Books in Brief: Stealing

Stealing, by Mark Lipman, edited by Robert Daley (Harper’s Magazine Press, 160 pp., $6.95).

Billions of dollars’ worth of goods and services are disappearing from the factories, warehouses, and retail outlets of American industry. Those responsible, modern-day ripoff artists, shoplifters, dishonest employees, and vandals, have turned many corporations into staggering, economically anemic entities. In Stealing, Mark Lipman, who has spent the better part of five decades championing the free market economy and protecting the inventories and reputations of the American corporate structure, has given us an inside look at this rape of the American marketplace. The author takes us into a Chicago meat-packing plant being picked clean by a ring of corrupt truckdrivers and packers, a Bayview, Arkansas pants factory devastated by thé wholesale looting of its inventory, a Carter, Tennessee furniture outlet ravished by one of its own vice presidents—methodically explaining even the most unbelievable of these capers. There are no sacred cows in Lipman’s world. He exposes and condemns any number of contemporary Pontius Pilates: police agencies which refuse to recognize the seriousness of crimes against corporate properties, prosecutors who place economic crimes at the lowest of priority levels, judges who blatantly parole criminals with as many as twenty previous marketplace offenses, and union officials who coddle those among their membership who have openly admitted to pilfering. Stealing deserves to be read.

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Salvatore Stazzone

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Stealing, by Mark Lipman, edited by Robert Daley (Harper’s Magazine Press, 160 pp., $6.95).

Billions of dollars’ worth of goods and services are disappearing from the factories, warehouses, and retail outlets of American industry. Those responsible, modern-day ripoff artists, shoplifters, dishonest employees, and vandals, have turned many corporations into staggering, economically anemic entities. In Stealing, Mark Lipman, who has spent the better part of five decades championing the free market economy and protecting the inventories and reputations of the American corporate structure, has given us an inside look at this rape of the American marketplace. The author takes us into a Chicago meat-packing plant being picked clean by a ring of corrupt truckdrivers and packers, a Bayview, Arkansas pants factory devastated by thé wholesale looting of its inventory, a Carter, Tennessee furniture outlet ravished by one of its own vice presidents—methodically explaining even the most unbelievable of these capers. There are no sacred cows in Lipman’s world. He exposes and condemns any number of contemporary Pontius Pilates: police agencies which refuse to recognize the seriousness of crimes against corporate properties, prosecutors who place economic crimes at the lowest of priority levels, judges who blatantly parole criminals with as many as twenty previous marketplace offenses, and union officials who coddle those among their membership who have openly admitted to pilfering. Stealing deserves to be read.