Two weeks ago, police showed up at Barbara Chapin’s North County home. “I didn’t know why they’d be there,” she says, “until they told me they’d found my mail in a car they stopped.”

Thieves had snagged Chapin’s outgoing mail—specifically, an entry form into the Pebble Beach Classic Horse Show for three of Chapin’s horses. A personal check accompanied the form.  

“[Investigators] told me it was obvious they were trying to wash the information off of my check,” Chapin says.

That’s how it works, according to Monterey County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Terry Kaiser, who heads up the unit that investigates mail theft countywide.

“They’re using alcohol and washing a check of its information,” he says. “If you let it sit in the alcohol, the ink will come off. The alcohol then evaporators, and they fill out the check to themselves and cash it.”

Kaiser says mail theft is the area’s most common crime, accounting for as much as a third of all reported crime in Monterey County.

“I’ve been here for 36 years,” Kaiser says. “And I’ve never seen anything grow so fast. It started in the late ‘90s and has just skyrocketed to the number one crime in this county.”

Monterey County now has a US Postal Service Inspector—a gun-toting sworn federal officer—on duty with local cops three days a week.

Inspector Steve Scheld, a Postal Service spokesperson, says mail theft has grown so rapidly that law-enforcement jurisdictions up and down the state have postal inspectors on their teams.

“It’s necessary now more than ever,” Scheld says.

Specific numbers of mail theft crimes are all but impossible to come by. In Monterey County, like most counties across the US, mail theft is lumped into a broader category of simply theft—the same category used for such things as stolen bicycles and handbags.

Mail theft only ends up formally reported and tracked when it involves large volumes of mail—a mail truck heist, an entire blue drop-box, or mass mail slots like those found in apartment complexes. Still, even those numbers speak to the fast-growing trend.

Scheld says that in 1999, the Postal Service experienced 3,425 “attacks” on bulk mail nationwide compared to 8,254 bulk-mail thefts in the last formal reporting year of 2003.

An attempt at bulk-mail theft was made at Chapin’s husband Don’s Hidden Canyon development off of Crazy Horse Canyon in Prunedale just a few months ago. Criminals broke into every one of the locked boxes scavenging for mail. All mailboxes were empty, but the attempt and resulting vandalism cost Chapin thousands of dollars.

On another occasion a few years ago, thieves took outgoing mail from the Chapins’ personal mailbox.

“I had no idea,” Barbara Chapin says. “Then people were calling and saying we didn’t pay our bills. We didn’t know what they were talking about. Then we figured it out: They were taking Don Chapin Company checks and trying to cash them. Then the stupid idiots endorsed them with their own name on the back and got caught.”

Kaiser says outgoing mail in a box with a red flag up is a huge red flag for crooks.

“They just drive up and down streets looking for the flags,” he says, “make a quick stop and snag the mail.”

Thieves are looking for just about anything: government checks, credit cards, birthday cards with a little cash, anything to aid in identity theft, and personal checks that can be washed of ink and rewritten or duplicated using check-making programs bought in any office supply store.

Despite ramped-up efforts to stymie mail theft, criminals are getting away with it at alarming rates. That worries cops because they say mail theft is at the root of a much bigger problem.

“It’s easy to get away with because of this attitude that it’s a white collar crime, and that there’s no real victim,” Kaiser says. “Instead, everybody’s on the bandwagon of gangs and drugs and violence. But the mail theft, the identity theft, that’s funding the bigger operations, the gangs and the drugs. It’s a huge circle, and [mail theft] sits in the center. It’s where crooks get their cash to operate.”

THEWEEKLYTALLY
1	Number of private toll roads west of the Mississippi; 17-Mile Drive in Pebble Beach takes the title. Source: Monterey County Convention and Visitors Bureau.