Crime Fighter Turned Crime Writer

Spartan Spotlight: David Rey ’03

David Rey ’03 wrote a memoir about fighting organized retail crime in New York City.

By Madeline McMahon

Photograph: Courtesy of David Rey

When the personal trainer asked David Rey ’03 why he recently decided to join New York Sports Club, he didn’t get the answer he was expecting. As Rey nonchalantly recounted the violent physical altercations he experienced on a near-daily basis at his job, the stunned reaction he got gave Rey an idea he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of before: He should write a book.

Since studying criminology and criminal justice at UT, Rey has managed security in New York City at some of the most high-end, high-volume retail stores in the world, including Tiffany & Co., Brooks Brothers and Bloomingdale’s. But it was his time at Macy’s Herald Square, known as the largest store in the world, that inspired his memoir, Larceny on 34th Street, published by Dorrance Publishing Co.

Starting out overseeing the “undercover store detectives,” Rey — fresh from working security at Tiffany’s, where one can hear a pin drop — had no idea what lay ahead of him at Macy’s. “After my first day on the job, people were taking bets on whether or not I was coming back,” says Rey.

The sheer size of Macy’s flagship store allows for more shoplifting than other stores, with about 10 different exits. Large groups of shoplifters often came together, and Rey worked like a quarterback to dispatch detectives to each exit before they got away. Sometimes it got ugly: “Legitimate shoppers are seeing fights at this entrance, fights at that entrance. Not only that but sometimes we’d have to carry them all the way back to the holding area,” said Rey.

When Rey and his team caught the biggest recovery of their careers, they realized a few short moments later that a loss three times bigger occurred earlier in the day. They picked up a young girl, no older than 14, carrying more than $10,000 of merchandise.

“We’re all patting ourselves on the back, tooting our own horn. Then when we talked to the girl, we found out that was her fourth time in the store that day,” says Rey. “She said she already shoplifted the same exact things that she got caught with.”

That’s because “organized retail crime” gets creative. So creative that most of the general public doesn’t even know it exists. “Nobody really knows much about this underworld network of people who shoplift for a living,” says Rey. “I wanted to be the first to put that out there and bring it to the public’s attention.”

From recruiting children to anti-sensor technology in purses, the complex schemes that Rey reveals in his memoir are likely only the tip of the iceberg of organized retail crime. Luckily for fans of crime dramas, Rey is working on a second book about his time at Bloomingdale’s, where he focused on investigating internal financial crimes.

“It was high drama, high adrenaline, every single day, all day,” says Rey.