Ashley Madison: It Wasn't Me (audio)

You can also listen to this audio file by clicking on the Play Button 

One sneaker at a time

Never has buying, selling or stealing a pair of sneakers in Brooklyn been this complicated.

The cat-and-mouse tactics between sneaker store managers and sneaker thieves have escalated to new levels of complexity. Theft prevention has changed just about everything involved in the transaction of buying a pair of sneakers — even the simple act of trying them on for size.

As a result, thieves have new tactics and are resorting to stealing the lowest-hanging fruit: the unguarded, single sneakers on display shelves.

“They come  here and they steal a left shoe,” explained Dayshorn Mickens, 24, a manager at a Foot Locker on Broadway, standing in a room lined with shelves of left-foot shoes. “Let’s say it’s a 9 and a half. They go to Jimmy Jazz” — another sneaker store two blocks away, where the display shoes are all right — “and steal the right.”

Over at Jimmy Jazz, a clerk, Wesley Mejias, 22, confirmed the unlikely bond between the two stores. “That’s true,” he said. “They’ll get the right here and the left at another store.”

Mr. Mickens started working at the Bushwick Brooklyn store a few weeks ago after a stint at the flagship on West 34th Street near the Empire State Building. Things were different there.

“They have actual security guards and detectives.They wear regular clothes,” he said.

In Bushwick, Mr. Mickens, uniformed in the store’s standard referee stripes, sees himself as manager, salesman, security guard and detective, all in one. He lives in the neighborhood and knows who the thieves are.

“It’s Brooklyn, so the streets talk,” he said. “They know I work here.”

Once upon a time, stealing a pair of sneakers was a play in two acts: 1) try on sneakers, and then 2) run away.

Mr. Mickens and other managers at Foot Locker and Jimmy Jazz stores have a rule to prevent their sneakers from running out the door.

When a customer wants to try on a pair of sneakers, a clerk will hand over the left one. If the customer wants to try on the right sneaker, the clerk will ask for the left one back before handing the right over. The customer never wears two new sneakers at the same time in the store.  

“If we give them both,” Mr. Mejias said at Jimmy Jazz, “they run with it.”

If the customer decides to buy the sneakers, the clerk carries them to the register, handing over the full pair only after payment.

Of course, there are exceptions, and the managers use discretion.

“The one-shoe policy is cool, but you can’t discriminate against every customer who comes in here,” Mr. Mickens said at Foot Locker.

Mitch Lazarre, 20, a store associate, said “A customer is going to only be focused on product. A guy who wants to rob will focus on other people.”

Other strategies are employed to beat the one-shoe policy.

On June 9, just before noon, a group of young men entered the Foot Locker in Bushwick. A different manager, Jay Barns, 20, greeted them, and they asked him to bring out several pairs of shoes to try on. “Ten or 15 people,” he said. He was suspicious and told them he didn’t have those sizes.

“One of the boys was like, ‘This is nothing funny. I’ve got money. We really need these sneakers.’ ” So Mr. Barns relented and brought the shoes up.

He handed the men left shoes. One said, “I’ve got two feet,” Mr. Barns recalled. “I’m telling them no, this is part of Foot Locker procedure. ‘Give me back the left and I’ll give you the right.”

As other customers became impatient, Mr. Barns saw members of the group stuff some T-shirts into a bag and head for the door. Flustered, he handed the men the right shoes.

The men — many wearing one sneaker and carrying the other — ran out the door.

“I was outnumbered,” Mr. Barns said.

Mr. Mickens is constantly vigilant and works hard to not treat everyone who enters the store like a crook. “Some people who come in here,” he said, “want to try on shoes.”

from The New York Times

Americans studying abroad (audio file)

You can also listen to the audio file by clicking on the Play Button

A Manhattan Fortuneteller

Priscilla Kelly Delmaro’s Times Square. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times

The 32-year-old man from Brooklyn , who is not named in court documents, told his story in a written statement prepared with Bob Nygaard, a private investigator, and presented to detectives at the Midtown South precinct early May.

In summer 2013, the man had a good job in marketing, with an office in New York, some support staff and a growing list of connections. But he had met a woman in Arizona named Michelle. He was in love. She was not. “The girl didn’t want to be with me, and the girl had categorically made that clear,” he wrote in the statement.

On Aug. 24, 2013, he walked across the Williamsburg Bridge and wound up in front of 253 West 43rd Street. The neon sign in the window read “Psychic.”

Ms. Delmaro greeted him and assured him that he and Michelle were “twin flames,” but that negativity was keeping them apart. “Spirits talk to me,” she said, according to the man’s statement, but there was a price. He paid her $2,500 and, after a second visit, $9,000 more.

A month later, in September, Ms. Delmaro told him she needed diamonds to protect his energy. He paid $40,064 for a ring from Tiffany’s and gave it to Ms. Delmaro, who promised he would use it as an engagement ring someday, the man said.

Michelle lived in Los Angeles. Go to her, Ms. Delmaro said.

He went. He texted Michelle. I’m on a boat, she replied, but let’s meet tomorrow.

“I was ecstatic,” he wrote. They met and talked and made plans for that night. But she backed out.

“She felt I had been acting strange,” he wrote.

Ms. Delmaro told him the trouble had come from a spirit that was stalking him. She needed $28,000, then $28,000 more. Michelle had grown cold so suddenly, he thought, that the spirit explanation sounded right, and so he paid.

A month later, Ms. Delmaro suggested they perform a fake funeral ritual to make the spirit think the man was dead. Another $40,000.

When that didn’t work, Ms. Delmaro said she needed a time machine to go back and cleanse his past. When the man balked, she said a suitable watch would do the job, and gave him a list of choices. He said he selected one of the cheaper ones: a rose gold Rolex for $30,000.

In December, Ms. Delmaro said that they had to lure the spirit over a bridge of gold in the other realm, so that it would become trapped. She said $80,000 would buy an 80-mile bridge.

Sold.

Ms. Delmaro, it should be noted, promised to return most of the money when her work was done. By year’s end, the bill had reached more than $320,000.

The spirit was crossing the bridge, “although very slowly,” the man wrote. Then Ms. Delmaro said they needed a second bridge, for Michelle’s spirit, and it needed to be 10 miles longer than the first one.

“I thought to myself, ‘I have the money just sitting in the bank,’ ” the man wrote, paying out $90,000.

Then he made a devastating discovery. On Feb. 17, 2014, he pulled up Michelle’s Facebook page and read the most recent post.

Michelle was dead. She had been for nine days. The man, shattered, told Ms. Delmaro. “I told you she had evil spirits” she said. “They killed her”.

“Delmaro then told me she was going to reincarnate Michelle,” the man wrote. The new Michelle “wouldn’t be exactly” like the old one, but her spirit would be placed into the body of a 31-year-old woman.

One year and many payouts passed. By then, Ms. Delmaro said she was working so many hours on his behalf that she had no time to tell fortunes and was behind in the rent. He sent money — even borrowing $28,000 from a colleague that he guaranteed with his future earnings — until he finally ran out.

“I’m broke”, he told Ms. Delmaro after selling his car and borrowing from friends and relatives in addition to the colleague.

The new Michelle was in Los Angeles, she told him. Go find her.

He met a woman in California that Ms. Delmaro later said was the new Michelle. But the woman was 24, not 31, and Michelle did not seem to be inside her.

He had lost his apartment. He had had enough and returned to New York. He sought out Mr. Nygaard, and they went to the police in May. Bank statements were given to detectives: He was out $713,975.

Ms. Delmaro and her companion, Bobby Evans, 27, were arrested on May 26 in a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. A steakhouse. They were charged with grand larceny and remain in jail.

Their lawyer, Jeffrey Cylkowski, denied the man’s allegations.

The man recalled his disappointment upon meeting the new Michelle. “This caused me to start thinking,” he wrote.

edited from The New York Times