberhart said. The unit’s case files show enormous quantities of recovered goods—Delta faucets, an unsettling amount of Secret deodorant. There were golf clubs and guitars and, somehow, furnaces. When Eberhart came to a photograph of paving stones, he told me about a man who was accused of remodelling an entire house and a restaurant through a long gambit involving unchecked receipts, pickup counters, cancelled orders, and extreme gall. The C.H.P. investigation, he said, had turned up Ring security cameras, kitchen cabinets, countertops, AstroTurf, dining-room chairs, paint, lumber, even “big bags of charcoal.”
Up popped photographs of a discount wholesaler called CostLess, followed by an article from the Orange County Register. In 2021, the newspaper reported that Facebook users had read about CostLess’s grand opening and “couldn’t wait to get inside.” The store advertised overstock merchandise at up to eighty per cent off: Sketchers for fifteen dollars, Uggs for seventy-nine. During the pandemic, the newspaper reported, CostLess’s “inventory of pantry goods and cleaning supplies became an alternative when traditional stores sold out.” An employee bragged that the owner “refused to charge more for pandemic items such as Lysol spray and Clorox, even when he lost money.”
The store became part of a broader investigation involving more than fifty million dollars’ worth of boosted freight, including Samsung and Sony televisions. The ring behind these thefts allegedly stole five to seven tractor trailers per week, sometimes by posing as truck drivers. Investigators impounded half a million dollars in cash, thirteen gold bars, and numerous illegal firearms. Forty people were arrested. (Charges are pending in many of the cases in this article.) As Eberhart showed me the photographs, he marvelled at one-dollar energy drinks and ten-dollar packages of pistachios, which, “even at Costco,” sell for more than double that amount. “It’s crazy,” he said.
On the afternoon of September 2, 2022, a man walked into a Macy’s in Valencia and asked to see a gold chain. A clerk behind a glass case pulled out a piece that cost more than forty-two hundred dollars. The customer snatched the necklace from her hand and ran. About an hour later, he showed up at a Macy’s in Redondo Beach and did the same thing, taking a chain worth more than two thousand dollars. Over the next few days, he robbed Macy’s stores in Lakewood, Montebello, and Santa Ana, stealing chains that, collectively, were worth nearly twenty thousand dollars.
In each instance, the thief wore a face mask, a baseball cap, a white tank top, and dark basketball shorts trimmed in white. In later heists, his outfit included red-and-black shorts; a long-sleeved shirt that snugly fit his athletic frame; and a series of caps, including one emblazoned with “Positive State of Mind.” At one jewelry counter, he admired himself in a mirror before sprinting out wearing a chain that the clerk had made the mistake of fastening around his neck.
The man always ran to the passenger side of a getaway car—a silver Lexus sedan with distinctive dents on the back right bumper and near the driver’s door. The presence of an accomplice qualified the thefts as organized retail crime, as did the possibility that the jewelry was going to a fence. As is typical, the suspects were engaged in multiple types of offenses. The getaway car once waited in a handicapped zone, then sped off the wrong direction down a one-way street. On Halloween, 2022, it struck a sheriff’s deputy who had been chasing the suspect on foot, injuring the officer’s leg and arm; the car “made no attempt to go around” him, according to a deputy who witnessed the hit-and-run. The crimes also involved fraud, as the jewelry thief presented fake I.D., including a Tennessee driver’s license and a California medical-marijuana card belonging to other men. And there was destruction of property: the thief broke one chain in half during an altercation with a clerk. His behavior suggested that he did not mind overpowering others in order to get what he wanted. After he hit three stores in one day, Kay Jewelers notified employees, “DO NOT attempt to chase or physically engage the suspect.”
The man’s most distinctive physical feature was his array of tattoos—“Karen” over his left eyebrow, a red crown on his neck. Store employees remembered seeing a cross tattoo on his left arm, and, on the inside of his wrists, an umbrella and a spider. The organized-retail-crime unit called him the Karen Bandit.
By November, the bandit had stolen forty thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry from Macy’s and another eighty thousand dollars’ worth from JCPenney. The case involved police reports, witness statements, forensic evidence, voluminous security footage, and surveillance. The lead detective on the case, Scott Elson, found that the bandit was covering his tracks with another form of fraud: someone was “cold-plating” the Lexus by using a license plate registered to another vehicle.
Detectives traced the bandit to a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, and two of the stolen gold chains to a local pawnshop. They also had a suspect for the getaway car. In the pawnshop’s sales records, Elson noticed what he thought was an error: the suspected driver’s name was supposed to be spelled with an “a,” not an “e.” Then he saw the notation “twin brother.” He was dealing with two potential accomplices with virtually the same name—and the exact same DNA. In driver’s-license photographs, the twins shared the same goatee, ear piercings, and haircut. Elson couldn’t get enough on the brothers to charge them, but the Karen Bandit pleaded guilty, and is serving eight years in prison. To Eberhart, the surprise twist in the roster of potential co-conspirators underscored the shape-shifting nature of organized retail crime. He explained, “It’s never one thing.”
Retailers are insured against losses, but they and law-enforcement officers like to point out that organized retail crime is not “victimless.” To start, there are humans on the other end of hostile encounters. In the Karen Bandit case, numerous employees—Vanessa, Renee, Monica, Miriam, Nathan, Hannah, Ana, Valerie—had to weigh the risk of injury, or unemployment, or worse, against the act of showing a customer a nice necklace. The N.R.F. recently reported that eight out of ten U.S. retailers say that thieves have become more aggressive and violent. In one shocking case, in Hillsborough, North Carolina, a man pushing a cartload of power washers out of a Home Depot shoved an eighty-two-year-old employee to the concrete floor without breaking stride. The clerk, Gary Rasor, died of complications from the fall, and the state medical examiner ruled his death a homicide. Reportedly, Rasor had merely asked for a receipt.
Last year, at a Home Depot near San Francisco, Blake Mohs, an L.P. who hoped to become a police officer, confronted a woman about an item taken from the power-tools department. She pulled a gun from her purse and shot him in the chest. (She later claimed that it went off by accident.) Mohs’s colleagues wore their orange work aprons to his funeral. His mother, Lorie, testifying at a congressional hearing, blamed the criminal-justice system, Home Depot, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, alleging that the agency had “failed to make safety a priority” for L.P.s.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than fifteen million people work in the retail sector. The N.R.F. says that retail supports fifty-two million American jobs. If retailers hope to recruit and retain good employees, they must first keep them safe. Companies have started to use security robots that relay alerts to guards, and systems for “advanced weapon detection.” During blitzes, Eberhart and his officers often find handguns tucked into suspects’ waistbands.
Retailers also want to improve their “analytic and investigative skills,” according to the N.R.F. When I asked Duryee, the C.H.P. commissioner, whether he worries that law enforcement’s collaboration with private industry will create a class of para-police retail workers, he said no, and told me that employees are given “rules of engagement.” He said, “There’s no commodity—we don’t care how much it’s worth—that’s worth a human life.”
On store shelves today, even the Ensure is locked up, along with toothbrushes and socks. During the Home Depot blitz, one man forced open a cage housing Milwaukee power tools. Rodriguez radioed for somebody to “get eyes.” Cap replied, “Yeah, I’m on him.” That fellow ended up walking out empty-handed, as did a man who ditched a full cart near the entrance. Eberhart and I watched him beat it in a gold Mitsubishi. “Got spooked,” someone said.
Just before closing, an older man arrived in a khaki jacket and a nice plaid shirt, looking like he might have come from a Lakers game. The L.P.s recognized him as a booster who liked to taunt employees, knowing that they are not allowed to stop him from stealing. When the man pushed a cart with large boxes through the front door, a detective radioed, “Good for a takedown.”
Outside, the man was handcuffed and told to stay put. “Where’m I gonna go?” he huffed. A check of his fingerprints showed that he was wanted on more than two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of warrants, for charges ranging from petty theft to making criminal threats. An L.P. walked over to Eberhart and said, “Today I would call a good day.” Back in the Ram, Eberhart told me, “That’s why it’s such a nice thing, to have these asset-protection people. They know their clientele. They know their habitual offenders.”
The blitz ultimately ensnared survival shoplifters and organized-retail-crime suspects in nearly equal measure. A fellow in a “McLovin” T-shirt was caught with two cans of Behr paint and multiple bottles of Green Gobbler Drain Clog Dissolver. A wiry older man just shook his head when found taking toilet paper, laundry detergent, and paper towels. Petty larceny did not interest the detectives, but, as Eberhart put it, “A misdemeanor is a misdemeanor, a theft is a theft. You can’t pick and choose what you want to enforce.” The impounded evidence included an illegal fixed-blade knife, found in the right front pocket of a young man who had arrived on a Razor scooter. Later, at the operation’s debriefing, Probart told the squad, “Only one guy with a weapon this time.” ♦
