Never Mind What’s Been Selling, It’s What You’re Buying

On the 30th anniversary of the 1977 blackouts, the City section buys a first-person account on the bootstrapping ethic of looting — otherwise known as “stealing”:

In Spanish Harlem back then, when I was 11 and living in a tenement on East 111th Street and Lexington Avenue, too many families were hungry, and too many fathers were unemployed and angry. And so when the lights went out that evening three decades ago this Friday, many of us were going to take what we wanted, and what we wanted most was what we needed.

Lucky G’s father did not have a criminal record, but like the looting housewives, he understood the needs of the neighborhood. I don’t remember his real name, but I knew his 12-year-old son Gilberto. Everyone called him G until one day Yvette Sanabria, one of the most beautiful girls in Spanish Harlem, fell in love with him, and from that day on he became known as Lucky G.

During the blackout, Lucky G’s father and his brother hot-wired a van to carry stuff away. But unlike most of the looters, who went after jewelry or electronics stores, Lucky G’s father and uncle followed the housewives and made for supermarkets.

If the housewives hadn’t gotten there yet and broken through the gates, Lucky G’s father would smash the hot-wired van right through supermarket windows. They loaded the van with entire aisles of Pampers, including the diapers in the stock room. They hit most of the supermarkets in Spanish Harlem, stopping only long enough to dump their booty before heading to their next target, hoping the housewives hadn’t yet cleaned out the place.

The following morning, there was not a diaper to be bought in the neighborhood. Word spread quickly as to who had Pampers and who didn’t. For weeks Lucky G’s father sold Pampers at discount rates. He made a killing.

But Pampers are just a gateway to Yemeni-esque ransom plots:

In the days following the blackout, I took a cue from Lucky G’s father and the other looters and began searching for an opportunity. There were no jobs for adults, let alone for a scrawny wannabe tough guy like me, so when the chance arrived in the name of dog-napping on the Upper East Side, I took it.

During the blackout of ’77, the Upper East Side was left unscathed. With a bustling economy of its own, it was the destination for the mothers of many of my friends, who woke up every morning and took a bus to the Upper East Side to clean apartments for next to nothing. As a teenager, I’d see Upper East Siders walking down Fifth Avenue, young girls in summer dresses, young men in khakis and crisp white shirts. I dreamed of living their lives, in their buildings, in their neighborhoods. I wanted to know where they were going. What doorman building did they call home? What smoothly operating elevator carried them to lofty and wonderful heights?

Back then, I felt that the only advantage I had over the Upper East Siders was that I sensed their fear that the damage we had done to our neighborhoods during the blackout we would one day do to theirs.

Yet I knew one of their weak spots: Furry creatures they treat like children. As good as gold. We’d call our dog-napping forays hunting. “You want to go hunting?” I’d ask a friend. We would take a laundry bag and a folding knife with a six-inch blade and roam the swanky streets of the Upper East Side. We were on the lookout for small dogs leashed to lampposts while their owners were running an errand or inside a cafe drinking coffee. We would unleash the dog or cut the leash, stuff the dog in the laundry bag and run as if the devil were behind us.

We would take the dog home, feed him, walk him, groom him, and two or three days later, we would prowl the street where we had stolen the dog in the first place, looking for the reward fliers. When we found them, posted to a bus stop or lamppost or the window of a beauty salon, we would return to Spanish Harlem to get the dog and my 6-year-old cousin. I would practice the word “aimlessly.” My cousin’s job was to be the cute, innocent child who had become attached to the dog.

Then we would all dress up, comb our hair and return the dog. The dog usually lived in a doorman building, and the owner was usually a woman.

“Lady, is this your dog?” I would say. “We found him aimlessly wandering around. My little brother loves him, but when we found out he was lost, we brought him back.”

The woman would be so happy and would reach out to take the dog from my cousin, who in turn would hold onto the dog and start crying as if his mother had died in his arms.

“I’ll get you another one, one that looks just like that one,” I’d tell him. And right then and there, the woman would fork over the reward.

I ran this scam to get money to buy stuff I wanted — Pumas, jeans — and sometimes, if there was money left over, I’d help pay the phone bill. I ran this scam with precision and skill.

The period during the blackout and its aftermath was the most dishonest in my life, but I will never shy away from what I did in El Barrio.

In the ’70s, the city was a cold place, but its residents were far from defeated. In the ghettos we waited for daylight, and when that first luminous ray broke through the crack on the wall, like the restless people that built this city, we saw an opportunity and we took it.

We built this city on stolen pets!