Crime

The most-robbed Walgreens in the nation saw its latest thefts captured on camera — in the middle of a journalist’s televised report on the rampant crime at the San Francisco store.

CNN Senior National Correspondent Kyung Lah was at the store on Monday night to report on the store’s latest anti-theft tactic — chaining the doors to its freezers shut — when she spotted a shoplifter walking out with merchandise in his hands.

NEW: The Walgreens at 16th/Geary in San Francisco has chained up the freezer section ⛓️

Workers said normally shoplifters clean out all the pizza and ice cream every night. They’re usually hit 20x a day. The whole store is virtually locked up. @KPIXtv

h/t @greenbergnation pic.twitter.com/lfFWmkLWdo

— Betty Yu (@bett_yu) July 18, 2023

Kenneth Law, 57, is accused of selling over 1,200 kits to vulnerable people contemplating suicide around the world. Law’s alleged offerings, displayed on now-defunct websites with names like “Imtime Cuisine” and “Escape Mode,” ranged from sodium nitrite, a lethal substance which can kill humans in small doses, to flow regulators and gas masks.

An April investigation by the Times of London shoved Law into the international spotlight, leading to his eventual arrest by Peel police. The Times investigation caught Law on tape advising how to use his products, as well as assuring the reporter that “many, many people” had died taking sodium nitrite. Law later confirmed those details in-person when the Times spoke with him outside a post office in Mississauga.

Retail crime is driven by reduced penalties and organized gangs, not economic hardship.

A recent video on Twitter showed a supermarket employee tussling with a shoplifter who had filled her bag with items. As the employee pulled the bag from her hand, she cried, “I have to feed my family!” That’s a common refrain from shoplifters these days, echoed in media headlines proclaiming that people have turned to stealing to put food on the table—despite a U.S. social safety net that includes $185 billion in spending on food stamps and other nutrition-assistance programs. In truth, America’s exploding shoplifting problem predates our current economic difficulties. Much of the stealing, store owners and security experts say, has less to do with putting food on the table than with a rise in organized theft, and it’s having a particularly adverse effect in cities where criminal-justice reforms have made it easy to get away with.

Investigators uncovered a massive walk-in vault — but no soundproof room — during their ongoing search of suspected Gilgo Beach killer Rex Heuermann’s Long Island property, police said Monday.

Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison called the 12-day search of Heuermann’s Massapequa Park property “fruitful,” saying he hoped cops will be able to wind down their work either Tuesday or later in the week.

And not just in areas where crime is commonplace.

Much of the criticism of the changes in the criminal-justice system has been focused on the decriminalizing of errant behaviors and the lack of serious responses to the gun violence that plagues many urban black neighborhoods. What is largely ignored is the breakdown in lawful behavior in other less life-threatening areas: car and traffic violations, fare-beaters on public transportation, and car and store thefts.

Cops have reportedly found a soundproof room in the basement of accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann’s home where they believe at least one woman may have been killed — and brought in cadaver dogs, a backhoe and ground-penetrating radar to try to locate possible bodies and “trophies” in his back yard.

New York State troopers and Suffolk County police have been scouring the accused killer’s family home, yard and storage sites for the 11 days since the hulking architect was charged in the deaths of three women and publicly named a prime suspect in the fourth — all part of the infamous 13-year-old “Gilgo Four” slayings.

The Montreal Mafia was once the apex of organized crime. There are few clearer signs of a desperate mob than messy public fighting

There was little prospect Francesco Del Balso would age gracefully. Or even at all.

Men who were hunting him understood this when they placed a quarter-million-dollar bounty on his head. Police realized it too, after searching his home and finding a pistol stashed and ready.

Del Balso knew his peril best of all.

They called it the polygon.

Using phone records and a sophisticated system that maps the reach of cell towers, a team of investigators had drawn the irregular shape across a map of tree-lined streets in the Long Island suburb of Massapequa Park. By 2021, the investigators had been able to shrink the polygon so that it covered only several hundred homes.

In one of those homes, the investigators believed, lived a serial killer.

In April 2011, just months after the bodies of four women were discovered buried near Gilgo Beach on Long Island’s South Shore, several experts and criminologists put together a sketch for The New York Times of the characteristics they expected to see in a suspect.

The women, wrapped in burlap and buried within a quarter-mile of each other in an area where the remains of 11 people in total would eventually be found, were probably killed by a white man in his mid-20s to mid-40s, they said. He is married or has a girlfriend. He is well educated and well spoken. He is financially secure, has a job, owns an expensive car or truck, and lives or used to live near where the bodies were found.