One Saturday last October, private investigators working for Lululemon and Victoria's Secret walked into an outdoor flea market in San Francisco's Mission District and pretended to go shopping. The handful of vendors at Arriba Juntos, Spanish for "upward together," are mostly immigrants trying to keep up with the rising costs of rent and groceries. Since white shoppers seldom visit the market, one of the vendors suspected that the investigators were undercover cops.
Sure enough, uniformed officers with the San Francisco Police Department soon descended on the market's stalls and without a warrant arrested two women who were selling bras for $20 each. Veronica Lumbreras-Villanueva, 40, and her mother-in-law, Deysi Ramirez, 59, told the police they had purchased the bras from another flea market. But the garments still had their price tags — a sign that they'd probably been stolen at some point.
The women had only $79 in cash on them, but the police valued their collection of 267 bras at $16,000, the full retail value of the merchandise at Victoria's Secret. Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco's district attorney, accused Lumbreras-Villanueva and Ramirez of taking part in a "Mission District fencing operation," an alleged criminal enterprise she claimed incentivizes "organized retail theft." If convicted of the felony charges, the women could face more than three years in prison.
Ever since the COVID pandemic hit, drugstore chains, luxury retailers, and department stores across the.