The hand on my shoulder wasn’t wholly unexpected, but nonetheless a shock.

“Son, I think you’ve got something that doesn’t belong to you,” came a soft, firm voice.

Heart pounding, I turned, while backing away several feet. Middle-aged guy, suit jacket but no tie, looking expressionlessly at me. I had no thought, just electric fear.

I pitched the bag underhanded at him, hard, and it hit him somewhere around the hip, before he could get his hands up. The heavy 8-track player inside, designed to sit on a table with home stereo equipment, crashed to the sidewalk, shattering something.

I ran. I ran with all I had, despite him shouting, “Stop, wait, hey, stop!”

He might have started running too, but I wasn’t going to turn around, and I couldn’t hear his footsteps in a busy parking lot off a big suburban street. I was 16, a basketball player—that old guy wasn’t going to catch me. But maybe he’d get into a car. Maybe he’d call the cops. Maybe there were cops already at the shopping center.

I ran harder.

It was evening, my clothes were dark. I zig-zagged into the residential neighborhoods close by, pounding down a couple of streets, glancing back, still running, to look. Nothing. Nobody on the tree- and car-lined street, quiet except for the crickets chirping—and the ragged wind of my breathing. I slowed to a jog, then a fast walk, and headed back to my own neighborhood, maybe a mile-and-a-half away.

My heart was starting to slow, and I realized how sweaty I was. My collar was damp, the t-shirt sticking to my back. But I was safe, I was OK.

And I knew I’d steal again.

I knew I’d steal again because the shoplifting thing was working out so well for me. I knew I’d steal again because I’d been seriously shoplifting for my work—yes, I regarded it as a job of sorts—for more than six months now, and the money I was making from selling vinyl LPs, cassette decks and other miscellany to high school friends was turning into small but steady income.

I knew I’d steal again because my circle of friends was impressed with my skills. Some had even inquired about teaching them my techniques. Some were even making special orders.

But more than all that, I knew I’d steal again because I liked it.

This is the story of a many-year period between adolescence and early adulthood where a middle-class Catholic boy—that being me—made it his business to steal objects small and big from stores small and big, with consequences small and big. This is the story of knowing better, of being raised “better than that,” of twisting ethical logic so that my thefts were “liberation” and “sticking it to the man.”

This is the story of a kid in the 70s who discovered he had a knack for five-finger discounts, so he went about searching for those “discounts” wherever he went. I was an industrious scoundrel, moving from records and small electronics to brief- cases (yes, a teenager with briefcases), clothes and then into liquor. Deeply into liquor.

This book covers my early days of lawlessness, stealing candy from liquor stores as a barely-see-over-the-counter kid all the way to stealing my first semester’s worth of books at college. It assays my evolving techniques and props I used in the work, brushes with the law and the courts, my thefts while traveling across country (and across a neighboring country) and finally coming round—after some bursts of conscience—to wondering how I could have been such an idiot.

Oh yeah: my mom finally found out. Forty years later.

Join me on the ride, but just in case, keep your hands on your wallet.

You need to know this: It all started with sugar.