Confessions of a Dying Thief

Darrell J. Steffensmeier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780202307619
• eBook ISBN: 9781351526869
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

*Recipient of the American Society of Criminology's 2006 Michael J. Hindelang Award for a book, published within the past three calendar years, that is "the most outstanding contribution to research in criminology."

*Nominated for the 2007 Outstanding Book Award of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

Sam Goodman, was a long-time thief, fence, and quasi-legitimate businessman. He had a criminal career that spanned fifty years, beginning in his mid-teens and ending with his death when he was in his mid-sixties. Confessions of a Dying Thief is an in-depth ethnographic study of Sam and his world based on continuous contact with him for many years, on multiple interviews with his network of associates in crime and business, and on a series of interviews with him shortly before he died.

The book updates and greatly expands the case study of Sam Goodman's fencing activity found in Steffensmeier's award-winning 1986 book The Fence: In the Shadow of Two Worlds. It combines Sam's colorful narrative accounts with substantive commentary by the authors to provide a more nuanced portrayal of criminal careers, illegal enterprise, and the broad landscape comprising the entity called "crime." To more fully understand pathways into and out of crime as well as the social organization of illegal enterprise, the authors propose an integrative learning-opportunity-commitment framework that combines differential association/social learning theory and an extended conceptualization of criminal opportunity with a three-fold theory of commitment to crime. This framework offers an integrated and more complete way of understanding mechanisms that underlie criminal offending and criminal careers. It also recognizes the complexity and scope of the criminal landscape and its embeddedness in the fabric of the larger society, including its criminal justice system.

Sam's illness and death are a sobering backdrop th

PART I
Introducing Confessions

1
Confessions’ Data and Contributions

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.

Significance of Confessions for Criminology

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.

The Validity and Generalizability of Confessions

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.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• First Author’s Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: Introducing Confessions
• PART II: Sam’s Life Unfolds: Chronology and Turning Points
• PART III: Crime Pathways and Organization
• PART IV: Sam Takes Stock: Dealing with Dying
• Epilogue
• References
• Index