[Elvie]

I worked in the book trade between 2000 and 2004. I did catch someone's eye once who left the store before putting all the neat piles of hardback books he had stashed under a table in his briefcase.

And I also marked Rough Trade and Lonely Planet guidebooks with invisible ink. After Robert Jordan was arrested I had to identify my handwriting to the police and be available for a court date, but never had my moment in the witness stand... there was no need

[mootothemax]

If it's of any interest, you can read Ronald Jordan's Court of Appeals judgment here:

http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWCA/...

For what it's worth, mention's made of books being marked.

As an aside, I find it quite incredible that the police office brought in to calculate Jordan's earnings did so on the basis that Jordan was paying his thieves 60% of face value. Sixty percent! I'd be kinda surprised if it was as high as twenty!

[gwern]

Police have no incentive to accurately price out earnings, and may not know about the details; rather, to overstate them to impress the court & press. I see a lot of this in drug cases - the police will say a bust resulted in a street value of $50k where the person only spent, say, $500, because they're using rounded up figures of the highest street price, and nothing at all realistic. Sometimes it's funny: yesterday I was reading a NZ article where the lawyer was trying to explain to the judge that just because his client was caught importing something like 100 doses of MDMA off Silk Road (cost ~$200, IIRC), his client wasn't a dealer - it was simply that because European MDMA is so cheap and there's overhead in handling an order & shipping it into NZ with decent stealth, few SR sellers will bother with small orders under 100!

[mootothemax]

Well that's the ironic thing - by overstating how much he was paying, the police officer showed that he earned less because his costs were so high.

[danielweber]

I was really confused as to what Robert Jordan got arrested for until I realized it should be Ronald Jordan. :)

[Elvie]

Apologies... all book related...