Blood money is money or some sort of compensation paid by an offender (usually a murderer) or his family group to the family or kin group of the victim.

Blood money is, colloquially, the reward for bringing a criminal to justice. A common meaning in other contexts is the money-penalty paid by a murderer to the kinsfolk of the victim. These fines completely protect the offender (or the kinsfolk thereof) from the vengeance of the injured family. The system was common among the Scandinavian and Teutonic peoples before the introduction of Christianity, and a scale of payments, graduated according to the heinousness of the crime, was fixed by laws, which further settled who could exact the blood-money, and who were entitled to share it. Homicide was not the only crime thus expiable: blood-money could be exacted for all crimes of violence. Some acts, such as killing someone in a church or while asleep, or within the precincts of the royal palace, were “bot-less”; and the death penalty was inflicted. Such a criminal was outlawed, and could be killed on sight.

• In Islamic terms, Qisas can in some cases result in blood money being paid out to the family of victims. The amount varies from country to country and from case to case.
• In Japanese culture it is common to give blood money or mimaikin to a victim’s family. Such was the case with Lucie Blackman’s father who accepted £450,000 as blood money for the murder of his daughter.
• Under the Korean legal system, it is common for those accused of serious crimes such as rape to offer blood money (hapuigeum, 합의금) to the victim, and if accepted then the perpetrator is usually excused further punishment. It is often brokered by the police. Despite being common practice, its use in high-profile cases does sometimes result in protests.
• In the Somali people’s customary law, which they call Xeer (a polycentric legal system developed indigenously), blood money is issued in the event of libel, theft, physical harm, rape and death, as well as to supply assistance to relatives of the injured party.
• In the Christian Bible, the term is used to refer to the thirty pieces of silver Judas Iscariot receives in exchange for revealing the identity of Jesus Christ to the forces sent by the Pharisees and/or the Sanhedrin. After the crucifixion of Christ, Judas returns the payment to the chief priests, who “took the silver pieces and said, ‘It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood.’”
• “Shanghaiing” was the practice of the forced conscription of sailors. Boarding masters, whose job it was to find crews for ships, were paid “by the body,” and thus had a strong incentive to place as many seamen on ships as possible. This pay was called blood money.

Crime began to plummet in the United States more than 15 years ago, defying all predictions. It did so for nearly a decade. It happened in every part of the country and in every category of crime. While the rate of decline has leveled off in recent years, to many this social achievement has meant that the country need not worry about crime anymore: The problem has been solved. That view is wrong. In reality, the problem simply exists in two places most Americans (and the media) don’t often bother to look: in crime-ridden sections of cities where minorities live, and in the overcrowded prison system that gives America the world’s highest rate of incarceration. The good news masks an ever-worsening tragedy in criminal justice.

The black homicide rate across the nation is six times that of the white rate. Chicago’s Washington Square neighborhood is poor and close to 100 percent black. The city’s Hyde Park neighborhood is affluent and mostly white. The homicide rate in the first is 26 times that of the second.

The most compelling explanation for the different crime patterns for blacks and whites is the effect of the criminal justice system’s breakdown on poor young black men, who have continued to commit crimes at a high rate, including violent ones, especially against blacks, and who regard the system as dramatically unfair and unworthy of their respect. The rate of imprisonment among white men is the highest it has been in American history, yet the rate is seven times higher among black men.

America’s prison system is now studied largely because of its failure. The prison population is unsustainably high—petty offenders are locked away with hard cases, overcrowding makes conditions dangerous and unhealthy, and financial costs to states are through the roof. The last time the country significantly reduced them, however, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the rate of crime skyrocketed. Neither option is acceptable. So what do we do?

No, this isn’t a post about how women are lying hussies out to ruin the lives of good men with wrongful rape accusations. If that’s what you were expecting, you’re definitely reading the wrong blog (actually, come to think of, stick around; you may learn something).

What I’m talking about is this: Living in a rape culture, women are acutely aware of the type of rapes–and the type of victims–that are taken seriously. And the type that aren’t. The “good” victim (the only kind that counts in the minds of many, many people) is attacked by someone she doesn’t know while dressed “modestly” and not under the influence of alcohol/drugs or engaged in “risky” behavior. She’s an upstanding citizen with no history of criminal activity, mental illness, or conduct outside the norms of mainstream society.

Thanks to prevailing rape mythology, many people also have very definite ideas about what happens before, during, and after a “real” rape. Real rape victims want no sexual contact of any kind with their attackers and make this crystal clear right from the start. When attacked, they don’t just say “No;” they scream, fight, yell for help, and/or try to escape. Ideally, the victim will duke it out with her attacker to such an extent that she is left with obvious physical injuries. After the rape, she will be visibly distraught and in tears, but this will not prevent her from reporting the attack right away. In the days and weeks following the assault, she will spend a lot of time in the shower and be too traumatized to appear to function normally.

Some rapes do indeed happen like that; most don’t. And the more a rape departs from this script, the harder it is for the victim to be believed and taken seriously. She didn’t fight or try to escape? She must’ve wanted it. She wasn’t crying or visibly upset right after the rape? She’s probably lying about being attacked. She was seen laughing and seemingly having a good time just days after being raped? It couldn’t have been that bad.

Rape victims know this. Realizing that many people won’t understand why you acted in a way that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions of “how rape victims act,” or worse, knowing that many people will automatically disbelieve you because of your background or even blame you for being attacked brings some rape victims to the conclusion that there’s only one way they’re going to see their rapist punished: lie.

Most of the lies rape victims tell revolve around their use of alcohol or drugs, their relationship to the perpetrator, their reason for being in the place the rape occurred, their behavior before/during/after the rape, or their background. Virtually all lies are told to make oneself appear more like the rape culture’s idea of the “good” or “worthy” victim and/or to make one’s assault more closely resemble the rape culture’s “real rape” script.

Competent detectives and prosecutors know that victims may think they must lie to see perpetrators brought to justice and try to impress upon them the importance of telling the truth. They may attempt to reassure victims that telling the truth is absolutely essential and won’t prevent the case from going forward. And that’s true–to a point. Prosecutors must win their cases in the same rape culture the rest of us reside in, not in some alternate universe. Even if the prosecuting attorneys don’t subscribe to any rape culture myths themselves (which, of course, the victim won’t know), the DA’s office has finite resources, and they’re not going to bring a case they don’t think they can win. Too many skeletons in the victim’s closet and a rape that departs significantly from the “real rape” script, and they may conclude that their limited time and resources are better spent elsewhere.

Even if the DA’s office is prepared to take a chance on a rape victim who doesn’t fit the rape culture’s “worthy” victim ideal, that’s not the end of the victim’s quest for justice. The vast majority of criminal cases are plea bargained, but rapists are less likely to accept a plea agreement and more likely to roll the dice with a jury trial, if the victim or other aspects of the case don’t meet the rape culture’s standards for “worthy” victims and “real” rape.

There’s a case from the late 90s that I will always remember because it was the first time in my life that I got the message that someone might actually give a damn about junkies raped while buying drugs. Drug dealers raping female addicts is a very common occurrence, and most people, including most cops, believe women have only themselves to blame when they’re raped while trying to score drugs.

That’s why I was enormously proud of the prosecutor who went ahead with the case against a drug dealer accused of raping a female addict, even though I realized that the drug dealer being a known serial rapist with two prior rape convictions probably had a lot to do with that. In any event, the drug dealer decided to reject a plea bargain and take his chances with a jury, and the judge ruled that it would be too prejudicial to the defense for the jury to be told about the guy’s priors. However, the victim was a great witness, completely honest and forthright about the rape and her drug addiction. She was such a strong witness, I was actually surprised when the jury came back with a “not guilty” verdict. After the acquittal, a reporter told the jury foreperson about the drug dealer’s previous rape convictions and asked if having that information would have made a difference.

Without missing a beat, the jury foreperson replied that it wouldn’t have made a difference because the jury didn’t doubt that the victim was raped by the defendant; however, they were “concerned that she was there to buy drugs.” In other words, she didn’t deserve to see her rapist convicted because she’s a drug addict. Unfortunately this case isn’t an aberration. Even if a rape victim is able to convince cops, prosecutors, and a judge or jury that she was definitely raped, she may still be denied justice if she isn’t deemed a “worthy” victim or her rape didn’t happen according to the “real rape” script. Is it any wonder then that victims in those situations may feel they have to lie?

I bet you were wondering when I was going to get around to the new developments in the DSK case. As you have probably heard, the sexual assault case against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn is unraveling because the alleged victim lied. Not about being sexually assaulted, mind you, but about her background and also about what she did in the immediate aftermath of the attack. She now says that instead of reporting the assault to her supervisor right away, she initially cleaned another hotel room, then returned to DSK’s empty suite and began cleaning, and only then did she report the attack.

I’ve talked to several people who think this is damning evidence against her, but if we weren’t living in a rape culture, it really wouldn’t be. It’s not at all unusual to be in shock following a sexual assault and to continue going through the motions. I know ’cause I’ve done it. In fact, if the whole thing was a setup and she “seduced” DSK with the intention of accusing him of sexual assault (either in hopes of being paid off to drop the charges or awarded sizable damages in a civil suit following the criminal conviction), you can bet that she would have run crying to her supervisor right away! This sounds like a classic case of a victim lying about some aspects of her rape so they won’t be at odds with people’s very limited idea of what “real rape” looks like.

Apparently she also misrepresented her income to qualify for subsidized housing, lied on her taxes to qualify for a bigger refund, and lied on her asylum application about being gang raped (after being instructed to do so by a man working on her asylum case; she had been raped in Guinea, but not in the way she described to prosecutors). Additionally, there are some indications that she may be involved in a drug dealing and money laundering operation, and a man described as her boyfriend is serving time on a drug charge. All of this makes her a “bad” victim, the kind of woman men can rape with impunity. She did not want to be that kind of woman. And so she lied.

She represented herself to police and prosecutors the way she believed she had to in order to be considered a “worthy” victim. A victim deserving of sympathy and justice. And so she became the pious Muslim refugee who survived unspeakable violence in her home country before escaping to the US where she was granted asylum. The devoted mother who has neither time for nor interest in any kind of personal life outside of raising her teenage daughter. The hardworking poor person who plays by the rules and somehow manages to get by on wages too low to get by on.

I expect that the DA’s office will drop the charges against DSK any day now. Sure, they still have the DNA evidence to prove that sexual contact took place, but since DSK’s attorneys are going with a consent defense (as defense lawyers always do when there’s DNA evidence), the victim’s testimony is essential. And her credibility is shot. So that’s the end of the case.

And that’s how it goes in a rape culture. First, we make sure women understand that only a few types of rape count and only a few types of victims matter, so those who don’t conform to those narrow criteria feel they must lie if they don’t want their attacker to get away with the crime. Then, when the lies are discovered, we tell rape victims that they are now no longer credible and it’s their fault the case against their attacker must be dismissed. Works out well, doesn’t it? For rapists, that is.

By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
NY Times Published: April 18, 2011

It is no surprise that prodigious helpings of murder, betrayal and honor — or, some might say, the lack thereof — have been on the menu, figuratively speaking, at a mob trial in federal court in Brooklyn. The trial, after all, marks the witness-stand debut of the first official boss of one of New York’s five Mafia families to testify for the government.

What has been a surprise to some, however, is that it can seem as though a real menu is required — just to keep track of all of the culinary allusions by the former boss, Joseph C. Massino of the Bonannos. References to food, meals, cooking and the restaurant and catering businesses, along with some choice gastronomic metaphors, have kept coming like so many courses on a tasting menu. They appeared at times to pile higher and higher, as if a groaning board had replaced the prosecution and defense tables in the well of the courtroom.

To those who follow the mob, the close connection between this ethnic underworld and the culinary arts practiced by Italian-Americans is not news. Indeed, momentous events in mob history have happened in and around restaurants: Carmine Galante, a cigar still in his mouth, was shot dead on the patio at Joe & Mary, a restaurant in Brooklyn; Joey Gallo was killed in a fusillade in Umberto’s Clam House as he bolted for the door, only to die on a Little Italy street; and Paul Castellano was gunned down at rush hour amid Christmas shoppers outside Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan.

And some of the most memorable moments in film that for some have come to represent organized crime are similarly gastrocentric. There are the phrases “Leave the gun; take the cannoli” and “Try the veal, it’s the best in the city” in “The Godfather” movie. And there is Paul Sorvino, playing a mob capo in “Goodfellas,” wielding a razor blade to slice garlic for his sauce.

Of course, Mr. Massino has acknowledged cooking up quite a few misdeeds of his own. He is appearing as a witness against a subordinate, Vincent Basciano, a former acting boss known as Vinnie Gorgeous, who is on trial for the murder of a Bonanno associate, Randolph Pizzolo. Mr. Massino continued his appearance on the stand on Monday.

Still, while there has been a sense that the gun and the knife — as the Mafia’s tools are called during the secret society’s initiation rites — have been center stage, the knife and the fork have been fighting for equal billing, perhaps unsurprising given Mr. Massino’s girth, not to mention some of his job titles other than boss: restaurateur and sandwich truck operator.

For example, when he listed his past crimes last week, food came into play. The prosecutor, Taryn A. Merkl, asked about Mr. Massino’s corruption of a prison guard in the late 1980s when he was being held in a federal jail in Manhattan.

“What did you bribe the prison guard to do?” Ms. Merkl, an assistant United States attorney, asked.

“He was bringing in food for us, cold cuts, shrimp, scungilli,” he replied.

More than a decade later, food was again the focus during a conversation he secretly recorded in a different federal jail with Mr. Basciano, the subordinate against whom he was testifying. “I’m belching, I’ve got a lot of heartburn, a lot of agita,” Mr. Massino complained to Mr. Basciano. “I’ll tell you one thing, that sausage wasn’t bad, bo.”

“Yeah?” Mr. Basciano replied, “I left it in the room, I didn’t eat it.”

“It wasn’t bad, I swear to God,” Mr. Massino continued. “I put a little mustard — it wasn’t bad. I had no dinner last night. I had peanut butter, I couldn’t eat. Tonight, I won’t eat, it’s fish.”

The kitchen, in a way, also provided some protection. In the early 1990s, after he served nearly six years in federal prison for racketeering, Mr. Massino’s parole prohibited him from associating with other members of organized crime families or felons and required that he hold a steady job. So he worked as a consultant at a Long Island company called King Catering.

There, he said, he developed a unique way to hold meetings and talk mob business with his underboss Sal Vitale — his brother-in-law, who was also a consultant at the company — while still avoiding law enforcement scrutiny, including physical surveillance and bugs.

“Did you talk Bonanno family business at King Catering?” Ms. Merkl asked.

“If we had to, yes,” Mr. Massino replied.

“Where would you speak to him?” she asked, referring to Mr. Vitale, who preceded Mr. Massino into the ranks of mob turncoats.

“In the walk-in box,” he said.

“Why the refrigerator?”

“To avoid bugs,” he explained tersely.

Mr. Massino’s four days on the stand before Judge Nicholas C. Garaufis in United States District Court in Brooklyn also provided a survey of sorts of a few of the city’s eateries, but the focus was on criminals and crimes at the establishments, not their fare.

He mentioned Caffe on the Green in Bayside, Queens, the scene of a shooting involving Mr. Pizzolo; Napa & Sonoma, a steakhouse in Whitestone, Queens, where Mr. Pizzolo had an outburst of sorts; and Via Oreto on First Avenue in Manhattan, which Mr. Basciano said he successfully claimed as a Bonanno family protectorate, over the objections of the Genovese family.

In addition to his work as a criminal, Mr. Massino held a number of jobs and owned a number of businesses that revolved around food.

His first jobs, as a youngster in Queens, were working in what he called a “food store” without elaborating and in a butcher shop.

As a young man, he operated a sandwich truck, known by the less-than-appetizing name “roach coach,” which he would drive to factories and other businesses to sell coffee, cakes and sandwiches. Eventually, he operated a catering company that served other sandwich trucks.

At the time of his arrest, Mr. Massino owned a restaurant called Casablanca, in Maspeth, Queens, where he could often be found. Menus at the time of the 1996 grand opening, however, did not advertise his association with the establishment.

Instead, there was a front man.

“Your Host: Alfred,” the menu informed diners. Alfred, however, had a few sidelines himself, according to Mr. Massino, one of which was serving as a soldier in Mr. Massino’s crime family.

The mark strolls along a city sidewalk, fresh out of the bank, his wallet in his back pocket, blithely unaware that he’s stumbled into the clutches of a practiced jug troupe. Someone shouts, “Look out for pickpockets,” and when the mark hears it, he feels for his wallet. It’s still there. A steer positioned across the street sees this and wipes his brow, signaling to an attractive stall walking toward the mark. She bumps into him, and while the startled mark apologizes for his clumsiness, the hook sweeps noiselessly past with a balletic grace and makes the dip, slipping out the wallet, dropping it into a newspaper and passing it to a second stall, who pulls out anything of value and drops the wallet in the trash. All four troupers promptly disappear into the crowd. It might be an hour before the mark knows what happened, and even then he may never be sure whether it was a pickpocket, or plain carelessness, that cost him his money.

Pickpocketing in America was once a proud criminal tradition, rich with drama, celebrated in the culture, singular enough that its practitioners developed a whole lexicon to describe its intricacies. Those days appear to be over. “Pickpocketing is more or less dead in this country,” says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, whose new book Triumph of the City, deals at length with urban crime trends. “I think these skills have been tragically lost. You’ve got to respect the skill of some pickpocket relative to some thug coming up to you with a knife. A knife takes no skill whatsoever. But to lift someone’s wallet without them knowing …”

Marcus Felson, a criminologist at Texas State University who has spent decades studying low-level crime, calls pickpocketing a “lost art.” Last year, a New York City subway detective told the Daily News that the only pickpockets left working the trains anymore were middle-aged or older, and even those are few and far between. “You don’t find young picks anymore,” the cop told the paper. “It’s going to die out.” A transit detective in the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, which operates the Boston area’s bus, commuter rail, and subway system, concurred via e-mail. “Pickpockets are a dying breed,” he wrote. “The only known pickpockets we encounter are older, middle-aged men; however, they are rarely seen on the system anymore.

The decline of dipping on the rails is extraordinary. Subways were always the happiest hunting grounds for pickpockets, who would work alone or in teams. There were classic skilled canons—organized pickpocket gangs—at the top, targeting wealthier riders, then “bag workers” who went for purses, and “lush workers” who disreputably targeted unconscious drunks. Richard Sinnott, who worked as a New York City transit cop in the 1970s and ’80s, also admiringly recalls “fob workers,” a subspecies of pickpocket who worked their way through train cars using just their index and middle fingers to extract coins and pieces of paper money—a quarter here, a buck there—from riders’ pockets. “They weren’t greedy, and they never got caught,” says Sinnott. Bit by bit, fob workers could make up to $400 on a single subway trip; then they’d go to Florida in the winter to work the racetracks. Many of the city’s pickpockets trained elsewhere, “and if they were any good, they came to New York,” Sinnot says, with a touch of pride. “In the subways, we had the best there were.” Pickpocketing remained fairly rampant for years. Glenn Cunningham, who was part of an elite NYPD anti-pickpocketing task force in the 1980s and ’90s (he currently handles security for Robert De Niro’s hotel and film festival), says that pickpocketing in spots like Times Square was “out of control” at that time. “I made tons of arrests with those guys. We were like cowboys.”

That was then. In a 2001 story, the New York Times reported that there were 23,068 reported pickpocketing incidents in the city in 1990, amounting to nearly $10 million in losses. Five years later, the number of reported incidents had fallen by half, and by the turn of the millennium, there were less than 5,000. Today, the NYPD doesn’t even maintain individual numbers on pickpocketing. “It’s hardly a problem anymore,” says a department spokesperson. The FBI’s definition of the crime is more inclusive than what we would consider a classic pick—the bureau defines it as “the theft of articles from a person by stealth where the victim usually does not become immediately aware of the theft,” according to a spokesman—but even broadly defined, that category of larceny-theft has been falling sharply for years.

Experts offer a few explanations for the gradual disappearance of pickpockets in the United States. Crime nationwide—from pickpocketing to homicide—has been dropping since the mid-1990s. People carry less cash today, and thanks to enhanced security features, it’s harder for thieves to use stolen credit or debit cards than it was in the past. And perhaps most important, the centuries-old apprenticeship system underpinning organized pickpocketing has been disrupted. Pickpocketing has always perpetuated itself by having older hooks—nicknamed “Fagins,” after the crime boss in Oliver Twist—teach younger ones the art, and then absorbing them into canons. But due to ratcheted-up law enforcement measures, including heftier sentences (in some states, a pick, defined as theft from the body of another person and charged as a felony regardless of the amount taken) and better surveillance of hot spots and known pickpockets, that system has been dismantled.

This is not the case in Europe, where pickpocketing has been less of a priority for law enforcement and where professionals from countries like Bulgaria and Romania, each with storied traditions of pickpocketing, are able to travel more freely since their acceptance into the European Union in 2007, developing their organizations and plying their trade in tourist hot spots like Barcelona, Rome, and Prague. “The good thieves in Europe are generally 22 to 35,” says Bob Arno, a criminologist and consultant who travels the world posing as a victim to stay atop the latest pickpocketing techniques and works with law enforcement agencies to help them battle the crime. “In America they are dying off, or they had been apprehended so many times that it’s easier for law enforcement to track them and catch them.”

But even if Fagins abounded in the United States, it’s unclear whether today’s shrinking pool of criminally minded American kids would be willing to put in the time to properly develop the skill. “Pickpocketing is a subtle theft,” says Jay Albenese, a criminologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It requires a certain amount of skill, finesse, cleverness, and planning, and the patience to do all that isn’t there” among American young people. This is “a reflection of what’s going on in the wider culture,” Albenese says. If you’re not averse to confrontation, it’s much easier to get a gun in the United States than it is in Europe (though the penalties for armed robbery are stiffer). Those who have no stomach for violence can eke out a living snatching cell phones on the subway, which are much easier to convert to cash than stolen credit cards, or get into the more lucrative fields of credit card fraud or identity theft, which require highly refined skills that people find neither charming nor admirable in the least. Being outwitted mano a mano by a pickpocket in a crowded subway car is one thing; being relieved of your savings by an anonymous hacker is quite another.

Is it wrong to be nostalgic for pickpocketing? Perhaps, but it’s understandable. Pickpockets have long been admired, even celebrated, in American culture, invoked as a sort of shorthand for the honorable thief, a figure of great skill, panache, and even good old-fashioned American enterprise. In Timothy Gilfoyle’s book, A Pickpocket’s Tale, 19^th-century pickpocket and con man George Appo is known as a “good fellow,” who unlike other predators in New York’s savage Five Corners neighborhood, “avoided violence, employing wit and wile to make a living.”The Professional Thief, an influential 1937 tome written by an actual crook and edited and annotated by criminologist Edward Hardin Sutherand, brought the inner workings of pickpocket canons to the public. A breathless 1960 Popular Science article did Sutherland and company one better, breaking down the crime and likening the hook to “the matador, the star of the show, stepping in only for the kill.”

Nowhere is this matador more favorably represented than in film, where aspiring wires are often shown practicing their hand on dummies whose coats are adorned with bells or alarms. In 1946’s Heartbeat, a piece of treacle in which a 35-year-old Ginger Rogers inexplicably plays a teenaged French street urchin, the Fagin is a refined gentleman who insists on everyone in his class using proper English. The brutish pickpocket in 1953’s Pickup on South Street, by Samuel Fuller, shows his heart of gold by aiding the fight against communist agents. More recently, in Ocean’s Eleven, Steven Soderbergh establishes both Matt Damon’s Linus Caldwell and George Clooney’s Danny Ocean as nonviolent good fellows by having the former expertly pick a pocket on the CTA, only to be himself picked by Ocean immediately after.

Examples are many, but it’s 1973’s Harry in Your Pocket that perfectly embodies both the sex appeal of classic pickpocketing and the whiff of nostalgia that clings to it. Harry, a suave master wire played by James Coburn, himself trained by a Fagin from the unspecified “old country,” recruits two young people to his canon. Inside his swank penthouse in Seattle, he explains the deal: “No whoring, no strong-arm. I have rules! Lots of rules!” His stalls act fastidiously, dress impeccably, travel in style, and stay in only the finest hotels. But there are hard times ahead. Society is changing. Harry’s aging partner Casey is losing his edge, misty with nostalgia for the old days. “There’s no sense of craft anymore,” he tells a promising young stall. “Nowadays youngsters haven’t got it, no patience, no discipline, they don’t want to spend the time to learn. So they … hit some poor old lady over the head and grab her purse. … It shouldn’t be allowed!” But there’s something even more troubling afoot. “Credit cards are not going to go away,” Harry tells Casey. “Like anything, money will disappear.”

“Do away with money?” cries Casey. “That’s ridiculous!”

“It’ll happen.”

“Communism! It’s criminal!”

The movie was right on both counts, even if its timing was off. Pickpocketing continued to flourish for two decades after Harry’s day, but extinctions take a long time. Even earlier, in 1960, Popular Science had older hooks already grousing that the next generation will be the one that finally casts the vaunted skill into disuse for good: “The old ones die off,” the writer explained, “and the newer generations lack the gumption and application it takes to learn the business.”

There are still a handful of pickpockets working cities, and some old-fashioned troupes on the road, according to Bob Arno, hitting big sporting events and smaller towns with “lax judicial environments” and police less adept at spotting dippers. They’ll do it a while longer, if they don’t make the jump into fraud or catch a felony rap. But by the looks of it, the day may not be far off when the fabled American hook of yore, stooped and trembling of hand, walks that subway platform one last time, pausing for just a brief instant to drop your empty wallet in the trash before calling it a day.