Over the years, I’ve had a few encounters with pickpockets. My first one was in Rome at the Porta Portese Flea Market. Porta Portese is a 17th-century city gate on the edge of Trastevere in Rome. It’s best known for the huge Sunday flea market that runs from the gate along Via Portuense and the nearby streets. If you go early, by 7 or 8 a.m., you get the best finds and the thinnest crowds. It was the late 1960’s and the fare of mostly secondhand clothes, cheap new goods, and household odds and ends was perfect for the hippie times we were living through. There were also antiques and vintage stalls, with old cameras, prints, books, and furniture, all concentrated toward the Trastevere train station end. This was where I learned the art of bargaining, which is totally expected both in Rome and especially at Porta Portese. The place is pickpocket central and we were all well forewarned and on guard. Nevertheless, on one Sunday I came home and found the back pocket of my jeans sliced open and my wallet gone. I never had a clue.
Pickpocketing is about as old as cities and crowds. The early form was the “cutpurse”, where in medieval Europe people carried money in pouches tied to their belts and thieves simply sliced the strings. The word “pickpocket” appeared in English in the late 1500s, around the time sewn-in pockets became common. Thieves then had to reach in rather than cut, and the trade turned into a matter of skill. I like to think my sliced pocket was a touch of the traditional in a new age setting…not unlike Porta Portese altogether.
Elizabethan London is where pickpocketing became a recognized craft. In 1585 authorities discovered an alehouse “school” where boys practiced lifting coins from a pocket and purse hung with tiny bells. A student graduated when he could do it without making a bell ring. Robert Greene’s 1590s pamphlets on the “coney-catching” underworld catalogued pickpocket slang and roles, and Mary Frith, known as “Moll Cutpurse,” became a celebrity figure. Pickpocketing was a hanging offense in England. A famous, possibly embellished, story holds that pickpockets worked the crowds at public hangings of other pickpockets. Later the punishment shifted toward transportation to Australia. That happened because the English had been sending their convicts to America, but the American Revolution put an end to that outlet, so they turned to Botony Bay. About 160,000 convicts were transported in total to Australia. Theft was by far the most common crime, and pickpocketing was a large share of it.
The 1800s brought organized gangs, like London’s well-dressed “swell mob,” and Dickens fixed the image of the trainer of child thieves with Fagin in Oliver Twist (1838). In the 20th century, crowded public transit and mass tourism made famous sites the main hunting grounds. Rome, Paris, Barcelona, and Prague became notorious. Louvre staff walked out in 2013 and again in 2023 to protest aggressive pickpocket gangs. Today the methods have changed less than the targets: phones have largely replaced wallets as the prize. Meanwhile stage performers like Apollo Robbins have turned the craft into entertainment that also teaches the public how pickpockets operate.
My next big encounter with pickpocketing was in Las Vegas when I was visiting my mother there with my kids. Going up in the elevator of the Flamingo, my kids and I were joined by two guys who were coincidentally also heading for the top floor with us. When the elevator doors opened, one of them tried to hold the door open and got his hand “caught” in the door while the door clanged open and closed on his hand while he panicked. It was a thing of beauty as a distraction because I was focused on getting the kids off the elevator while I tried to help the guy with his hand caught. After they went back down the elevator to get some ice for his hand, my eleven-year-old son, Roger, told me he was sure they had pickpocketed my wallet…and sure enough, he was right.
My most recent episode was on a motorcycle trip to Spain. We started in Barcelona and after doing the familiar rounds of the Sagrada Família and other Gaudí masterpieces, we were heading for lunch near our hotel, the Mandarin Oriental on Passeig de Gràcia. My friend Steve put his 35mm Nikon in a canvas bag I was carrying (I convinced him he didn’t need to take it to his room) and in the two blocks we walked and the hour we lunched, someone very skilled pickpocketed the camera without any of us being aware. Barcelona is widely considered Europe’s pickpocketing capital. In 2023 the city recorded about 100,000 pickpocketing incidents, and theft made up 48.1% of all crime. More recent figures are better. A recent joint police crackdown called Pla Kanpai reportedly cut pickpocketing on public transit by about 40% in the first half of 2026…but it’s still bad and Steve is still sore at me for his lost camera.
My younger son, Thomas, called me last week and said I needed to go see a recently released movie, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. John Turturro plays Harry Lehman, an aging Bronx pickpocket trying to work in a current-day cashless, digital New York. It’s fiction, not a real person, but as a long-time New Yorker, I can say it’s shot in a very realistic way that shows the grittier side of the city. Harry, who can’t ride a subway without seeing it as an endless array of pickpocketing opportunities, lifts something he didn’t bargain for, a USB stick holding a digital secret he can’t even open. He ends up being hunted by a vengeful crime family that wants it back. Steve Buscemi plays a pawnshop owner that fences all of Harry’s stolen watches and jewelry, while he has to take the ever-available smartphones to be fenced in Chinatown. Giancarlo Esposito (Gus from Breaking Bad) plays an old school police detective who has known Harry for years.
While critics describe the film as a gritty, on-location caper with a jazz score and a family-drama undercurrent, that acts as an affectionate send-off to an older, analog New York, I call it a modern-day Robin Hood. You see, Harry, while a committed petty felon with no regard for personal property, cares now only about taking care of other people like his invalid wife, his friends, neighbors, his estranged daughter, and even the rookie pickpocket to whom he acts as mentor. He gives up everything for his old school traditions and for those he cares about. That, by itself, is symbolically a turning back of the cultural analog clock. The world has become a place where everything Harry eschews is what the folks in Truth Social and on Binance Crypto Exchange want. And the principles that guide Harry; kindness, caring, professionalism and grace under duress don’t seem to mean a damn thing. People seem more inclined to rob the hood than be Robin Hood.