Black Market Billions: How Organized Retail Crime Funds Global Terrorists (Gal Zentner's Library) Read Online Free PDF Page A

organized network, and tend to send much of their profits from items they’ve stolen to support overseas terrorist groups in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Ireland, or Italy.
    Carlos Espinoza Gonzalez was a 38-year-old native of Chile who had also been on Hooper’s radar for a long time. Hooper started seeing him in California retail stores in 2000 and 2001 working with groups of 10 to 20 individuals (most of them Chileans) to boost department stores. According to Hooper, who had watched Gonzalez for morethan ten years, he would steal mostly apparel and sell it to garment district fences in Los Angeles. The fences that Gonzalez and his team worked with were of Middle Eastern descent and ran several warehouses that sold merchandise to smaller apparel shops and off-price stores. The money these Middle Eastern warehouses made was sent back to Hamas-supported groups, according to Hooper, who said that the men who owned the warehouses had been on FBI watch lists since 2005.
    In a surveillance tape shown to me by Hooper, Gonzalez, a relatively average-looking man of medium height, with dark hair and a nice smile, enters a store with an accomplice. He makes his way to the apparel section. He loiters around the men’s jeans section, while his lookout watches for salespeople suspiciously eyeing him. In one quick movement, Gonzalez takes a stack of pants and places them in a shopping bag. He then signals to the lookout, and they both walk out of the store and into a getaway car driven by another accomplice. In a different surveillance tape, Gonzalez took the same type of pants in a different store, walked into a dressing room, and then a couple minutes later walked out with nothing in his hands. Yet the clothing he was originally wearing looked bulkier, indicating that he stuffed his original clothing with the stolen pieces. Per his usual pattern, Gonzalez walked out of the store with the merchandise, hopped into a getaway car, and sped to another location.
    “Since Gonzalez was part of a larger Level 3 boosting and fencing operation, law enforcement saw him more of an asset in busting a larger ring as opposed to worrying about the 20 items that were stolen from the store. The problem with that strategy is people like Gonzalez learn that they can get away with boosting for years and not be penalized for it,” says Hooper, who calls Gonzalez a “super-booster” due to the large number of fencing operations that he supplies. Because Gonzalez supplies so many fencing operations, the traditional strategy for combating ORC of targeting the fence or “going after the head of the snake” would be ineffective since it would be like “cutting off thefirst head of the mythical Hydra,” with “more heads just sprout[ing] up in its place,” Hooper says. Gonzalez didn’t concentrate on stores just on the West Coast. He traveled up and down the East Coast as well, visiting Florida, Washington, D.C., and New York. Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus were also retailers he and his team of boosters hit, according to Hooper.
    Since the incident depicted in the surveillance tape I watched, Hooper worked closely with the LAPD and the FBI to disseminate Gonzalez’s photo and information to retailers across the country. Gonzalez became one of the most recognized professional boosters in the U.S., and his newfound notoriety made it much harder for him to escape without consequences. Gonzalez has served jail terms of 6 months to 2 years in several different jurisdictions where he was arrested, enabling Hooper and his team to be more effective at contacting local police departments around the country to make them aware of Gonzalez’s criminal history.
    In addition to Level 3 boosters such as Gonzalez, the FBI closely watches South American theft groups involved in jewelry and diamond heists. Like Gonzalez, these groups operate with 10 to 20 people, hitting stores in the diamond districts of major cities, such as Los Angeles, New York,