What we've seen here in Orange County, especially in Seal Beach, is these organized retail theft crews come in, they get arrested, and the first thing they say to us is, aren't you just gonna give me a ticket?

It's like, no, you're going to jail.

You committed a crime.

And that's something that I mean, the look of shock on their face is.

Predictable because they're accustomed to just walking free with a ticket.

Yeah, and Seal Beach is different.

And what's that famous phrase you came up with, Don't steal and Seal.

I'm Jonathan Walton and this is Queen of the Con Season six, The California Girls, Episode eight, Don't Steal in Seal.

This is a bonus episode where I sit down with a veteran cop who was thrust into the world of retail theft after a fellow cop framed him for a crime he did not commit.

This is my eye opening conversation with Sergeant Jordan Marakian.

I'm Sergeant Jordan Raccan Seal Beach Police Department.

Been a police officer for over twenty years.

I've worked for the Laguna Beach Police Department and I started my career as a police officer in San Diego.

I have a unique background.

In two thousand and six, when I was just what we call a baby cop, I was wrongfully terminated.

Ooh, and that happens sometimes in law enforcement.

You get accused of something and you have an agency that maybe over ealous, and they immediately terminate you.

In my case, I was accused of stealing fifty five dollars from a person, which everyone knew it didn't happen.

I knew it didn't happen.

I don't even know the details, but that just sounds so dumb, like, why would you if you're going to steal steal fifty five thousand, why would you steal fifty five dollars?

Well, candidly, there's a little bit more to it.

I was up for promotion and the gentleman that I was up for the promotion against happened to work in internal affairs.

So the best way to eliminate your competition is to get rid of them.

Wow.

And it was a huge It was a huge deal back in two thousand and six, and I got my job back and you were cleared.

I was one cleared.

But what God to do that to someone?

It's so messed up it is, but it happens.

I'll tell you, it happens a lot in police work.

It's a it's a very strange thing that happens when you're somebody that rocks the boat, or you're somebody that maybe up for a promotion.

It's a very competitive, cutthroat industry.

So when I was wrongfully terminated, I went to work for the Home Depot as a lost prevention officer, And so I spent seven months waiting to get my job back, walking up and down the aisles of Home Depot looking for shoplifters, and I very quickly learned that retail theft is a huge deal.

I mean, just to give you an example, the store that I worked at, this is one Home Depot store.

They lost on average every year two million dollars one store.

That one store, Oh my god.

In each store it's called shrink and each store has an allocated amount that there that's okay for them to lose if they go over that, people like me at the time lost prevention could lose our jobs.

So there was a lot of pressure to arrest people and recover property.

Now there are some theft crews out there that use things like booster bags, which a booster bag is like it's a shopping bag essentially, So like I walk into Target with Target bags and I put Target merchandise in those.

Bags, so you give the illusion that it's paid for merchandise because you have a Target bag, right.

And then there are other more sophisticated operations, like we have Romanian theft crews, and I specifically say Romanian because nine times out of ten they.

Are from Romania.

Yeah, from Romania, and they'll go in.

They do a lot of distraction thefts, so it's theater.

Yeah, They'll they'll have like one person distracts the employee while the other two steal the goods.

Sometimes they'll they'll come in and one of them wist, slip and fall, and everybody attends to that person while things are being stolen, long dresses or bulky clothing.

And then under the clothing they literally have like nylon bags or nylon sewn in where they can drops yeah, deep pockets, yeah, to drop stuff in.

And that's a little more sophisticated.

You don't see that as frequently as you see spash and grabs or.

Just running in, grinding in, going blit.

They have a getaway car YEP with no license plates on them.

Sidebar.

If you've listened to Queen of the Cohn season two, The OC Savior about a truly cunning con artist named Lizzie Maulder who scammed her circle of friends and associates out of nearly two million dollars using voice changing apps on her phone.

Hi, my name is Marcy.

I'm calling from Bank of America.

A fake degree from Pepperdine University.

And we know how prestigious that school is.

And a firefighter husband who gave her the appearance of legitimacy.

Her husband says he was not a collaborator.

That's a fricking joke.

Yeah, then you know Sergeant Jordan Morakian because he was the incredible detective at the time who took that scammer down.

Just the arrogance of Lizzie Moulder.

It made it easier for me to go after her because I just didn't like her.

Keep in mind, Marakian's bosses ordered him to drop the case because they weren't going to prosecute Lizzie Mulder, but Marakian refused and went over his boss's heads and straight to the Feds, and then in a truly spectacular turn of events, Marakian going rogue got connor as Lizzie Mulder, federally charged, convicted, and ultimately sent to prison.

I often fantasize.

About you, this is not going where you think it's going.

If you were the cop on duty the day I walked in to report my con artist, if instead of a guy who turned me away and told me there wasn't a crime here, if you were the guy, I think you would have taken it seriously, because it's a crazy case what happened to me.

And when I furnished them eventually with like more than two dozen other victims, ultimately they only ever filed a single felony for grand theft in my case.

They never investigated the other cases.

And I just feel like you would have done it differently.

Well, I appreciate that.

I mean, the sad reality about my profession is that, like any profession, they're good apples and bad apples.

And sometimes when you get to the rank of detective, you get two kinds of detectives.

You get the detective that is, for lack of a better word, as a pit bull and goes after everyone, and then you get the detective that wants to we call it ride the desk, meaning cost out the rest of their career.

Do is do minimal amount of work and as little work possible.

So you know, anytime somebody walks into a police station and they ask for an investigator or they ask for detectives to help, it really depends on who you end up with.

Yeah, it's a look of the draw, it really is.

It could go two different ways.

The one thing though, that Sergeant Mrakian helped me understand about the Michelle Matt case is why the California Highway Patrol, a law enforcement agency that most people associate with issuing speeding tickets and chasing bad guys on freeways, would be tapped to break up the Michelle Mack shoplifting ring.

It struck me as odd when I started investigating this case.

Why the CHP.

Why the California Highway Patrol and not the various municipality police departments or sheriff's offices.

Why the CHP, Well, California is one of the few states that technically doesn't have state police officers.

We do, which is Highway Patrol.

So the reason why the Highway Patrol investigates it is there's multiple jurisdictions involved, so you can group the cases all together under the umbrella of the Organized Retail Thefts Task Force with the Highway Patrol.

So otherwise it would be unwieldy, Right, You'd have this county and that county, that city in that town, and police and here from all these different organizations who don't necessarily do a great job of talking to each other and sharing information.

And we don't have the resources to investigate a crew in multiple jurisdictions.

And again, I hate to keep going back to the Lozy Moulder case, but out of the fourteen or fifteen victims we identified, only one was in Laguna Beach.

I just happened to for whatever reason, I wanted to go after it, you know.

And I went after her and cared, and I called the agencies that were involved.

I called agencies that had victims in their cities, and they wanted nothing to do with it.

God, that's annoying, it is.

And and you know, I won't put them on blast on this podcast, but they wanted nothing to do with it.

Now, when she was arrested, they wanted all the credit.

Wanted all the credit.

Don't dip out of a case where I could have used your help, yeah, but didn't want to be there for the photo.

Op, right, they wanted to be there for the photo op.

It fired me up, you know, rightfully, so, yeah, because you were just trying to do the right thing and put this woman behind bars where she belonged, and everyone seemed to be dropping the ball or passing the buck or not giving a fly in f.

Right, And that was two years of my life.

Yeah, and thank god, yeah, thank god he did it.

Man.

Well, I'm glad that we got one right.

After the break.

You won't believe what kinds of videos Sergeant Murkian is actually posting on his police department's Instagram page.

To some extent, I've been accused of public shaming.

Welcome back to Queen of the Khan.

Sergeant Jordan Murrakian has been making waves in law enforcement for the past twenty years.

It's a very strange thing that happens when you're somebody that rocks the boat.

The other thing Sergeant Murrakian is getting a lot of attention for these days is the unconventional social media account he created for his department that puts all the shoplifters getting busted in Seal Beach on blast.

What I want listeners to understand is you, Sergeant Jordan Morakian, have put your police department in Seal Beach on the map nationally for this social media engagement that you kind of just invented.

Like at some point you thought, what, like people hate cops, let me try to change that.

Because you've done your Instagram page on Seal Beach and now how do people find it?

Is it just at seals at Seal Beach Police, at Seal Beach Police.

It is so engaging and entertaining, and I find myself cracking up because you'll take these police bodycam videos of arrests, You'll take these shoplifters getting caught and getting arrested, and you'll you'll edit together the bodycam, the police carcam, the store video, close circuit camp, Like it's so compelling.

You make these little videos and you have like a like a like a pop song.

Sometimes they're addited to you.

Gotta fail me, You gotta fail any manu roads double heg.

And you've increased engagement in Seal Beach and turned the tide of public opinion for police in Seal Beach and now other departments call you like, hey, we want to do what you're doing.

Can you help us?

Right, how did you come up with this?

Well, that's a that's a great question, and I'm going to try and give you a short winded of an answer.

I mean, first and foremost, I have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to theft because I worked in lost prevention.

I'm an honest, tax paying citizen consumer who doesn't want to pay increased prices because other people are stealing goods.

I have a dark sense of humor, and I was lucky enough at the time that I started the platform to have a chief that trusted me, So all those things happened at the same time, and I was able to use my ability to tell a story through humor on a platform that happened to be a police department.

Right.

And I think that law enforcement agencies, candidly, I think that they felt that they always had to be very vanilla to be safe.

To be safe, don't get canceled, right, don't get canceled.

But I don't think that police departments have given enough credit to their communities.

Their communities want to see that we're doing our job and that they don't want to see us doing TikTok videos and dancing around our patrol car.

They want to see us doing our job, and they want to see the people that are victimizing these businesses.

They want to know, well, who did it.

I'm posting a clip of one of Sergeant Morakian's social media videos at Queen of the Khan on Instagram so you can see what we're talking about.

To some extent, I've been accused of public shaming and maybe maybe I am right, But you're shaming people who are stealing, correct, So shouldn't shouldn't they be shamed?

And what's shaming?

You're broadcasting their image that the security camera footage got of them stealing the thing in the store and trying to run out and you catching them.

Yeah, I mean, to some extent, i am shaming them because they should know better.

But I'm also shaming them because they're targeting us very specific thing, because they're taking advantage of these lenient laws.

And what's the narrative that we've heard in the media for years is that you know, these people are stealing to feed their families, they're stealing to you know, live, Well, you're going to have our time justifying that.

To me, when it's an organized crew that's coming in and stealing makeup and beauty supplies and things of that nature, I'm going to have a really hard time buying that right.

Because they're not stealing food to eat for themselves or stealing products to use for themselves in their lives.

They're stealing as a business to sell it to the fencer who's going to sell it to someone else.

Yeah, and they're taking that money and they're buying, you know, clothes and shoes and fancy cars.

You know.

You ask any police officer, including me, when we've arrested somebody that's stealing food because they're hungry, we end up paying for the food.

Oh wow, I mean, I would venture to say that ninety nine percent of the cops out there.

When you have someone that wanders into a store steals a rotisserie chicken, gets detained by the store, we show up and the first thing we say is, you know, why'd you steal the chicken?

I'm hungry and I have seen more police officers.

I've done it myself, reach into our pockets, pull out some money and pay for it and just say, you know what, I don't think we need to arrest this person, right, we give them a stern warning, like, hey, listen, Like you can't just steal food.

You know, there are resources available for you through homeless outreach or through you know whatever.

But when it's you know, Milwaukee drill bits and copper and power saws and old part of the operation.

It's part of a bigger operation.

Yeah, I think you're right.

Have you ever as a police officer, now not lost prevention, but just as a cop working, have you personally busted shoplifters?

Oh?

Yeah, and how does that go?

I mean, I mean I that's an everyday thing.

You mean, have I personally been in a store and arrested a shoplift or like shown up to a store because you've been called and you had to cuff them.

And we get called every day shoplifting every day.

Yeah.

So in the city of Seal Beach, we have target calls Burlington Co Factory, Marshalls, and we have an ol to Beauty, So we on a daily basis get calls for shoplifting, right, And we've developed good relationships with those stores and we've reassured them you can call us because what's happening a lot.

And we've heard this directly from the employees.

Is corporate told us not to call.

H Well, why did corporate tell you not to call?

Well, they said, because you guys won't show up anyway.

Well, what they're doing is they're they're likening us to surrounding counties that don't show up.

Sealed Beach is different.

We're different.

And I'm not saying we're the best.

That's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is.

But if you get a call from from Marshalls, hey, we caught the shoplifter.

He's in the back.

Will you come arrest him?

We're there.

Wow.

Yeah.

And and part of the reason, by the way, it's not because we're a better police department.

We work in a city where the crime rate is relatively low.

So it stands out more we have time.

Yeah, right, we're not inundated with gang violence.

Oh I get that now, you know what I mean.

You're not that busy with all the other crazy stuff happening, right, you have time to go arrest the shop lefter.

We have our share of stuff.

I mean, just yesterday we had a robbery at seven to eleven, Like at gunpoint.

No, they didn't use guns, but they went in and they threatened the clerk and it was a crew of three.

And that's actually something that's another technique is they're juveniles.

So these organized retail theft crews use juveniles to do the crime because juveniles don't get prosecuted as much as adults.

Right, they get diversion.

Yeah, we learned in season three, right, what that is a diversion program.

It's take take some classes online, and you're free to go.

Yeah, and they get released to a responsible adult.

So they don't they don't even go to jail.

They don't go to juvenile hall.

Right.

Right, I r s Johnny.

He's sixteen.

He just stole something from Target while I'm on the phone with mom.

Right, come pick up Johnny.

Right, Johnny gets a ticket and maybe he gets diversion.

Maybe not right, And your arrests as a juvenile don't affect you as an adult as much.

Right, So that's why they're using juveniles.

That's a good.

That's a good, that's a that's a smart plan.

What we've seen here in Orange County, especially in Seal Beach, is these organized retail theft crews come in they get arrested and the first thing they say to us is, aren't you just gonna give me a ticket?

It's like, no, you're going to jail.

You committed a crime and that and that's something that I mean, the look of shock on their face is.

Predictable because they're accustomed to just walking free with a ticket.

Yeah, and seal beach is different.

And what's the famous phrase you came up with?

Don't steal and seal don't steal it cheesy, but it works, it does, and it's caught on it's caught stole it from you sinceera's form of flattery, and they're using similar sayings.

They are and you're even seeing the Orange County DA Todd Spitzer has an ad campaign saying if you steal an Orange County, we prosecute.

And it's very I mean, I don't want to say that they stole my idea.

I'll tell them they stole your idea.

But you started the don't steal in seal right, brilliant.

You should have been an ad man.

And now everyone's adopting that one line to tweaking it for their purpose.

Well, and I think what I think what they're doing also is I would use the emoji of an orange for Orange County, and you're seeing that pop up on the billboards from a district attorney, Todd Spitzer.

I'm all for it, you know.

I think it's great.

When you're driving into Orange County from Mela County, you'll count at least five or six billboards that say if you steal an Orange County you will be prosecuted.

Wow, that's a good message to send.

After the break.

Sergeant Mrakians schools us on the pitfalls of getting accustomed to a.

High dollar lifestyle.

So when she'd quit bartending and became a physical therapist, she took a fifty percent pay cut.

Welcome back to Queen of the Khan.

In my conversation with Sergeant Jordan Mrakian about the whys and wherefores of professional shoplifting.

If you think about it, it's an easier and less punitive way to make quick money.

Yeah.

I mean you run more of a risk, more of a risk getting arrested selling drugs than you do walking into aulta beauty in Los Angeles County, where you know the police aren't going to respond, the employees aren't going to chase you, so I'm just going to walk in here and you can steal ten high end makeup items and make two three thousand dollars quick depending on what you steal.

Yeah, that stuff there's expensive, right, it's crazy.

So they target very specific merchandise.

And if you multiply that times ten to fifteen people, and each person, let's say, is making one thousand dollars, right, meaning they're stealing one thousand dollars worth of merchandise, let's ten to fifteen grand per day.

Yeah, that's a lot of money to lose if you're alta or any store, right.

Yeah, and especially like going in wearing a mask, wearing a hoodie, knowing the employees aren't going to chase you, knowing that the consequences, depending on the county you're in, are minimal.

It's easy money.

And you have all these online fencing operations.

Amazon is one of them.

I mean Amazon, they're trying to do their part, so they say, so, they say, but they still make money on these sales, right, So what part is that?

Right?

And that doesn't even include eBay, offer up, Facebook, Marketplace, whatnot.

There are different apps out there where you can make a quick buck.

Not to mention the swap meet.

Yeah, they sell them like a trunk at a swap meet all the time.

So a liquor store, for example, which a lot of people don't realize, some of your biggest fencing operations are liquor stores.

So I go to Ralph's.

I'm a thief.

I steal ten tide pod containers, you know, the detergent.

Yeah, those are expensive thirty six to forty five dollars each.

Right.

I turn around and I fence them to a liquor store for twenty bucks.

The liquor store sells them for thirty five to forty They make their money back.

Uh.

I put an ad on Craigslist looking for shoplifters I can interview, and within a day, within twenty four hours, I got hundreds of responses in Los Angeles, hundreds of people, hundreds of shoplifters willing to tell me how they shoplift, why they shoplift, whether they're former or current.

And I found this one woman.

She got into it by accident.

She was kicked out of the house at eighteen.

Her father died, her mother hated her, kicked her out of the house, and she was homeless.

And she found out about shoplifting through other homeless people.

She was sharing I don't know a bridge with Like, what are you, you know, living outside?

I got the sense that this is not something she wants to do, but just doesn't have knowledge.

She's kicked out of the house at eighteen.

I mean, where would you be if you were kicked out of the house at eighteen?

Like, where would I be?

I wouldn't be sitting here.

I don't know what out.

Maybe i'd be a shoplifter too, Maybe i'd be like a yeah, and I'm sympathetic to that.

I mean, you know, like I said, everyone has their unique story and circumstances.

You could say, like, what incentive is there for her to work at a coffee shop making seventeen bucks an hour eight hours and she can make a thousand in one day?

I get that, you.

Know, but and she pointed out it's a She told me she's not hurting anybody.

Yeah, and that's how she sleeps at night.

Yeah.

Do you find a lot of homeless people are shoplifters?

Like, I didn't know that's a thing.

Not really, huh, I'm surprised.

Well, let me ever a phrase that they're not stealing the high dollar items.

They're stealing, things like T shirt, food, they're they're stealing like singular items to get by right.

No, but she's working for fences.

Yeah, we don't.

We we typically don't see that.

We're seeing the we're seeing gangs, like actual street gangs.

We're seeing families.

We we arrested a mother and a daughter the other.

Day, a mother and a daughter shoplifting.

Yeah.

I posted something in the story about that on Seal Beach PD.

Oh you got to send me that video.

It was a Mother's Day post.

I took a picture of her being arrested, and I made it into a Mother's Day card, Happy Mother's Day something.

Hopefully you'll be out of jail by Sunday or something, you know, Sunday brunch.

Yeah, so you know, yes, homeless people do steal.

But if you think about it, and this isn't meant to sound insensitive, but when you see someone who's homeless, you typically can tell they're homeless.

Right, So if a homeless person goes into a retail store, they're going to stick out, They're going to be watched, so it's very hard for them to accomplish what it is they're setting out to do.

I just chose her because she told me and she showed me.

She's working for many fences, and she sent me this eighty five page I kid you not, man, eighty five page pdf document, color coded with all the items her fences are requesting and what they'll pay for each one.

Yeah, and she goes around with that.

Like a shopping lists and steals.

Yeah.

That's common more often than not when we see people committing theft, Like we'll show up to Target, let's say, and the arrest the person and then we watch the video, the CCTV video from Target, and you'll see them looking at their phone.

They have a list, and what they do is they pose is like a Instacart or you know, because it's common that they're looking.

Right like they're an Instacart shopper filling a list for Instacart, when really they're a shoplifter professional feeling a list for a fencer, right, huh.

And it's I mean, it really is.

It's an easy payday.

In the case of the girl you're telling me about, you get used to living on a certain wage and it's extremely difficult.

I guess the best example I have is I have a friend named Lauren that was a bartender at a high end restaurant, and she was making six figures a year being a bartender.

But she always wanted to be a physical therapist.

I know where this is going.

So when she'd quit bartending and became a physical therapist, she took a fifty percent pay.

Cut, fifty percent, she had to.

Go back to bartending.

Yeah, so now you know, she's in her thirties bartending miserable.

But she got used to living off of that salary.

Yeah, what options does she have?

And bartending's fun it can be, but you lose your weekends if you work at certain Yeah, you gotta work on the weekend.

Yeah, that's where the money comes in.

It's human nature, really.

We get accustomed to a certain income and a certain lifestyle.

Then it plunges us all into debt and a perpetual cycle of wanting more and more and more.

If we could all just figure out a way to be content with less in the big picture, we'd be a lot less stressed about finances.

Shoplifting queen bees included.

So I think Michelle Mack probably would have gotten away with it had she not lived in such a sprawl a state.

But she did what all fraudsters do.

She got greedy.

They get greedy and they show off.

Yeah, and they feel like they're untouchable at some point.

Yeah, she knew exactly what she was doing.

Very sophisticated operation, very sophisticated.

Yeah.

Thanks for listening to season six of Queen of the Con.

We've got five previous seasons you can binge about some really crazy and crafty con artists, beginning with season one about the woman who conned me.

You won't believe where she is right now, stay tuned for that.

If you're enjoying Queen of the Con, tell someone click that share button and send this podcast to anyone you think might be into it.

Also, if you can leave us a five star review, reviews really help other listeners find us.

Queen of the Con The California Girls is a production of AYR Media and iHeartMedia, Hosted by me Jonathan Walton.

Executive producers Jonathan Walton for Jonathan Walton Productions and Elisa Rosen for AYR Media.

Consulting producer Evan Goldstein.

Written by Jonathan Walton, Edited and mixed by Justin Longerbeam Audio engineer Justin Longerbeam.

Mastered by Hugh Guestitt, Justin Longerbeam legal counsel for AYR Media, Johnny Douglas, executive producer for iHeartMedia, Maya Howard