"Sticky Fingers, Confessions of a Marginally Repentant Shoplifter"

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Ever wished you could walk into a store, find an item you wanted, and not pay for it? Tom Bentley wished with you. But then he did it, and for years. Bentley spent the early ’70s stealing goods from stores and selling them at his high school. Tape players, tapes, albums, clothes, liquor. What turned into a virtual swimming pool of liquor. He stole it, sold it, gave it away, came back for more. Sticky Fingers examines, with humor and only occasional pangs of guilt, what drove a nice Catholic boy from the suburbs of Southern California to fill his pockets, bags and cars with ill-gotten goods. The book explains the techniques by which he evaded capture, the techniques that didn’t help that evasion, and the techniques which he used to wrestle with his wobbly conscience. He mostly got away with it. Mostly. A parallel to a boyhood Arséne Lupin meets Shoplifters, the book grabs you by the collar through Bentley’s conduct with the cops, and his commerce with his collaborators. And with all those unwilling victims. (Hey, the statute of limitations has run out.) PS By the way, remember Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book? Don’t even think about it.