He stole 130 laptops, police suspect, from 24 different companies in five states.

For over 12 years, Eric Almly travelled the country committing robberies, according to the St. Petersburg Times. Once he even called his victim and taunted them from a payphone.

And one typically audacious heist was in March when he snuck into the national headquarters for Outback Steakhouse. He "mingled with company staff until they left for the day," the Times reported. Then he stuffed 11 laptops into two shoulder bags and walked off.

"No, he wasn't the new guy" the Times joked in an earlier article. A security guard stopped him. He told the guard he was going jogging, and the guard let him exit the parking lot. Back in his $1800-a-month beach condominium, nearly 300 miles away, he erased the laptop hard drives, then sold them on the internet.

His eBay profile shows a 99.4 percent satisfaction rating. ("GREAT SELLER!! SUPER FAST SHIPPING!! WOULD BUY FROM AGAIN! A++") He's been a member since June of 2003, sending 35 packages to Taiwan just in 2004, according to the Times, with other buyers in Latvia and the United States. Over the years he'd pocketed at least $20,000.

In a remarkable article, the Times assembles a profile of the serial thief. Not all of his laptops were stolen — some were just being re-sold — but many were the loot that he'd taken from office park heists. "He just figured that a corporation like Outback would just kind of write it off, absorb the loss and move on from there," Tampa police Detective Larry Brass told the paper — and across the country, hapless office workers acknowledged that they remembered seeing him.

In Phoenix, legal assistant Miriam Foulk said she bumped into Almly one evening in 2002 while preparing to leave her law firm. If he had shown fear, she might have thought he was up to no good. Instead of sprinting away or reacting violently, though, he "just smiled, didn't say anything and kept going" deeper into the office.

Three laptops were missing the next morning…

Over time he'd left a nationwide trail. In Milwaukee they called him "the Khaki Bandit," according to the Time, and in Colorado they circulated leaflets with his picture. If a building required an electronic access card, he'd simply follow another employee into the building. He was acquitted of one home burglary charge in 1992, and then arrested within a week for three more break-ins (while being a suspect in another eight).

In 1993, he received a one-year work farm sentence. And after taunting his victim from a payphone, the victim dialed *69, and Almly was arrested, eventually receiving a three-year prison sentence for four separate incidents. He received another two-year sentence in 2005, but at least twice when criminal proceedings were initiated, he simply failed to show up, later fleeing from bench warrants.

The fateful day came when Almly met a woman on a beach in Miami who lived 285 miles away in Tampa. "The pair hit if off," the Times reports, and during a three-day visit in April, he robbed the Outback headquarters. Then one sunny Friday, police knocked on his door. They'd subpoenaed the records from eBay after receiving a tip.

What about the Outback computers had tripped him up? "Nine of its 11 stolen laptops had been equipped with security software that transmits a stolen computer's physical location the moment a thief accesses the Internet with it."

His girlfriend told the newspaper that "He's rethinking his life right now." In his apartment, police found laptops stolen from three different cities. His photo led police to also i.d. him in surveillance footage of robberies of 13 laptops from FedEx, six from Burger King, and several from two other corporations. But ultimately it's just one small victory in the face of a much larger problem. According to the Times two million laptops were stolen just in 2004.

"Of those, 97 percent were never recovered."

Entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 4:44 pm under Internet.  Print This Post