The bait was apparently too tantalizing to pass up. In the early morning darkness, an Amazon package vanished off the stoop of an ornate Greenwich Village townhouse. Whoever took it was likely unaware that a tracking device was placed inside. It showed that, in a matter of hours, the package took a long, pretzel-shaped route through the Holland Tunnel to Newark, New Jersey, then back through Manhattan, following the contours of the 2 train into the North Bronx.
Roughly 14 miles away in South Richmond Hill, Queens, a security camera captured the moment a hooded figure in a blue surgical mask swiped another Amazon box from the porch of a modest two-story home in South Richmond Hill. This time, a tracker showed the item making a circuitous journey down the commercial corridors of nearby Jamaica, Queens before landing blocks from where it was stolen.
Package theft has become a ubiquitous fact of life that — according to criminologist Ben Stickle, who studies the phenomenon — appears to be getting more organized, and more bold.