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Born to Steal: The Facts Behind the Australian Shoplifting Industry

His Honour had seen it all before. But while he could express no emotion at the sideshow before him, he had to concede that it was one of the best acts in town. And to the uninitiated, it was certainly convincing.

‘Hydraulics’ (they reckon he could lift anything) was doing his thing. Old Hydro was no stranger to the courts. Horses had won Melbourne Cups with less form than the old shoplifter. He had been lifting gear and getting pinched for it since 1955. He always maintained that he was in the iron and steel business: he said that his missus did the ironing and he did the stealing.

‘I’m an old-aged pensioner, totally illiterate and almost blind,’ the ageing conman pleaded to the magistrate, producing his pensioner’s bus and rail card. ‘I only took a couple of things to sell so I could feed myself and my sick wife. Give me a break, your Honour.’

The beak looked over his bifocals at the prisoner in his well-prepared court outfit – a ragged suit peppered with cigarette burns, crumpled shirt and unshined shoes without laces. He wasn’t convinced. But he had to agree that Hydraulics certainly looked the part, though it in no way resembled the outfit he’d been wearing when he was nicked. The magistrate inquired:

If you have fallen on such hard times, then what were you doing in the possession of 10 Giorgio Armani suits, four Ermenegildo Zegna jackets, eight pairs of handmade Bally shoes and 30 Christian Dior silk ties when you were arrested?

And I’m led to believe that you were wearing an outfit comprising of some of these expensive garments plus a bowler hat, a carnation in your lapel and you were carrying a gold-tipped cane. That’s hardly the attire of a poor old pensioner.

Amid protests that he was minding the gear for someone else and couldn’t read the labels, Hydro was taken away for yet another lagging. He would be out in a few months and straight back on the job. It was all part of what Hydraulics did for a living and he accepted jail as part of his livelihood.

He was one of many members of an organised shoplifting gang that specialised in stealing only the best brand names, pooled and fenced their booty and split the profits. His associates would look after his family while he was inside, just like Workers Compensation.

But while these farces go on in the courts around the country daily, retailers are finding it less and less amusing as their profits dwindle because of an industry that now has a turnover in the vicinity of billions of dollars a year. And no matter what device the retailers come up with to discourage them, the thieves always seem to be one step ahead.

And there would appear to be no end to the folks who buy the hot gear. It is almost as though it’s every Australian’s God-given right to buy something that ‘fell off the back of a truck’. And if you know where to look, like the local pub or club, there’s always something on offer. The general public’s willingness to buy hot goods is the lifeblood of the shoplifter.

One inner-city Sydney hotel had become so notorious for its clientele buying and selling hot goods that the cops warned the publican that if he didn’t put a stop to it, they would close him down. At one stage it was almost impossible to get into the toilet for the guys in there trying on gear.

NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics show that by far the biggest losers are the department stores, with more than 29 per cent of the annual turnover of convicted shoplifters coming from their shelves. Next are service stations, with 11.2 per cent, and supermarkets, with 10.1 per cent.

Other regularly targeted businesses include clothing stores, milk bars, newsagents, bookshops, chemists, DVD hire outlets, laptop computer shops, hardware shops, jewellery shops and sex shops. Of the 2736 convictions of adults for larceny by shop stealing, from the most recent figures available, only 180 of them were sent to prison, while the rest were either fined (1536), granted recognisance without supervision or conviction (434), granted recognisance with supervision, periodic detention or community service order (146) or received no recorded conviction (250).

Curiously enough, the lowest of these figures is that of imprisonment – this gives a pretty fair indication of what the law seems to think of the great old Australian pastime of shoplifting.

Australians have the dubious reputation of being the best shoplifters in the world. This stems from the halcyon days of the early 1960s, when the notorious ‘Kangaroo Gang’ took to London like a plague of locusts and cleaned out the shelves and clothing racks of Harrods, Fortnum and Mason, Austin Reeds, Selfridges and the House of Dunhill for almost every bit of clothing and jewellery that they had. The gang consisted of about 20 Australians, most of whom had skipped bail back home, usually for shoplifting, and were lying low in the Bayswater district of London in places like the Court Club in Inverness Terrace.

A member of the gang described London in the early 1960s as an Aladdin’s cave full of shops just waiting to be robbed. He says that the Poms were so naive to theft in those days that he went to Sotheby’s prior to a jewellery auction to have a look at what there was to pilfer. As he was browsing, one of the ushers handed him a five-carat diamond ring to examine and walked on. He slipped it into his pocket and walked out. It was as simple as that.

From then on, Sotheby’s became a prime target for jewellery. The gang’s favourite method of shoplifting was called ‘head pulling’, where a female accomplice with large breasts would go in first and distract the male attendant while the gang moved in and nicked what they could from the display cabinets.

But it was the huge department store Harrods that copped the biggest hiding. The ‘shoppies’ used to run competitions and bet on who could get the most full-length cashmere coats out in one day. The winner got out eight in as many trips, at 200 quid a coat. All of the gear was fenced through the local cockney lads.

The Aussie shoppies ate in the best restaurants, drank the finest wines, had the best tables at the nightclubs and, naturally, wore the best clothes. Tales of the Kangaroo Gang are legend. Old timers will tell you that they got away with it because they were so brazen and willing to try anything, like stealing the up-market and rare animals that were for sale at the pet shop in Harrods. French poodles and chihuahuas were easy to pinch, as they would snuggle up under the shoppie’s coat and avoid detection.

But the classic of them all would have to be the day they nicked the chimpanzee. An ex-army colonel had a private zoo in Sussex and he badly wanted a chimp but didn’t want to pay the outrageous price that Harrods was asking. So he called in the shoppies. But how do you get a baby chimpanzee out of a department store without anyone noticing?

Simple. The same way you would get an ordinary baby out. In a pram. With a ‘nanny’ at the wheel, they opened the cage, slipped the chimp out, wrapped it in a shawl, stuck a bottle in its gob, put it in the pram and wheeled it out the front door. The little old ladies in the lift on the way down couldn’t help but wonder if the beautiful little baby they admired in the pram was either a West Indian kid or a white one with whiskers and a suntan.

By 1970 no one with an Aussie accent could get into a department store (or any store for that matter) in London, so the rort came to an end. To the dismay of retailers in Australia, there was an influx of the best shoplifters in the world returning home. It was back to business as usual and that’s the way it’s been ever since.

But apart from the organised gangs, it seems that the most common reason for shoplifting is good old-fashioned greed. ‘It’s something that’s been around forever,’ said a store detective who preferred not to be named. ‘Kids from wealthy homes do it, so do mothers and fathers, poor folk and rich, old and young, country and city folk. Everyone seems to have shoplifted something at least once in their lives. Outside of the pros it’s like one big national pastime and the retailer is the loser.’

According to the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, only about one in 50 shoplifters are ever detected and even fewer are brought to the attention of the police. The reasons for this include fear of litigation for false arrest, bad publicity, losses associated with the removal of staff from the shop floor to deal with shoplifters, and subsequent proceedings and dissatisfaction with the manner in which courts deal with the offenders.

Based on Victorian findings, less than a third of detected shoplifters are referred to the police by retailers. Instead, retailers deal with thieves directly by demanding payment for goods, banning them from the shop, notifying parents or taking no action whatsoever.

Most of the professionals in Sydney and Melbourne work in gangs, usually about four to a team. While the big department stores are their bread and butter, they are now targeting more of the specialised clothing and electrical stores and pinching only the top-brand gear like Reebok, Toshiba, Gucci and YSL. They have found over the years that the top clobber moves quicker, and, at only a third of the ticketed price, it’s the best bargain a punter will ever get.

The professional shoplifters take their livelihood seriously and actually pay tax as a self-employed ‘whatever’ to avoid an unpleasant confrontation should they have to explain their income down the track. Most enjoy ‘non-working’ holidays just like the rest of us, and they often take the family away from it all for a couple of weeks.

The female professional shoplifters are always well groomed and the men look like company directors. One notorious elderly shoplifter made a practice of fleecing a huge department store in the heart of Sydney so often that the unsuspecting staff got to know him and chat with him. As he was always immaculately groomed in three-piece suits and did actually buy things from time to time, he was able to pass himself off as a retired doctor who was lonely and was looking for something to do.

After some time, the staff convinced him that he would make the perfect store detective. So he applied for the job and got it, more on the staff’s say-so than his fabricated credentials. It was like letting Jack the Ripper loose in the Touch of Class. It took the store about three months to realise that most of their gear was disappearing from under their noses. By then, the ‘doctor’ and his associates had taken off, along with a hefty amount of very expensive merchandise.

The better individual shoplifters make up to $1000 a day, as they are a lot more selective than your average shoppie. These are the cream of the shoppies, who will steal on order. Their clients pick out an item that they like – a cashmere cardigan, Louis Feraud suit or designer-label jacket – and tell the shoppie where it is, and the shoppie goes and steals it for them.

This usually costs about 30 per cent of the ticketed price, so it is one hell of a saving on a suit that costs $2000. These more exclusive shoppies will often employ a ‘casual’ as a deterrent and pay him or her a daily wage, the same as a restaurant would pay a casual waitress.

An oft-told story is about the guy who was whining down at the pub that he had found the right Christening dress for his tiny daughter, but the shop wanted a staggering $1200 for it. One of the shoppies was back in 10 minutes with the dress down the front of his pants for a third of the ticket price.

Some stores will go to any lengths to deter the shoppies. Like the manager of the big department store in Sydney’s Bondi Junction, who was so sick of being ripped off that he had a life-sized cardboard cut-out cop erected in the store. When the pilfering persisted, he decided that the cop wasn’t aggressive enough so he had another made a foot taller, and this time with a giant scowl on its face.

Someone stole it.