Drug addiction fuelled David Andino’s need to steal. Every day, he hit the same Target in Manhattan. His mother, a retired police officer, hadn’t seen him in years.
The shoplifter knew the geography of the big gleaming Target store in Tribeca as well as he knew his dingy little US$20-a-week room uptown.
He popped through the sliding front door, where a security guard stood posted. No sense trying to sneak in – the guards all knew him on sight. In his head, a timer was ticking, like a shot clock. Ninety seconds. That was how long it would take for the police to respond to the 911 call the security guard would be making right now.
He hurried past the guard to get to the pharmacy area downstairs. The nearest route down was the escalator going up.
The shoplifter, David Andino, clambered down that escalator, hurtling past shoppers heading up.
Andino scooped what he could into a laundry bag, seeking out the brands he knew he could easily sell. Aveeno lotion, Cetaphil cleanser, CeraVe moisturiser. Sensodyne toothpaste, Crest White Strips.
Ninety seconds.
He raced back up the escalator, past the guard, and back onto Greenwich St and into the nearby Chambers St subway station.
He boarded an uptown train, and the doors closed behind him. Success. Tomorrow, he would be back again.
It was 2022. Day after day, he stole from that Target store. The police arrived, too late. As he stole more and more, day after day, Andino became a one-man crime wave in the Police Department’s 1st Precinct in lower Manhattan.
Eventually, officers changed tactics. They started lying in wait for Andino outside his favourite Target. Watching.
Another search was taking place across the Hudson River in New Jersey. A woman, retired from the Police Department after 20 years in rough sections of New York City’s Bronx borough, spent her mornings searching her computer for some sign of him in the city’s jails, or worse.
Her name was Elizabeth Velazquez. She was David Andino’s mother.
A stubborn problem
You have probably never laid eyes on David Andino. But you have felt, with frustration, the impact of his actions in the shaving cream and toothpaste aisles of your pharmacy, where everything is now locked behind plastic. The barriers are in response, store owners say, to rampant theft.
That claim has been questioned as overly broad – an easy scapegoat for deeper challenges facing the retail industry. Shoplifting, experts observe, has actually declined nationally.
But in New York City, it remains a stubborn daily reality. Security guards are trained not to lay hands on a person stealing, a fact that many thieves know. And those who are caught are rarely, if ever, jailed; instead they are given desk-appearance tickets for their misdemeanor offences. They can rack these tickets up without practical consequence, until someone begins tracking one individual thief and adding his thefts until they pass US$1000 ($1700) in value, the threshold for felony grand larceny.
Before he was one of the busiest shoplifters in the city, Andino was living in Harlem, and his days revolved around feeding the drug habit that had knocked him out of college and far off course. Cocaine and heroin.
He panhandled on the subway, he said in an interview, but it wasn’t enough.
He needed a new hustle.
A friend, Brian, said, “You want to make $20 real quick? We go into Target and take Sensodyne.”
Target seemed huge, a shiny fortress of glass and steel on Greenwich St in Tribeca, just blocks from the World Trade Center.
He went along, very afraid, certain he’d be in a jail cell in no time at all.
The two men entered the store and made their way downstairs to the pharmacy. They loaded the bag until Andino could barely lift it. They went upstairs, where he was sure security was following him.
But they weren’t.
He hurried to the subway with his heavy bag, shocked at how easy that was. They went back, sometimes carrying disguises, donning jackets and caps after leaving the store so they would look different from whatever description the police might have.
One day, Andino went to Target alone, no partner. And it still worked.
It quickly became routine, a part of his day, like a favourite coffee cart or deli.
Target employees found him stealing, and he would apologise – “I’m sorry I’m doing this, I’m sorry” – even as he kept loading his bag. Andino learned quickly that guards weren’t allowed to physically stop him. It was against store policy.
The security guards began to recognise him. “You got a minute and a half,” one guard told him one day, as if daring him.
Sometimes Andino spoke back. “You do what you do, and I’ll do what I do, and we’ll see what happens,” he’d say. “It’s not like it’s your stuff. I’m not going to your house and stealing from you.”
They waited for him at the store’s exit. Sometimes he ran out an emergency door instead. Sometimes he faced them directly.
“If they’re in front of you, you go around them,” he told himself. “Don’t go through them.”
Police work and motherhood
Elizabeth Velazquez graduated from high school 19 and pregnant. David was born the following October. His father left and drifted into addiction. He later died after using an infected needle.
Velazquez rebounded and went to college. She held fast to a dream job she’d had since she was about 8, growing up in the rough 1980s South Bronx. “I always wanted to be a cop,” she said. “I just wanted to be out there and make sure people are taken care of.”
She joined the Police Department in 1998. David was 9 years old, a happy child with a bright smile and a pet dog, Phoebe. If she thought her job would excite her son, she was wrong. “My son had a lot of nightmares,” she said. “He thought I was going to die. He’d come jump in my bed.”
She worked at ground zero after September 11, digging for bodies. “It was bad,” she said. “I came home with a grey uniform.”
David attended a Catholic elementary school until the family left the Bronx and moved to the suburbs of Warwick, New York. “He started smoking weed,” she recalled. “I started noticing little things.” She took out a second mortgage and sent David to the New York Military Academy in Cornwall, New York, hoping the discipline would curb any trouble before it really began.
It seemed to work, and David graduated and enrolled at Penn State University’s rural Hazleton campus in northeastern Pennsylvania, in the foothills of the Pocono Mountains. He pitched for the baseball team and proudly wore his team’s ring.
She went to work patrolling the streets of the Bronx every day, seeing streets lined with people in the throes of drug addiction, and she thanked God her son had dodged that fate.
‘The sky cracked open’
After arriving at Hazleton, Andino began selling OxyContin. It was easy money. He’d buy pills for US$4 ($7) apiece and sell them to his fellow students for US$30 ($50).
Curious, he tried one and quickly became hooked. He loved the feeling it gave him.
After two years, he crashed and dropped out.
He moved back home. Velazquez had given birth to a daughter while he was in high school; she was just 4. His mother worried about his impact on the girl, but he felt like his mother was overreacting. “She became too strict,” he said. “She cut me off. I became more desperate. I sold my baseball ring.”
Like millions of other prescription-drug abusers, he became unable to afford his habit, and switched to a cheaper high: heroin.
“It was like the sky cracked open and God grabbed me,” he said. “That’s how it feels.”
He’d always been so neat and clean growing up. Now he was a mess – his clothes, his hair, his room.
Velazquez felt trapped, afraid of the possible fallout at work. “I couldn’t tell the job my son was an addict,” she said. She noticed some of her jewellery had gone missing. Blank cheques had been removed from her chequebook.
Then, in 2010, came an anonymous note stuck to her door: “It said, ‘What you suspected about your son – you’re right. He is on heroin,’” she recalled reading.
She demanded he take a urine test on the spot. He refused. “Somebody must have heard the commotion,” she said. “The cops came.”
That was a tipping point. “I need you out of here,” she told him.
Heroism and darkness
Andino ended up in Harlem, couch surfing, crashing wherever. Haunted by the story of how his father died, he only used clean needles from a needle exchange. It provided everything he needed. Cooker, cotton, needles, tourniquet.
For a while, he stole beer from a Target store on the Upper West Side and sold it to bodegas on East 116th and Lexington. The bodegas put the beer in their coolers with their own inventory.
He called home when he needed cash between beer heists.
He taught his mother how to wire money through Western Union. She would give the store a password that Andino would need to recite in order to pick up the cash.
Something easy to remember: their pet dog.
“Phoebe,” he’d say in the Western Union outlet, collect his money and hurry to his drug dealer.
Months passed since he had left home. Then years. To be a police officer and an addict’s mother was to live in a lonely, deeply uncomfortable place.
There were plenty of people suffering from addiction in her precinct of the Bronx, and she realised her son was that person, somewhere. She hadn’t seen him in years, despite being just miles away, and seemed to hear from him only when he needed money. She wondered if the police treated him as rudely as her fellow officers did people on their beats.
“Cops are like, ‘You stink, you smell like shit,’” she recalled. “The cops thought it was funny. What’s funny about that?”
She’d wake up every morning and open the inmate locator on the city’s jails website. Mostly no hits, but every now and then, his name would appear.
He’d call her. “Mom, I’m arrested.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“I have ways.”
If he wasn’t in jail, she had one more website to check: the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, a nationwide site for unidentified or unclaimed bodies in medical examiners’ custody.
“I know it’s a little dark,” she said.
In April 2018, while on patrol, Velazquez and her partner were flagged down by a distraught woman, screaming that her baby was choking in their apartment. The officers ran up and found an 8-day-old infant, turning blue.
Velazquez performed back slaps and chest compressions while her partner, Daniel Wynohradnyk, called ahead to St Barnabas hospital. Officers blocked intersections along their route. The baby recovered at the hospital.
“The best feeling I’ve ever had as a cop of 20 years,” Velazquez told a television reporter later.
Other officers gave her a nickname. “They called me ‘the baby saver’.”
The days wore on. The baby saver awoke each morning and looked for her son’s name in the city’s morgue.
A shoplifter’s prime
In the prime of his shoplifting, Andino was stealing every morning and many evenings. He had a regular buyer on West 116th St, he said, who resold his stolen items to customers.
They loved the smell-goods, the cosmetics, the makeup. Clothes, detergents, Downy Unstopables. Fifty of those would bring him US$15 ($25). Seconds of work. He could sound like a stock boy as he described the store. Peppermint soaps. Collagen – he could sell all the collagen he could carry.
He had many other paying customers, too. Families. They wanted Ninja blenders, espresso machines, air fryers. The whole neighbourhood knew him. “I’m having a big barbecue,” someone would tell him.
He’d go to a Trader Joe’s on Broadway and West 72nd St and steal food – 20 or 40 steaks in about the time it takes to read this sentence. The store’s perpetually long line, winding through the aisles, made his work easier. “They’re all covering me,” he realised. He grabbed sockeye salmon, lamb chops, racks of ribs. He stole bacon to sell to the breakfast carts in Harlem.
He lived in a rented room with his girlfriend, who was also a thief. She liked Duane Reade.
He warned that she should diversify. “You can’t keep going in the same store the same way at the same time,” he told her.
And yet, he ignored his own advice. Yes, he spread his stealing around several stores, but he always came back to the Target in Tribeca.
It was sometime in 2023 when a new manager at the store caught him stealing. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, his usual routine, as he kept sweeping items into his bag.
She was different. “She was like, ‘Him,’” he said. “‘He comes every day. We want him.’”
On October 6, 2023, a police officer arrived and handed Andino a Target trespass notice. The document formally banned him, under the threat of arrest, from entering the store. He ignored it.
October turned to November. The new store manager was watching, quietly keeping a list of dates and items stolen. When the amount of the items passed US$1000 ($1700), he could be charged with felony grand larceny instead of petit larceny, a misdemeanour.
That day arrived on November 12. It seemed like officers were waiting for him at the top of the escalator.
Stores respond with locks
In September 2023, Target closed a store in East Harlem, blaming shoplifting losses. It had been there 13 years, and was one of several stores the chain closed at the same time. Just blocks away, Andino was reselling stolen Target merchandise on East 116th St.
That same year, the National Retail Federation released a report dedicated to “organised retail crime,” as it is known in the industry. It said that in 2022, retail theft resulted in industry losses of US$112.1 billion, compared with US$93.9b the previous year.
A flowchart tracked the various ways that thieves were known to operate. Some stole from stores and fenced the goods to be shipped overseas. Some resold the goods to “local business (e.g., bodega)”.
It was Andino’s playbook. Wittingly or not, he had flowed into the streams of national shoplifting patterns. His 90-second strategy, perfected over months, was common practice.
The industry has a name for people like Andino: boosters.
Boosters are often “individuals with economic or social vulnerabilities such as the homeless or those with substance issues,” the industry report read.
Target announced tougher policies. In July, it said that the threshold for security guards to “stop” a theft had dropped from US$100 worth of stolen goods to US$50, according to Bloomberg. It is unclear what a “stop” entailed, as employees are still told not to physically intervene in a shoplifting.
Some in the industry believe the shoplifter-as-boogeyman is overblown, a scapegoat for losses in more mundane areas of retail, like bookkeeping mistakes that add up.
But shoplifters, seen on surveillance video smashing and grabbing on the nightly news, are easier to vilify, said Brand Elverston, an industry consultant and a former director of asset protection at Walmart.
“Supply chain errors, simple bookkeeping errors, accounting error, process error – no one’s going to watch a video about that,” he said.
Target, like many stores, has increased the amount of goods it keeps behind locked plastic cases in recent months.
“To be clear, we do not like locking up product,” Brian Cornell, CEO of Target, told Yahoo Finance. “But we like running stores, and we want to keep our stores open. We want to make sure they’re safe.”
‘One last hurrah’
Elizabeth Velazquez arrived at Ulster County Correctional Facility on a weekend morning in October. It would be the first time she had been in the same room with Andino since 2016, when she was still a police officer.
Sitting in the prison’s large visitation room, with barred windows offering limited views of the trees and mountains outside, she worried about what he would look like.
He came in, and his eyes found her table. He didn’t look as bad as she feared. He had put on weight. But his teeth were a wreck, broken in the front.
Velazquez hugged him and wouldn’t let go. She cried and said, “You look so good,” over and over. “I love you so much. Please come home.”
They sat. She told Andino he needed an inpatient facility to kick drugs for good. No more street life.
He said he needed to go to Harlem to find his girlfriend and bring her with him.
“You can’t go back there,” she told him. “You can’t fix someone else until you fix yourself.” She watched his face.
“OK, OK,” he repeated, but to her, it seemed like he was just saying that.
A week later, Andino, now 35, sat down in that same room, now all but empty, for an interview. He spoke of his addiction and his stealing. He said he regretted that life, what it cost him. He didn’t see Target as a real victim. It was the same thing he used to tell the employees there: it wasn’t like he was stealing from their homes.
So how do you stop people from shoplifting?
“You’d have to get drugs out of the picture,” he said. But more practically: “Bigger security guards. I see a big security guard, I don’t go in.”
He has a parole hearing coming soon.
“I want to go into a programme,” he said. “But I’m not going to lie. I’m going to go into Harlem,” to find his girlfriend, he said. “I’m going to have one last hurrah. And I’m out.”
Would he steal during that last visit?
“If I have to,” he said.
His favourite Target has changed since he has been behind bars. Practically every single one of the items he described having stolen is now locked up behind plastic barriers. Aveeno, Sensodyne toothpaste – actually, all the toothpaste. CeraVe lotion, Cetaphil cleanser, makeup, makeup remover. Row after row.
When he arrives, he’ll find that almost everything is out of reach now. And he will see his reflection in the plastic, staring back.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michael Wilson
Photographs by: José A. Alvarado Jr and Joshua Bright
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
