Most of us have sat around a table with friends and colleagues, sharing our viewpoints about how to fix the social problems we all face.
A few years ago, I got the unexpected opportunity to not only espouse my social philosophies, but to actually test how much I really believed them. It was the equivalent of the Universe saying, “Okay, Stan. Put up or shut up.” The issue had to do with rehabilitation of ex-convicts in order to reduce the cycle of recidivism. In today’s column, and for the next few weeks following, I will share with you my experiment in hiring someone who stole from me. The story is written by myself, and by the thief.
Stan the Idiot
I got into my Miata after band practice at Mark’s house, 9:00 p.m. on a Tuesday night, early in 2002. I was half a block down the road when I suddenly realized that my jacket and backpack were not on the passenger’s seat next to me. Then I felt the night air coming through a slit in the convertible top. I stopped the car, letting the event sink in. I had been robbed.
It wasn’t the first time. My home had been burgled twice back in 1981, and the feeling was the same. Somebody had taken hard work from me. Because whatever I’ve gotten in life, it hasn’t come from inheritance or a lottery ticket. And now I was going to have to work harder to fix the problem. And it was a huge problem.
I was traveling for business a great deal in those years. So my backpack held my passport, checkbook, wallet, business cards, cell phone, PDA and work papers. I also had passwords and bank account numbers in my wallet. I had discounted the chances of theft, like a dolt, and wrote the codes down because I had a burgeoning number of places where passwords and special codes were necessary. These days there are so many secret words and symbols in our lives because of the internet, voicemail, etc. And they have to change frequently. Tough to keep it straight. But recording them all together like I did was just plain stupid. In retrospect, I can imagine the thief opening the backpack, stunned at their good fortune. Everything they needed to assume my identity was laid out like Christmas dinner.
I began a game of “Keep One Step Ahead of the Thief”. The game didn’t start right away. I had called in the robbery, filed a fraud report with the credit agencies, cancelled my cards, and changed passwords that I thought were at risk. I stopped losses out of my bank accounts and credit cards pretty quickly. But I didn’t do enough.
My first clue that something was still amiss was when a few days went by and I didn’t receive any mail. At first I thought it was unusual but only that. Then, after about a week, I checked into it. That’s when I found someone had submitted a change of address for my mail, posing as me. On that same day, I got a call from the Loew’s Coronado Hotel asking me if I had wanted the American Express card I was ordering to come to the hotel room or to my home.
I notified the police of these activities, and left work immediately. I found out where my mail routing was done at the post office, so I walked into the Mission Valley routing center and just went up to the first person I saw, asking them how I find out where my mail was going. This turned out to be a big violation of postal service protocol. No one is supposed to have access to the mail center without prior authorization or being an employee on duty. They hurried me out, but gave me the forwarding address. I immediately went to the post box shop in Kearney Mesa where my mail was being sent. I walked into the shop and asked to speak to the manager. While I was doing that, a man came up to me and introduced himself as a special investigator on stake-out at that location. We left the shop and went to his car. He and another detective had been waiting for the thief to show up to claim mail so they could arrest him.
I learned that my thief was working seven victims concurrently, that he had done this before and that they felt they had enough evidence to put him in jail quickly. I shared all of my information with the detectives and we began to stay in touch.
I continued my own investigation work, compiling the behavior pattern and staying just in front of the thief’s efforts. I narrowly avoided him receiving a check for $8,000 that had been drawn on my credit union account. And then I got a call from a woman who complained that “my” check had bounced. She was the mother of the person to whom the check had been written, and her daughter had accepted the check for work done for the thief. It took thirty minutes to convince the mother that I wasn’t the person who wrote the check. I gave all this information to the investigators.
After a great deal of time and disruption to my life, I had successfully replaced the cards, the license, the passport and the checks. I had secured my accounts. I only lost a couple of hundred dollars from my wallet. The money that was taken from an ATM machine was insured by the bank. But I lost some things that were irreplaceable. In my wallet were pictures of my children when they were babies. In my planner were letters from my daughters. Those letters and photos had been solace to me in hard times, beacons of love when I needed it most.
One day, I got a call from a special agent of the Secret Service. They had arrested the suspect, and found him with enough evidence to convict him easily. I began to breathe easier. [Next time, we’ll hear from Chuck.]