Great Pretenders

Pursuits And Careers Of Persistent Thieves

Neal Shover

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813328119
• eBook ISBN: 9780429973383
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, the author focuses on the sociological origins, activities, and criminal careers of persistent thieves. He uses a crime-as-choice framework and a life-course perspective to make sense of important decisions and changes in the lives of persistent thieves.

1
Pathways of Persistent Thieves

The years since 1970 have brought dramatic change in the way elite academicians and policymakers talk about crime and what should be done about it. In the place of labeling theory, which had enjoyed considerable support for a decade or more, economists and cognitive psychologists along with many in the criminological mainstream began to advance an interpretation of crime as choice. The fundamental assumption of this approach is that criminal acts are products of decisionmaking in which the individual examines and assesses available options and their potential net payoffs, paying attention particularly to the possibility of arrest.¹ In this view, crime unambiguously is chosen, purposeful behavior.

The rise of crime-as-choice theory was accompanied by a new focus on “career criminals,” men who commit a disproportionately large share of street crime. Although some commentators have taken a rather bleak view of prospects for reversing their pattern of crime, there is good reason to contest this. In contrast to the contention that most career criminals commit crime over many years, there is little doubt that criminal participation by many persistent thieves is intermittent and that they eventually stop committing the kinds of crimes they committed when younger. A study by Daniel Glaser and his students is instructive. They interviewed several hundred federal prison inmates and followed up with additional interviews in the first nine months after the inmates were released. Their research showed that men generally do not devote their energies exclusively to crime for long periods of time. Instead, they “follow a zig-zag path ... [going] from noncrime to crime and to noncrime again. Sometimes this sequence is repeated many times, but sometimes they clearly go to crime only once; sometimes these shifts are for long duration or even permanent, and sometimes they are short lived.”² Viewed one way, Glaser’s research sensitizes us to scrutinize points in the lives of persistent thieves when seemingly they choose either to engage in crime or to avoid it. In short, the notion that most offenders follow a zig-zag path of criminal participation compels us to be sensitive to turning points in criminal careers and the reasons for changes in direction at these junctures.

Significant turning points as well as changes in the frequency of crime commission and crime preference are evident in the six biographical sketches that comprise this chapter. We see in them short-term movement into and out of crime as well as long-term changes in the intensity and quality of offending. Notice that most of the men were products of the lower reaches of the working class, a simple fact of origin that both limits and distorts their perceived legitimate options. Inevitably, this constrains their decisionmaking. Notice also that several of these men found attractive and were drawn to some aspects of crime or hustling. Last, pay attention to how their interests, their commitments, and their willingness to risk imprisonment change over the life course.

I met the men described here under varying circumstances, although most were participants in research projects described in the Appendix.³ I spent no more than a few hours with most of the men, but I have had occasional contact with others over two decades. This in part explains variation in the detail provided in the biographical sketches. Further adding to this variation is the fact that for some of the men, I had access to correctional records and rap sheets, but for others the only materials I could draw from were interviews.

Carl Horton

A rather passive, quiet man in his mid-50s, Carl Horton was on federal mandatory release when I interviewed him. When asked how many calendar years he spent in confinement, Carl Horton responded like nearly all men who have served multiple prison sentences: “I haven’t figured it up.” He could only estimate: “I kind of guess, I think maybe about 17 years.”⁴

Born in rural North Carolina, Carl is the youngest of five children. His parents separated when he was approximately 12 years old. Carl remained with his father before rejoining his mother and siblings, who since had migrated to Washington, D.C. There was very little family cohesion, and Carl, being the youngest, was left to fend for himself much of the time:

It was Depression time, and my mother had her thing. I guess she was young and wanted her own life, or something, I don’t know. And I had so many different—what would you call them?—stepfathers, or so forth and so on, you know. Mixed me up a lot of times. I was too young to understand, and it would just break my heart, you know. Sometimes she would disappear or something and they would put me with my grandmother and stuff. I was kind of a mixed-up kid.

Although he had no involvement in delinquency, Carl began drinking heavily by age 21 and his entire life has had a problem with alcohol.

Carl was first incarcerated at age 19, when he served six months for robbery. As he describes the incident today:

I was drinking in an alley with some people, and this guy supposedly had been robbed. Or something like that. And they locked me and this girl—Mary something, I can’t think of her name—concerning it. He claimed he was robbed of, I don’t know how much money, but I didn’t have a penny on me, nothing. And it wind up where they broke it down to a misdemeanor.... Anyway, I entered a plea and they gave me six months.

While incarcerated he “met people and got to know guys in there.” He was fascinated and captivated by their accounts of criminal activities:

I listened to them talk about how to make money, big money.... And I got to thinking I was kinda smart then. Tryin’ to figure ways to make money illegally, you know, without working too hard for it.

Q: You wanted to be a good hustler, huh?

A: I wanted to, yes.

Carl never realized his criminal ambitions because “I figure I didn’t have the intelligence or something, the know-how or whatever.... I never had any luck.” Although he committed rather little crime, Carl served multiple prison sentences.

Carl attributes nearly all his criminality to the combined effects of momentary need for money and the influence of alcohol. He says that when pressured for cash and intoxicated, he is easily led and also tends to do “stupid” things. Carl never has robbed anyone and estimates that he had committed no more than 10 burglaries in his entire life. They were unskilled and yielded little return; he notes that he never made more than $200 from any of the crimes he committed. Lack of criminal sophistication is evident in this description of two burglaries:

I was living on P Street, I think, and I got behind in my rent and everything.... And I broke a window in a place and pulled some stuff out of there to sell. And I got caught, and I think I got four years in Lorton [then the District of Columbia reformatory].

I got arrested in ‘74, I think. There’s a place near where I was living called Lee’s, some kind of auto place. A friend of mine had busted the window in the place and told me what he got out of there. Says, “It’s still open.” So, I went down there and got the rest. Put it on one of those push carts that you get in the Safeway and stuff. And I’m pushing it up the street at 4 o’clock in the morning, and the police grabbed me.

Of the prison sentences he has served, Carl says that eventually he reached a point where “I didn’t have the fear, you know. I say, ‘well, hell, it’s a place to eat and a place to sleep, and there’s no pressure on me. I can get my mind clear.’ It lifted my brain of worry, so it was kinda easy.”

Carl once worked for nearly four years as a baker, but it has been many years since he last held steady employment. Today he has few occupational and social resources from which he can draw. He never married but did father a child by a girlfriend some years ago. He has no contact with either of them today. His siblings live in another city, but so long as his fortunes are down, Carl avoids contact with them, primarily because of the embarrassment it would cause him.

Carl believes that he wasted many years of life, and indeed he tends to speak about it in the past tense: “I had dreams of doing better for myself and making life better for myself, you know. I had dreams. And I kept dreaming and dreaming and dreaming, but they never quite came true.”

Carl Horton seems overwhelmed by the downward turns his life has taken. Most of his youthful dreams, both legitimate and illegitimate, have vanished. Asked to describe a typical day, he said:

Well, I get up about 5:30. I shave and wash up. I come out and if my friend, William, don’t have any jobs, I go down to, go catch the bus to Georgia and Alaska—that’s the District [of Columbia] line—and stand around and wait for somebody to dig footings or pour concrete or something like that.... And I would stay there until about 9:30. If I don’t catch out [get day labor] by 9:30, I hitchhike a ride back downtown. If I got money, I catch the bus. But if I don’t have money, I’d hitchhike a ride. And I come downtown and stop around two or three places where the guys hang around. They drinkin’ wine and stuff like that. Somebody always got something. We drink some wine or, you know, whatever. And if I got anything at home, I go home and eat me a sandwich or something like that. If not, I’ll go around to one of these places where they give away free food. They got about three or four places around here where you can go and all you have to do is line up and go in and eat.... That keeps you holdin’ together, in physical condition, you know. That’s about it.

Although he is dissatisfied with his present life, Carl knows that his advancing age makes it unlikely that he will be able to secure work and a steady income.

Brian Biluszek

An only child, Brian Biluszek was born in Michigan to an accounting clerk and his wife. The parents divorced when Brian was a small child, leaving him with no significant childhood memories of his mother. After the divorce, the father and Brian returned to live with the former’s parents. When Brian was six years old, his father took employment as a clerk in the aircraft industry, and he and Brian moved to the state of Washington. Although Brian’s father subsequently married a woman who had a child by a previous husband, relations between her and Brian were not good. For this reason, Brian returned to Michigan and lived with his paternal grandparents for approximately one year before returning to his father’s home.

As he approached adolescence, relations between Brian and his father deteriorated, in part because the latter “did not show his emotions” easily and Brian, as he puts it today, was a “smart ass.” Although Brian began stealing candy and other small items from stores before age 10, he did not begin serious stealing until he reached adolescence. While his family was on vacation, their home was burglarized, an experience that angered and upset his father. The police investigation that followed struck Brian as extremely cursory, “a farce.” He drew the lessons that burglary not only is safe but also that it could be a vehicle for getting back at this father:

I started stealing, I really believe I started stealing, you know, for psychological reasons, wanting to get even with somebody.... The only thing I can think of is that I had so much, such a great deal of hatred and contempt for my father that, you know, that if I’m stealing something I’m doing something to hurt him, I’m getting back at him, I’m getting even.

Although Brian had no official juvenile record, at age 15 he began breaking into homes in the neighborhood where he lived. He describes himself as a person who always has had difficulty relating easily with others, and stealing gained him acceptance with other boys who also were committing crimes: “I wasn’t stealing with them, we were just a group that knew that each other were stealing, kind of a little group of ‘hoodlums’ in the school.” Although most of his crimes were committed alone, Brian and a neighbor boy collaborated on some break-ins while he was in high school. Asked how he learned to steal, Brian said it was “through trial and error, TV and picture shows, stuff like that. Trial and error mostly.” In addition to the money he garnered from break-ins, they were “awful exciting, a big rush. “

Brian enlisted in the army at age 18, but he did not wear the yoke of authority well. He was AWOL on several occasions, spent several days in the stockade, and was discharged after only seven months. Today he says that when he enlisted he was promised training that he did not receive, and this only embittered him: “I think I had unreasonable expectations of it. I swallowed the line, you know—’I’m going to learn a trade.’ And the recruiter, I felt that the recruiter had promised me certain training that I didn’t get. And I thought they’d lied to me.” After his discharge, he returned to Michigan and lived with an aunt and uncle.

Brian’s periods of stealing were intermittent; on at least one occasion he went for a year or more without doing any break-ins. This was true while he was in the military and for nearly one year after his discharge. He says that “when I’d get in an emotionally stressful situation, I would start back with that pattern of burglarizing.” At age 20, Brian followed a girlfriend to Georgia, where she planned to attend school. Before leaving town, however, he stole money from a former employer that he believed was rightfully his. He explains: “He wouldn’t give me my last paycheck, because I had created some liability that he would have to take care of.” Once in Georgia, however, Brian resumed his old pattern:

I wanted money, I needed money, and I knew I could get it that way.... I didn’t want to look for a job. It’s not the fact that I didn’t want to work,... it’s the fear, it was the fear of going out and having to ask for work, you know, look for a job. It wasn’t the actual working.

The reasons he stole had changed since his adolescent days:

In the beginning, I didn’t have to worry about a place to stay, you know. I was living at home, I was getting fed, I didn’t need any money. I think, back then, I’d take liquor and guns and jewelry and money, if it was there. It didn’t really matter. Right at the end, I was stealing to support myself, so I was into stuff I could sell. And I always checked the freezer and refrigerator before I left a house, to take meat, you know. If there was steaks or something, I would take food.

Asked what he did with the things he stole, Brian replied, “that was a big problem, because I was afraid to try to pawn anything and, mostly then, I took, I just took money, credit cards, and handguns, you know. When I got popped [arrested] I had, like, forty pieces in the house ... that I didn’t know what to do with, and ... I was too scared to try to sell them.... I was kind of naive.” He says today that “if I knew then what I know now, I probably could have been making three or four times as much money as I did.”

Although the great majority of Brian’s burglaries victimized households, when he did break into a business it yielded a larger sum of cash than he ever had gotten from his previous household burglaries: “I did one [burglary], it was an insurance company, and I found, I got about five or six hundred dollars in cash. And I’d never gotten that before out of a house, and I was just thrilled with businesses.” Consequently, he decided to continue business break-ins. One night, he was interrupted as he was preparing to break into a business that he believed was empty at the time.

Q: How’d they catch you?

A: I’m not real sure if it was, I really believe there was someone in—it was a restaurant I was trying to break into—and I believe there was someone inside the building. And they called the cops. They heard me outside.

Q: They caught you dead bang?

A: Uh, I was trying to break open the door, and I heard a noise that sounded an awful lot like the hammer on a revolver being pulled back. And I left. And I’d parked my car, probably a quarter of a mile down the road, and I went down the railroad tracks and crossed the ditch and got back in my car. And I started to drive away, and when I started to drive away, you know, there were blue lights everywhere.

After his arrest the police found considerable stolen goods in Brian’s apartment. He was offered an 11-year sentence in return for a guilty plea, declined, and eventually settled for 6-10 years. As he says today:

Looking back on it, I mean, I had been down there probably three or four months in Georgia, and I still ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Pathways of Persistent Thieves
• 2 Origins, Options, and Preparation
• 3 Changing Criminal Opportunities and the Unskilled
• 4 Identity, Lifestyle, and Character
• 5 Career Changes and Termination
• 6 Threats, Decisions, and Confinement
• 7 Crime Control and Persistent Thieves
• Appendix: Materials and Methods
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index