FLORIDA SERIAL LAPTOP THIEF FOILED IN TAMPA Business: Here's how a slick laptop thief was foiled in Tampa

Here's how a slick laptop thief was foiled in Tampa

Smart, shrewd,determined. A serial thief was portrayed as all these. Here's how his alleged crime spree unraveled after a stop in Tampa.

By Scott Barancik, Times Staff Writer
Published October 28, 2007

WEB-BLOG EDITOR NOTE.................see link for extensive additional information

In March, a clean-cut stranger wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt strolled into the Tampa headquarters of Outback Steakhouse, mingled with company staff until they left for the day and walked out with 11 laptop computers crammed into his shoulder bag.

When a security guard stopped him in the parking lot, the gifted liar convinced him he was out for a jog. Later, at his $1,800-a-month apartment along Miami Beach, the burglar erased the laptops' hard drives and began selling them via services like eBay, where he had earned a 99.4 percent customer-satisfaction rating and tens of thousands of dollars in profit.

"It's pretty rare that you come across a smart thief," Tampa Police Detective Larry Brass said. "Typically it's just, 'Kick in a window, grab what you can and go.' "

Outback isn't his only alleged victim. Dubbed the "Khaki Bandit" in Milwaukee, pictured on "wanted" leaflets in central Colorado, shown on TV news reports robbing the Miami headquarters of Burger King Corp. and FedEx Corp., the laptop thief has been investigated in more than two dozen heists across five states, including the recent theft of 10 laptops from Tampa's Sykes Enterprises Inc.

But Outback parent OSI Restaurant Partners may have been his undoing. Thanks in part to the company's use of a clever antitheft device, Brass made an arrest in April. Evidence collected at the Miami Beach condo helped link some of the other unsolved burglaries to the same man: Eric Almly, a 33-year-old career criminal from Duluth, Minn., now awaiting trial in a Miami jail. Almly and his lawyers declined to comment.

Though his plain features defy Hollywood's idea of a con artist - think Leonardo DiCaprio's rakish character in Catch Me If You Can - Almly has the right resume. A determined thief since his mid teens, he has made a near science of stealing and selling laptops over the past five years. He's even developed some acting skills, if you consider perpetrating a faceless office-worker a form of theater.

"This is a very intelligent young man," an Almly defense attorney said in 1993, moments after the 18-year-old had been sentenced to serve one year on a work farm. "If he can put his intelligence to positive uses, then the sky's the limit."