ON THE JOB
By far the easiest and most productive method of stealing is on the job. Wages paid to delivery boys, sales clerks, shippers, cashiers and the like are so insulting that stealing really is a way of maintaining self-respect. If you are set on stealing the store dry when you apply for the job, begin with your best foot forward. Make what employment agencies call a “good appearance.” Exude cleanliness, Godliness, sobriety and all the other WASPy virtues third grade teachers insist upon. Building up a good front will eliminate suspicion when things are “missing.”
Mail clerks and delivery boys can work all sorts of neat tricks. When things get a little slow, type up some labels addressed to yourself or to close friends and play Santa Claus. Wrap yourself a few packages or take one that is supposed to go to a customer and put your label over theirs. Blame it on the post office or on the fact that “things get messed up `cause of all the bureaucracy.” It’s great to be the one to verbalize the boss’s own general feelings before he does when something goes awry. The best on-the-job crooks always end up getting promoted.
Cashiers and sales persons who have access to money can pick up a little pocket change without too much effort, no matter how closely they are watched by supervisors. Women can make use of torn hems to stash coins and bills. Men can utilize cuffs. Both can use shoes and don’t forget those secret little pockets you learned about in the last section. If you ring up items on a cash register, you can easily mistake $1.39 for 39? or $1.98 for 98? during the course of a hectic day. Leave pennies on the top shelf of the cash register and move one to the far right side every time you skip a dollar. That way at the end of the day, you’ll know how much to pocket and won’t have to constantly be stuffing, stuffing, stuffing.
If you pick up trash or clean up, you can stick all sorts of items into wastebaskets and later sneak them out of the store.
There are many ways of working heists with partners who pose as customers.
See the sections on free food and clothing for these. There are also ways of working partnerships on the job. A cashier at a movie theater and a doorman can work out a system where the doorman collects the tickets and returns them to the cashier to sell again.
A neat way to make a large haul is to get a job through an agency as a domestic for some rich slob. You should use a phony identification when you sign up at the agency. Once you are busy dusting the town house, check around for anything valuable to be taken home. Pick up the phone, order all sorts of merchandise, and have it delivered. A friend with a U-haul can help you really clean up.
CREDIT CARDS
Any discussion of shoplifting and forgeries inevitably leads to a rap on credit cards; those little shiny plastic wonder passes to fantasy land that are rendering cash obsolete. There are many ways to land a free credit card. You can get one yourself if your credit is good, or from a friend: report it stolen and go on a binge around town. Sign your name a little funny. Super underworld types might know where you can purchase a card that’s not too hot on the black market. You might heist one at a fashionable party or restaurant. If you’re a hat check girl at a night club, don’t forget to check out pockets and handbags for plastic goodies.[5]
Finally, you can redo a legitimate card with a new number and signature and be sure that it’s on no one’s “hot list.” Begin by removing the ink on the raised letters with any polyester resin cleaner. Next, the plastic card should be held against a flat iron until the raised identification number is melted. You can use a razor blade to shave off rough spots. This combination of razor blade and hot iron, when worked skillfully, will produce a perfect blank card. When the card is smooth as new, reheat it using the flat iron and press an addressograph plate into the soft plastic. The ink can be replaced by matching the original at any stationary store. If this is too hard, you can buy machines to make your own credit cards, which are made for small department stores. Granted, this method is going require some expertise, but once you’ve learned to successfully forge a credit card, buy every item imaginable, eat fancy meals, and even get real money from a bank.
Whether your credit card is stolen, borrowed or forged, you still have to follow some guidelines to get away without any hassle. Know the store’s checking method before you pass the hot card. Most stores have a fifty-dollar limit where they only call upstairs on items costing fifty dollars or more. In some stores it’s less. Some places have a Regiscope system that takes your picture with each purchase. You should always carry at least one piece of back-up identification to use with the phony card as the clerk might get suspicious if you don’t have any other ID. They can check out a “hot list” that the credit card companies send out monthly, so if you’re uptight about anything watch the clerk’s movements at all times. If things get tight, just split real quick. Often, even if a clerk or boss thinks it’s a phony, they’ll OK the sale anyway since the credit card companies make good to the stores on all purchases; legit or otherwise. Similarly, the insurance companies make good to the credit companies and so on until you get to a little group of hard working elves in the basement of the U.S. Mint who do nothing but print free money and lie to everybody about there being tons of gold at Fort Knox to back up their own little forging operation.
9. MONKEY WARFARE
If you like Halloween, you’ll love monkey warfare. It’s ideal for people uptight about guns, bombs and other children’s toys, and allows for imaginative forms of protesting, many of which will become myth, hence duplicated and enlarged upon. A syringe (minus the needle) or a cooking baster can be filled with a dilute solution of epoxy glue. Get the two tubes in a hardware store and squeeze into a small bottle of rubbing alcohol. Shake real good and pour into the baster or syringe. You have about thirty minutes before the mixture gets too hard to use.
Go after locks, parking meters, and telephones. You can fuck up the companies that use IBM cards by buying a cheap punch or using an Exacto knife and cutting an extra hole in the card before you return it with your payment. By the way, when you return payments always pay a few cents under or over. The company has to send you a credit or another bill and it screws up their bookkeeping system. Remember, always bend, fold, staple or otherwise mutilate the card. By the way if you ever find yourself in a computer room during a strike, you might want to fuck up the school records. You can do this by passing a large magnet or portable electro-magnet rapidly back and forth across the reels of tape, thus erasing them. And don’t miss the tour of the IBM plant, either.
Another good bit is to rent a safe deposit box (only about $7.00 a year) in a bank using a phony name. That usually only need a signature and don’t ask for identification. When you get a box, deposit a good size dead fish inside the deposit box, close it up and return it to its proper niche. From then on, forget about it. Now think about it, in a few months there is going to be a hell-of-a-smell from your small investment. It’s going to be almost impossible to trace and besides, they can never open the box without your permission. Since you don’t exist, they’ll have no alternative but to move away. Invest in the Stank of Amerika savings program. Just check out Lake Erie and you’ll see saving fish isn’t such a dumb idea. If you get caught, tell them you inherited the fish from your grandmother and it has sentimental value.
There are lots of things you can send banks, draft boards and corporations that contribute to pollution via the mails. It is possible to also have things delivered.
Have a hearse and flowers sent to the chief of police. We know someone who had a truckload of cement dumped in the driveway of her boss under the fib that the driveway was going to be repaved.
By getting masses of people to use electricity, phones or water at a given time, you can fuck up some not- so-public utility. The whole problem is getting the word out. For example, 10,000 people turning on all their electrical appliances and lights in their homes at a given time can cause a blackout in any major city. A hot summer day at about 3:00 PM is best. Five thousand people calling up Washington, D.C. at 3:00 PM on a Friday (one of the
