Now Rothmans keeps its front doors locked at all times, letting people in only after they knock. The culprits got away with $20,000 worth of merchandise. Ken Giddon, co-owner of Rothmans, a menswear shop near Union Square, said his store was hit twice by the same crew of boosters in a three-week period in 2021. While everyone was standing there freaking out about it, I was just sitting there like, Okay, and …” “A couple of weeks ago, someone came in and stole four pairs of Cartier glasses, and those frames are $1,200 apiece. “It took me a very long time to not give a shit,” the employee said. “We call it selling sunglasses and fighting crime,” said a jaded Sunglass Hut employee who claimed he’d been threatened by a booster wielding a knife and, on another occasion, a pair of scissors. According to the Retail Industry Leaders Association, nearly 76 percent of stores said that shoplifters had threatened the use of a weapon against a sales associate. These thefts have exacted a psychological toll on store employees. In April, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board declared that America was battling a “ shoplifting epidemic.” The NYPD says that retail-theft complaints have gone up 66 percent since 2019, and the problem isn’t confined to New York: 54 percent of small-business owners polled in a recent survey reported a rise in shoplifting with 23 percent claiming their stores were robbed on a daily basis. Rubinov’s operation thrived in an era that tabloids have labeled a golden age of shoplifting. When he saw a particular product was selling well, he would instruct boosters to steal more of that item. Rubinov’s staff would then clean the packages of any tags or labels that made them look stolen and list the goods at a substantial discount on his eBay store, Treasure-Deals-USA. Boosters were getting robbed by their fence. Usually he paid seven to ten cents on the dollar. Inside the office, boosters would unload their bags so Rubinov or one of his employees could look over the haul and calculate its retail value. (Rubinov settled that case only to stiff his own attorney.) In 2015, an Ecuadoran immigrant sued Rubinov, alleging the pawnshop owner had paid him just $1.67 an hour to wear a sign outside New Liberty Loans. In addition to his reputation for hoovering up merchandise, Rubinov was known for being cheap. He favored Louis Vuitton boots and Gucci shirts and often started his mornings sipping coffee on 47th Street, watching hawks steer customers to pawnshops.

Because nobody was as greedy as Roni.”Ī 42-year-old from Queens, Rubinov had the soft, handsome features of a club promoter and the sleepy eyes of a father of five.

“There were other operations out there, but nobody did it like Roni. “He was doing that shit like he was operating a completely legitimate business,” said Jerard “Italiano” Iamunno, 39, who boosted for Rubinov on and off for years. Sometimes there would be a line because boosters came back two or three times a day. Up the stairs, past Rubinov’s pawnshop, through a room cluttered with gold testers, money counters, and precision scales, and up a back staircase, they would arrive at Rubinov’s second office, a room he kept for the bounty his legion of thieves brought him. Cosmetics in tow, boosters would head to 47th Street near Sixth Avenue, where they were greeted by New Liberty Loans’ soot-stained marquee: WE BUY GOLD & 💎. Occasionally, some poor sales associate or “loss-prevention specialist” would attempt to scare the culprit, but company policy often prevented their doing much more. On any given day, they would head to Duane Reade or CVS or Rite Aid, sweep an armful of creams - L’Oréal, RoC, No7 - into a pillowcase, and leave. Most often, though, boosters sold Rubinov cosmetics pinched from pharmacy chains. Once, a booster offered him a box of pens he’d found in a trash can. Rubinov wasn’t the only fence who would buy stolen goods and resell them online, but he had a reputation for taking pretty much anything a shoplifter could bring him: Rolexes, baby formula, condoms, boxed chocolate, prom dresses, K-cups, Amazon gift cards. Just about any booster hanging around the Diamond District a few years ago knew Roni Rubinov’s pawnshop, New Liberty Loans.

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