One of the increasingly alarmist trends is what the industry calls "Organized Retail Crime," usually perpetrated by groups of five to seven crooks who know a certain area intimately, and who are well versed in store security procedures.
He has sued people who were close to Madoff and likely knew he was a crook.
"If anyone knew he was a crook, they wouldn't have supported him," Markowitz says.
She then added, "We all know that a crooked operation is only rarely, if ever, just a little bit crooked".
The difference is that as we root for Affleck's character to carry it off, we know that he is a crook who beats up people for the fun of it and puts the woman he loves in grave danger.
Koch was known as somewhat of a crook who greatly enjoyed the power he possessed, and who would bring violence to his enemies.
It's a variant of the old argument for picking a police chief who knows what the crooks are up to, which is what F.D.R. did when he appointed Joseph Kennedy, a notorious Wall Street speculator, to be the first chairman of the S.E.C.
This did not stop Miami police from arresting him four times for vagrancy, a law that had been rewritten to allow anyone known or suspected of being a "crook [or] gangster" to be arrested on sight.
Recently, when I spoke to Kincaid, who has written for this magazine, she said, "He's always been a crook and everybody knows it.
And it has an equally small-time moral, best expressed by Shoeless Joe himself: "Dealing with crooks, you know, you get crooked every way".
