If you asked I told you. Didn’t try to rattle your cage. [And] wanted you to see for yourself that seeing is better than just hearing about it.
—Sam Goodman
This book is an examination of a career in crime and the world of theft, fencing, and criminal enterprise as experienced by Sam Goodman—a longtime thief, fence, and quasi-legitimate businessman who also was the principal subject of The Fence: In the Shadow of Two Worlds by Darrell Steffensmeier (1986). Sam died in his mid to late sixties following a four-month bout with lung cancer. Steffensmeier met Sam in the 1970s, stayed in regular touch with him, and visited him frequently in the hospital during the course of his illness. Steffensmeier also interviewed him at length on a Friday-Sunday weekend, five days before he slipped into a coma and eleven days before he died. Hence the title, Confessions of a Dying Thief. These interviews with a dying thief are both original and unique. We know of no other instance in criminology where a career thief about to die has been interviewed, much less probed so intimately.
Most of the book consists of two interrelated components: narrative accounts by Sam portraying his life and criminal career, interspersed with our conceptual commentaries that put the narrative material in social science perspective. In presenting Confessions, we have “cleaned up” Sam’s language (e.g., swear words, ethnic slurs), but not entirely. We have left intact his vernacular at most places, especially when he discusses topics like death and religion, to give the reader a better feeling for Sam and his response to events, people, and life in general. We have changed names, dates, and certain details to protect Sam’s associates from identification. We also have edited Sam’s prose to remove the false starts and repetitions common to speech, but annoying in print.
Although the narratives in Confessions are in Sam’s own words, both they and our accompanying commentaries are also based on additional, corroborating information from other sources. In order to establish the validity of Sam’s account and recollections, Steffensmeier continually sought information and contacts for verification—for example, by discussing similar matters with Sam’s associates, and by securing information from police, newspaper, and other sources. In some instances this process involved multiple interviews and frequent (even regular) contact with this or that associate of Sam. In general, these sources confirmed Sam’s experiences and accounts and by extension the ideas and conclusions described in Confessions.
Especially informative were interviews with “insiders” like Jesse (Sam’s one-time burglary partner), Rocky (a thief who regularly sold stolen goods to Sam), Timmy (a warehouse worker who sold pilfered merchandise to Sam), Puddy (a local bookie with whom Sam hung out), and Chubby (a longtime hanger-on), who knew Sam very well and also were knowledgeable about the theft world. The many meetings and conversations Steffensmeier had with them and other insiders could itself be the basis of a companion document. Moreover, as with Sam, the time spent associating with them across settings and over time helped to introduce information that one may be otherwise unable to secure.
If the respondents were willing and the situation favorable, Steffensmeier taped the interviews. Otherwise, he made notes at the earliest convenience or taped his recollections and observations. The interviews were often actually conversations, and like most conversations, jumped from subject to subject, time period to time period. The interviews took place in homes, on porches, at places of business, in cars or pick-ups, in parks, in bars, in restaurants, in offices, in jails, at auction sites, and on the street. Sometimes the interviews lasted several hours, other times a few minutes to an hour. Occasionally the “interview” was an all-day affair or a morning or an evening spent together at Sam’s place of business, at an auction, or at another site. Interviews were conducted with a single informant, with two informants together, or with several informants together.
Each of these sources added valuable comparative data, but in the process made it increasingly difficult to handle the material (especially within the printing limitations of a book). As Wright and Decker said, “Perhaps the most challenging aspect of any field-based research project involves reducing what one has seen, heard, and felt ‘out there’ to written form” (1997:xiv). Given the longevity of the project and the plurality of individuals and sources involved, attempting to come to terms with all the material collected was at times almost overwhelming. Sorting out and deciding which out of an abundance of relevant examples to use at times seemed almost impossible, especially in light of the multiplicity of people and activities with which Confessions is concerned. It was especially taxing to address occasional discrepancies (typically minor) in Sam’s or an associate’s account between earlier and later interviews over several years, or between Sam’s account and another insider’s recollection, as all viewed an event or activity somewhat differently according to their own lens and interests.
The document that follows is both a life history of a criminal career and a description of the underworld and illegal enterprise, as experienced by a veteran thief and fence who had been engaged almost continuously for roughly fifty years. Sam’s account tells us about underworld culture and organization, the social worlds of theft, hustling, and illegal enterprise. Confessions depicts the underworld as what Anselm Strauss (1993) called a “social world” of interaction, communication, and (to some extent) shared meaning. In other words, we see the underworld as a ‘field” of mutually recognized goals and organized striving for achievement, to paraphrase Pierre Bourdieu (1977; see also Martin 2003). Confessions elucidates the social organization of burglary and of fencing, the criminal social capital necessary for successful criminal enterprise, the importance of criminal networks, the stratification or pecking order of the underworld, and the nature of localized organized crime networks. This major theme in Confessions of the social organization of the underworld and criminal enterprise addresses matters only briefly touched on or implied in The Fence.
This study of a seasoned thief and criminal entrepreneur makes at least eight contributions to criminology and sociology in general. First, Sam provides a kind of voice from a culture and situation not known to most sociologists and criminologists. Confessions is a live and vibrant message from “down there,” telling us what it means to be a kind of person most of us have never met face to face. We learn about his view of the world, about the interconnections across individuals and settings that not only shape the underworld but frequently link it to the upperworld, about how the culture of the underworld grows out of and is related to the general culture, about the thin thread often separating the two worlds, and about the need to lessen the distance between underworld members and upperworld academics who report and construct theories about crime.
Second, Sam’s confession reminds us that deviants, even persistent criminals, are seldom deviant in all or even most aspects of their lives. Sam comfortably rubs shoulders with thieves, gamblers, and quasi-legitimate businessmen but also courts respectability and pledges allegiance to some major normative standards. His keen eye for the moral loophole and general lack of remorse for all the “rank shit he has pulled in his life” only partly cloak the marginality from legitimate society and the concern for the appearance of respectability that even the career criminal can only rarely overcome. We feel the publicly known as well as privately experienced stigma of a “criminal record” that is difficult to reverse, disguise, or ignore.
Third, Sam’s own life and his recollections about his many associates do not support some contemporary views of career development and desistance. We know much about the “careers” of low-level and ordinary offenders—most of whom apparently have exited from crime by age thirty or forty. On the other hand, we know very little about persistent offenders like Sam and about the extent and types of crime committed at different stages of criminal careers. From Sam, we leam that many “matured out” offenders still find crime morally acceptable and continue to commit crimes sporadically when the opportunity presents itself and the risks are small, or they regularly moonlight as part-time offenders while holding legitimate jobs, or they operate as background operators. We also learn that some subsets of the larger criminal population—good burglars, dealers in stolen goods, bookmakers, con artists, quasi-legitimate businessmen, local racketeers, and mafiosi—frequently persist in their criminality until they are too old or feeble to do otherwise. The prison samples used in the bulk of existing studies underrepresent the offenders for whom crime is the most remunerative.
Fourth, we witness (through Sam) the complex mix of rewards and motives for criminal entrepreneurship—material gain, excitement, attention, peer recognition, and the enjoyment of simply doing what one is good at. There is also the playing out of the central ingredients for success—integrity, reliability, generosity, larceny sense, and business-sense (including hustling)—in the midst of activities characterized by risk and ambiguity; and the oscillating pattern of involvement and disengagement as entrepreneurs like Sam attempt to balance concerns with safety and desires for fast profits over extended periods of time. There is also in Sam (and in many of his underworld colleagues, and in many blue-collar people in general) a sort of resentment toward the system because of the variability and perceived unfairness in life chances across individuals and groups.
Fifth, the accounts of actual offenders like Sam caution against simplistic views of criminal opportunity. Opportunity is, of course, a venerable concept in criminological theory, but it is almost taken for granted as a given when crimi-nologists study criminal careers. Throughout Confessions, we critique existing conceptions of opportunity. Confessions directs attention to the notion that there is considerable variation in criminal opportunities, and in types of opportunities, across individuals and groups. More importantly, however, Confessions illustrates that offenders like Sam not only respond to crime opportunities, they construct and sustain them. Furthermore, motivation and opportunity are not easily distinguished in the “real” world of criminal involvement. Being able makes one more willing. What is objectively possible is more likely to become subjectively acceptable, and vice versa. Finally, access to—and how one capitalizes on—opportunities for serious, sustained criminal enterprise is likely to involve matters like preexisting ties, preparatory knowledge, reputation, and whether one is from the “right” racial or ethnic group.
Sixth, inasmuch as Confessions is about the life course of a career criminal, it has special relevance for the development and assessment of the life course perspective, which has become popular in recent criminological writings. Life course perspectives focus on onset, persistence, and desistence or continuation of criminal careers, and emphasize the importance of “turning points” as critical events or decisions that trigger transitions into or out of crime. A focus on the life course and criminal offending is compatible with a variety of theoretical perspectives central to criminology, such as social learning/differential association, social control, opportunity, routine activities, and rational choice theories.
Certainly, Confessions contributes to our understanding of crime and the life course, and life circumstances, contexts and turning points that facilitate onset, persistence, and desistence or decline in offending. For example, Sam’s narrative is filled with emergent and pivotal turning points that decisively structured his criminal career and fostered his development of criminal capital (such as his poor relationship with his stepfather, his tutelage in theft and hustling at the hands of his uncle, his initial periods of incarceration, his burglary partnership with Jesse, opening his secondhand shop, being invited into the local gambling club attended by organized crime figures, and his conviction and prison stint for dealing stolen goods). In short, Confessions amply illustrates the dynamic nature of criminal offending and how offenders exercise agency and choice in the face of emergent constraints and opportunities over time.
By tracking Sam and his several of his associates into their fifties and sixties, Confessions also helps to illuminate later stages of careers in theft and criminal enterprise by going beyond adolescent or young adult samples. It is quite remarkable that robust claims about the causes and risk factors shaping the persistent or chronic offender expressed by many criminologists today rely almost exclusively on offender samples that cover only the adolescent and/or young adult years (typically up to about age thirty—see the review by Farring-ton 2003). This reliance and the robust claims are most strongly observed among those writers who espouse a life course or developmental perspective on criminal offending. Yet, following offenders into their twenties or even thirties hardly captures the fullness of the life course. Consequently, we know relatively little about the dynamics of offending and/or desistence beyond the ages of twenty to thirty.
Seventh, we outline an integrative learning-opportunity-commitment theoretical framework throughout our commentaries. This framework combines differential association/social learning theory and an extended and refined conceptualization of criminal opportunity with a three-fold theory of commitment to crime versus conventionality.
Finally, Confessions is an in-depth life history, but it is also more than that. It is equally a picture of the criminal underworld and criminal enterprise more generally. As Sutherland (1937) argued long ago in The Professional Thief, crime is socially organized and is a group phenomenon. Sam and his associates provide a unique window on the social organization of criminal enterprise, including organized crime. In other words, Confessions is about a social world (Strauss 1993) or field (Bourdieu 1977, 1985) of local criminal enterprise and Sam’s place in it. Through Sam’s narratives (corroborated with information from Sam’s criminal associates and other sources), we understand the organization of burglary crews, the ins and outs of running a successful fencing operation, the crucial importance of criminal networks, the stratification or “pecking order” of the world of crime, racism and sexism in the underworld, and the nature of localized organized crime networks. As a part of our examination of the underworld as a field, we identify and analyze types of criminal social and cultural capital that are necessary for success and longevity in money-oriented crime and criminal enterprise.
Confessions is testament to the value of the ethnographic perspective and its emphasis on understanding the effects of opportunity structures, social norms, lifestyles, stressful life circumstances, and other commonly invoked explanations of behavior, criminal or otherwise, by seeing them from the actor’s viewpoint. The strength of ethnographic data, especially when it is collected over a substantial period of time, is that it enables us to understand processes rather than just static outcomes of social processes.
Criminal careers research in recent years has taken two main turns. One is the growth in ethnographic research that builds on a long research tradition in criminology and seeks to comprehend crime through the eyes of offenders. The bulk of this research has been on street offenders and their pursuits—their lives, routines, and decisions. The other is the much larger growth in statistical studies that track offenders using arrest or conviction data or that use data from offenders’ self-reported offense history. The self-report data are typically collected in questionnaires or in one-shot probes or interviews. As a consequence of these twin developments, there is some narrowing of the experiential distance between criminological subject matter and criminological researchers, but on the other hand, “growing numbers of criminologists know crime and criminals only as lines in electronic data files” (Neal Shover, cited in Wright and Decker 1997:xi).
In our view, one-shot interviews can provide useful information about backgrounds, worldviews, and some dimensions of crime (e.g., strategies and templates for committing crime). However, one-shot interviews are quite lim-ited when it comes to acquiring information (1) about an offender’s own history of law-breaking and especially his or her recent or current law-breaking, and (2) about an offender’s criminal associates and networks. This difficulty in getting offenders to disclose increases with age, as offenders become more circumspect and cautious—middle-aged and older offenders probably require more rapport.
Studying practitioners of crime and vice is a risky business, studded with traps and pitfalls. Interviewing criminals is challenging. If the interviewer makes the offender subject feel pushed, defensive, interrogated, and prodded, he or she is likely to “clam up” and not participate in further interviews, especially in early stages of the interviewing process. We believe that getting accurate and valid details depends especially on the rapport one builds with informants. Offenders have a vested interested in protecting their identities, maintaining secrecy, and keeping outsiders out (Fleisher 1995:21). For these reasons we, like other ethnographers, tend to distrust data gathered in penciled-in questionnaires or in one-shot interviews with informants, especially when minimal efforts at cultivating rapport are made.
To illustrate, Steffensmeier’s initial interviews with Sam (as well as with this or that associate) produced some useful information about Sam’s life and about the world of crime, but very little useful information about Sam’s own criminality. Moreover, while some of Sam’s associates eventually revealed their own recent or current criminality (e.g., Jesse, Sam’s one-time burglary partner), other associates never did disclose it, but their criminal involvement was divulged by other informants.
Issues of trust and offender honesty therefore lessen the usefulness of questionnaires and one-shot interviews. The latter should not be construed as “life history” interviews, much less as “in-depth.” Furthermore, we note that such data collection methods may be biased in favor of showing much more desis-tance than in fact is the case. This is because offenders, especially middle-aged and older offenders, would be less likely to admit or self-report recent or current offending on an impersonal questionnaire or during a one-shot interview. Therefore, researchers who relied on such data would conclude that all offenders eventually desist, or that life-course-persistent offenders are a small minority who are quite different from other offenders.
Ultimately, we rest our claim to validity on the fact that the research reported here is based on many interviews with Sam over a long period of time, and on multiple interviews with his associates or network members. Additionally, attempts were made to corroborate information with multiple sources of data whenever possible. Steffensmeier had regular and frequent contact with the key individuals referred to in Confessions. As a rule, gaining rapport or getting informants to “open up” about their criminal activities was simply not feasible in the first interview or two or three. The only partial exception to this rule occurred when Sam sponsored or vouched for Steffensmeier to a new interview subject and facilitated the contact.
This study adopted what Glaser and Strauss (1967) call the “constant comparative method,” and can best be characterized as what Burawoy (2003: 668-69) called “rolling ethnographic revisits.” This strategy involved (1) intensive interviewing, including the ongoing preparation of semi-structured questions or interview protocol and (2) successive visits in which there is a running dialogue between field notes, observations, and conceptual framework.
For all these reasons, we believe that the data presented here have more validity than most studies of criminal careers, which rely on self-report questionnaires, official arrest records, or one-shot interviews. As for generalizabil-ity, social scientists have two goals in different kinds of research. One common goal is to generalize from a sample to a population, and this is the typical goal of studies using statistical data. However, another kind of generalization is theory based: the researcher’s goal is to generalize from the data at hand to theory and concepts (Glaser and Strauss 1967). That is, in the latter scenario, the researcher is not interested in the statistical representativeness of his or her research subjects, but in the implications the data have for developing and testing theoretical ideas and concepts.
Ethnographic studies data typically pursue this latter goal, and that is what we are doing here as well. This also means that the generalizability of this study is intimately tied to the validity of its data, as discussed above. If we have confidence in the validity of our data, then we can have confidence in their utility for applying and testing general theoretical ideas about crime, criminal careers, criminal enterprise, and the underworld. Ultimately, the generalizability of this study and the theoretical arguments we make from it are empirical questions. We strongly encourage future researchers to put them to the test.
Another theme of Confessions contributes to the ongoing debate within criminology about the accuracy of popular images and social scientists’ ideas about contemporary criminals—especially about chronic or life-course-persistent offenders. Images of crime and criminals intersect with emotions and sentiments about the essence of human nature and about what to do (or not to do) in order to deal with crime. Two stubborn images of crime and criminals prevail both in folklore and in academic criminology. One might be called the image of criminals as “desperate people in desperate circumstances.” The other is the image of criminals as “pathological,” “developmentally damaged,” or “suffering from personal deficits.” Both of these sets of images, we believe, provide a very narrow view of the criminal landscape.
The first of these sets of images views criminal decision-making and behavior as propelled by the desperate circumstances of offenders’ lives. Offending results when offenders stumble into crime as a result of their social and geographic proximity to crime groups and situations. This view portrays criminals as leading more or less passive lives, driven by “grim economic or psychic necessity” (Bordua 1961:136). A related set of images portrays criminals as viewing life as one big escapist party, a party that they have to gain illicit income to finance.
The second view is that “criminals” are very different from the rest of us. As Lemert (1951:91) notes, the stubborn folk idea also thrives in academic criminology that “persons leading lives condemned by society must be unhappy, demoralized, and emotionally maladjusted.” In this view, criminals, especially those referred to as life-course-persistent offenders, suffer from low self-control or impulsivity, low intelligence, or other biological or psychological deficits. This view often implies that criminals are bad now, have always been bad, will always be bad, and are bad in almost every way.
A related view is that criminals are “outsiders” who profess values and views drastically inconsistent with mainstream conventional values and norms. Relevant here is Bordua’s assertion: “It seems peculiar that modern analysts have stopped assuming that ‘evil’ can be fun and see [crime/delinquency] as arising only when boys [men] are driven away from ‘good’“ (1961:136, emphasis added).
In the late 1980s, the Pennsylvania Crime Commission (PCC) chose Stef-fensmeier to be the project director and chief consultant for the PCC s 1990 Decade Report, Organized Crime in Pennsylvania: A Decade of Change (1991). Jeffery Ulmer also worked on this project and contributed to the report. The PCC did so largely on the basis of their favorable reading of The Fence. In many respects the popular images and the social scientists’ ideas about contemporary criminals noted above were at odds with The Fence, and the criminal investigators and intelligence analysts of the PCC saw it as a more realistic portrayal of criminal enterprise and its practitioners.
The PCC Executive Director and staff shared David Matza’s (1964) view that academic criminologists, who profess expertise about crime, appear to have a remarkable reluctance to get close to or gain firsthand knowledge about their subject matter. In fact, they delighted in pointing out what they saw as the disconnect between the “ivory tower” theories of academics and their own, “real-world knowledge” of criminal careers and criminal enterprise.
For the veteran criminal investigators of the PCC, The Fence was grounded in “the real world” of crime—it provided, as does Confessions, a rich, in-depth understanding of the criminal life and world. They felt that the book showed how crime and criminal enterprise are woven into the fabric of society, and how the line between legitimate and illegitimate is often thin. They saw The Fence as offering a more nuanced and representative portrayal of the criminal landscape, particularly the world of theft, hustling, and illegal or quasi-legal enterprise. Also, they saw it as addressing “real crime” because it focused on adult practitioners of crime and vice whose criminality impacted hugely on society at large, as opposed to studying delinquency and what they considered “kids’ stuff.”
The Commission’s staff and its director tended to recognize the partial validity of “desperate men facing desperate circumstances” imagery, but felt that criminological views overemphasized this and exaggerated it beyond its statistical reality. As much or more than resource scarcity, they saw crime as a product of one’s greed, or as one’s niche or “thing,” played out in a society where the worlds of business and politics provided lots of moral leeway. They were highly skeptical about pathological and developmental damage views of persistent offenders, and could counter them with example after example. And they particularly saw as gullible the solution of “early childhood intervention” as a panacea that would dent the extent of crime or criminal enterprise in U.S. society and the pathways into such. Confessions continues in this mode of calling into question sometimes simplistic or overgeneralized popular and criminological imagery.
We have placed Sam’s narratives in theoretical perspective by way of intermittent commentaries that reflect our assumptions and sentiments about human nature, our orientation to what to ask and what kinds of information to collect, and our cognitive abilities (or limitations) in interpreting the data. Our questions and representations clearly do not reflect or contain all of reality. There obviously is plenty of room for alternative approaches and interpretations. We invite the reader to supply his or her own interpretations and view the narrative material through their own lenses, in addition to or instead of ours. Like Sutherland did in his preface to The Professional Thief we offer Confessions merely as a basis for further study of particular aspects of criminal careers and illegal enterprise, in the belief that it will provide a helpful, fuller understanding of pathways into and out of crime as well as the social organization of illegal enterprise. Like Sutherland, we are striving for an imagery of the criminal landscape that enlarges our ideas about what might be present in the world we study.