If I were to ever become a thief, my first choice of items to steal probably would not be pasta. I suppose perhaps if I was a really hungry thief and there was a plate of spaghetti sitting right there on a counter with nobody looking at me it would be a different story. But in general, I cannot see myself ever joining the illegal pasta game. So I feel it is pretty safe for me to say that I would definitely never try to steal a trailer filled with thousands of dollars worth of pasta. (Aside: is there some sort of black market for pasta that would make this worth it? I could always be convinced to change my mind if I had the right motivation.)

Apparently, though, these four guys from New Jersey do not have the same life goals as me. Because they were recently arrested for doing just what I would never do: stealing a trailer full of pasta.

Now, if I just had a need to discuss pasta-related crimes, I could have talked about the guys who got caught after robbing a Build-a-Burger in New York when the police followed their trail of macaroni salad, which I’m sure they left in a Hansel-and-Gretel-type plan to eventually find their way back to the Build-a-Burger and return their steal. So, thanks for ruining that act of conscience, police.

However, I’m not as interested in how pasta can foil your robbery attempts as I am in how it might influence you to start a life of crime. Thus, the trailer full of pasta theft.

Here is what happened:

Four men stole a trailer of pasta. Said trailer was parked on the street. Said street contained police doing surveillance. The thieves pulled up to the trailer in a car and a tractor. They hooked the trailer to the tractor and tried to drive away where they were no doubt going to fence the pasta for big bucks.

However, this is where the whole “police surveillance” hurt them: this particular trailer had been reported stolen a few days before the tractor pulled up to haul it away. Ergo why a pasta trailer was getting so much cop scrutiny and why it was so suspicious to see four guys attempt to remove it from its parking spot.

The tractor was pulled over and the men were arrested. Police ask that anyone with more information on this crime come forth with it by calling 908-474-8538. But even if you do not have information on this particular crime, if you just have any information on the pasta theft world in general, please contact me. Because it is really a confusing matter to me. I have to ask again, is there a thriving underground pasta ring out there that would make stealing this many carbs worth it? And if so, why? You know you can buy that stuff fairly inexpensively at most grocery stores, right? It just does not seem worth the jail time, if you ask me.

Ashley Shaw

Ashley Shaw is an Alabama native and current New Jersey resident. A graduate of both Kennesaw State University and Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, she spends her free time reading, writing, boxing, horseback riding, playing trivia, flying helicopters, playing sports, and a whole lot else. So maybe she has too much spare time. Contact Ashley at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Men Buck the Atkins Diet Trend, Steal Trailer Full of Pasta appeared first on Law Street.

A little over a year ago, my parents were driving me into the city one night because I didn’t feel like taking the train to meet some friends. My then 12-year-old brother said he would come on one condition: that we stop at a shoe store at 812 Broadway. As someone who lived in the city for two years, the address alone meant nothing to me until I looked up the cross streets. The store turned out to be just south of Union Square about a block from the Strand bookstore. I wondered why I never noticed it during my frequent trips to the area.

We get to the storefront, which completely lacked any signage and had two large black-tinted glass doors. An associate stood outside like he was a bouncer guarding a hot new club. Inside, the store was crowded with suburban tween boys and their parents. Rows and rows of sneakers (many of them still wrapped in plastic) lined the two exposed-brick walls. If you want to try on a sneaker you have to go up to a counter to order them and then wait until they call your name.

My brother is a self-professed “Sneakerhead.” I suppose it’s similar to how I lust for designer shoes, but as much as I try to understand his fixation, I can’t really get past the idea of people paying hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars for such ugly shoes. At Flight Club, which initially started as a consignment store, there is a special display case featuring special “vintage” sneakers inspired by Back to the Future and Space Jam. On average, these obnoxious shoes go for well over $1,000. Luckily my brother chose a practical pair of white Air Jordan “Fire Red” 5’s. My parents paid $160 for those that night, now according to sneaker appraisal site Campless, those shoes can be sold at a 28 percent markup.

Meta pictures of my brother taking a picture of his sneaker collection #idontgetit #iwouldiftheywerePrada

A photo posted by Katherine F (@kafernn) on Dec 12, 2013 at 12:56pm PST

From that trip spawned an obsession. My brother simply had to have the latest and greatest sneaker. My mother, however, was not very open to the idea of buying (potentially used) sneakers on Ebay, despite his insistence that they were no longer available anywhere else. “How can that be when the shoe was just released today?” my mother and I would wonder. I decided to do some further investigating.

It turns out that when it comes to Nikes limited edition sneakers — Air Jordans and Lebrons — the black market is the main market. Basically, getting your hands on a pair of these sneakers is like trying to get tickets to a Taylor Swift concert; they sell out the second they become available, so you have to buy them from a third party at a 200 percent markup. Unlike designer apparel or even luxury cars, Nikes can increase in value after you buy them at retail price. Apparently there are “Sneakerheads” who buy up all of the inventory upon initial release and resell them for a living, some of which even include Footlocker employees. Last year, Nike resellers collectively made about $230 million in profits. That’s $230 million that Nike is missing out on. So wouldn’t it be a smarter business strategy to mass-produce them?

When I asked my brother why he thinks this is the case he simply shrugged and said, “It’s ’cause it’s all hype” and to a certain extent he’s right. We all know the power of celebrity collaborations. There have been riots over the coveted shoes since the late eighties. High schools even had to ban the shoes from their dress codes because students were attacking each other in an attempt to steal their shoes.

About ten years ago you could walk into the store a couple of weeks after the latest pair of Jordans were released and buy them off the shelf. It wasn’t until the onset of sites like Ebay, Craiglist, Amazon, and now social media like Instagram and Twitter, that a whole new market was born. Unfortunately, not only do third party sites cheat Nike out of profits but they can also cheat consumers. Young kids, including my brother and his friends, order these sneakers from as far as Hong Kong only to be sent cheap knockoffs instead (there’s even a whole other market for good replicas). One time my brother ordered a pair of Foamposite One Weathermans on the up-and-coming site Alibaba and was sent shoes that were so fake that no human foot could ever fit inside of them, much less walk in them.

The more offending members of his collection, which thank God he never wears. Some of these are older than he is. Courtesy of Katherine Fabian.

Another reason Air Jordans sell better at certain times than others is that sales are often governed by the trajectory of Michael Jordan’s career. For example, now that he’s retired, kids like my brother (who weren’t even born yet when he originally played for the Chicago Bulls) want to get their hands on shoes with the name of a now legendary basketball player. Now that I think about it, Jordan has “retired” so many times over the years that I think he was doing it on purpose to steer sales of his shoes. I mean, why would he bother playing all those consecutive years when he had all that shoe money to sit on?

Nike also further feeds the hype over its Air Jordans by re-releasing certain versions over the years. However, they also ultimately have the power to stop the black market from dominating the industry. If Apple limits the amount of new iPhones one can buy upon its release, why can’t Nike do the same? I have a feeling that the company enjoys all the controversy, including the riots, that come along with selling its sneakers in “limited” quantities. Interestingly enough, Ebay CEO John Donahue just joined Nike’s board last June. When it comes down to it, that $230 million hardly makes a difference in light of the $27.8 billion Nike’s made within the last year. Ultimately, only about four percent of Air Jordan’s are resold in the first place.

Frankly, I wish they wouldn’t sell some of those shoes at all because they’re so damn ugly. The eighties called, they want their sneakers back.

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Katherine Fabian (@kafernn) is a recent graduate of Fordham University’s College at Lincoln Center and is currently applying to law schools, freelance writing, and teaching yoga. She hopes to one day practice fashion law and defend the intellectual property rights of designers.

Featured image courtesy of [Joseph Quicho via Flickr]

Katherine Fabian

Katherine Fabian is a recent graduate of Fordham University’s College at Lincoln Center. She is a freelance writer and yoga teacher who hopes to one day practice fashion law and defend the intellectual property rights of designers. Contact Katherine at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post How Air Jordans and “Sneakerheads” Shifted the Market for Nike appeared first on Law Street.

Bitcoin  — the cryptocurrency in the form of digital coins — allows financial transactions to be completed over the internet without the use of banks or a clearing house.  (Click here to read Bitcoin for Beginners.) There are plenty of positives that come along with this currency: it reduces the cost of transactions, as the fees are significantly lower than those with traditional electronic transactions; there are no  prerequisites or qualifications to gain access to Bitcoin; and  unique to its creation, the coins, which are stored in free, user-created digital wallets, can be used in any country. With that said, there are real concerns surrounding the coins.

Unlike paper currency, Bitcoin is not backed by any government or any other currency standard such as gold. One huge difference between traditional currency and Bitcoin is that there will only ever be 21 million coins available. Unlike traditional currencies, producing more Bitcoins, or taking some out of circulation, is not an option, and many of the people currently holding them are hoarding them. This has increased speculation and contributed to the huge increase in cryptocurrency value over a short time. Once people realize that there are only a small amount of coins available to purchase out of the 21 million total, consumers may be unwilling to purchase them at such high prices. This could have adverse affects on the coins’ value, but on the other hand, the exclusivity of the commodity may cause people to be even more interested in acquiring the currency and cause its value to increase considerably.

What happens if Bitcoins become so valuable that they’re able to back legitimate government currencies?  How could this shift power and wealth to the people who are hoarding Bitcoins?  I’m not saying it will happen, but we must think about the possibilities in this technology-driven society. The major takeaway from the speculation is that this currency is risky and can be exploited easily. Bitcoins are a risky investment and there are no equivalent insurance protections to those at traditional banks. Possibly worse, there are no standard cybersecurity protections from hackers when dealing with Bitcoin. Due to the currency’s anonymity, it is very hard to track where a particular coin has gone once it’s taken from a digital wallet. This anonymity leads us into the darker, seedier side of Bitcoin.

Because of the anonymity and absence of government regulation, Bitcoin is being used as a de facto payment to fund illegal weapons and drug trades on the black market. The most well known underground internet-based drug ring, Silk Road, had more than one million users and was in operation for two and a half years. Silk Road allowed users to buy any kind of illegal drug they desired and have it shipped directly to their home. Think eBay for drug addicts and their suppliers. Silk Road was also good for child pornography and illegal weapons sales.

In September 2013, after years of investigation by the FBI, Silk Road was shut down and its engineer, Ross Ulbrict, was arrested after facilitating 1.2 million transactions. These transactions accounted for 9.5 million Bitcoins — valued at a whopping $1.2 billion — and earned Ulbrict about $80 million. Unfortunately for him, all of his Bitcoins, and a majority of those held by Silk Road users, were seized by the FBI, making the government agency’s digital wallet the largest in the world.

Although the FBI should be excited about a job well done, we must remember that it took them two and half years to shut down Silk Road, and only a month for Silk Road 2.0 to get up and running.  If you go to the site, the operators boast how they’re morally superior to the original Silk Road since they no longer provide child pornography or facilitate the sale of illegal weapons. No… I’m not joking. The site also talks about newly emerging competition with other underground websites that were created to fill the void Silk Road left. The problem is getting worse and the operators have learned from the mistakes of previous site operators. They’re even giving users instructions on how to better protect themselves and keep their identities from being detected.

The only positive in this situation is that these people are so clearly lacking significant moral fiber, that every few weeks the site creators steal  all of their users’ Bitcoins, or they are hacked and the site’s Bitcoins are stolen. Unbelievable. I think it’s kind of funny that these drug dealers are being robbed, but at the same time, we have no idea what kind of criminal mind has the ability to steal from other criminals. That’s when it gets scary. We can only hope that these kinds of underground sites will cause so much uncertainty that they self destruct. Until then, we have an unregulated digital currency that can be exchanged for real money, and is contributing to an increased amount of cyber thievery and crime in America and abroad.

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Teerah Goodrum (@AisleNotes), is a graduate student at Howard University with a concentration in Public Administration and Public Policy. Her time on Capitol Hill as a Science and Technology Legislative Assistant has given her insight into the tech community. In her spare time she enjoys visiting her favorite city, Seattle, and playing fantasy football.

 Featured image courtesy of [Zach Copley via Flickr]

Teerah Goodrum

Teerah Goodrum is a Graduate of Howard University with a Masters degree in Public Administration and Public Policy. Her time on Capitol Hill as a Science and Technology Legislative Assistant has given her insight into the tech community. In her spare time she enjoys visiting her favorite city, Seattle, and playing fantasy football. Contact Teerah at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Seedy Side of Bitcoin appeared first on Law Street.