Is organized crime behind your local shoplifting?

Last year, police arrested a Polk County, Florida woman named Blanca Sevilla after she was caught walking out of a grocery store with her purse stuffed with $90 worth of Good Start Soy Baby Formula that she hadn’t paid for.

A classic case of petty shoplifting? Not exactly. After interviewing Sevilla and another baby formula booster named Jessie Lopez as they sat in the county jail, authorities learned that the thieves were part of a 21-member ring of shoplifters headed by Eli Nimrod Castillo-Almendarez, who was arrested in March 2009.


The ring, based in Georgia, was allegedly paid between $100 to $300 a day to methodically steal cans of baby formula in six Florida counties for eventual sale on the black market in North Carolina. The ring’s take in one year totaled $2.5 million, police said, adding that over the ring’s seven-year period of activity, it could have netted $17.5 million.
It wasn’t the first time that Polk County was victimized by what law enforcement and retail industry experts call “Organized Retail Crime” (ORC). In 2008, 18 people were arrested and charged with the theft of $100 million in cosmetic products over the span of five years.

ORC may not fit most people’s image of organized crime. And that may be one reason why it hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Such large-scale theft is often hard to detect from the thousands of shoplifting incidents reported around the country each year, but it “is an extremely sophisticated, coordinated crime, ” Frank Muscato, the ORC investigations supervisor at Walgreens, told Congress during a hearing on the subject in 2008. “It is not opportunistic theft where merchandise like food, clothing, sundries or music are stolen for personal use.”

Link:http://thecrimereport.org/2010/03/04/shoplifting-inc/