The day Gary expects a package delivery to his Mt. Airy apartment, he tracks the truck’s arrival with the focus of an air traffic controller shepherding a jetliner on final approach. 

“When they are a block away, I’m standing outside,” says Gary, who asked that his last name be withheld for fear of reprisal. “I have to meet them when they get here. If I don’t, my package will wind up sitting outside and he will grab it.”

“He” is a porch pirate, a thief who steals packages left on door steps and in apartment building lobbies. The man, believed to be between 25 and 33 years old, has been stealing unattended packages across Mt. Airy for roughly the last two years.

“This is a job for him,” Gary said. “He found a way to survive by stealing stuff from people, which isn’t right. That [may be] his only way of surviving. I don’t know if he has enough education to get a job. I don’t know what his story is.”

Tenants in two buildings owned by Elfant Pontz Properties have also been victimized for thousands of dollars in lost goods during the thief’s stealing spree, said Robert Elfant, the buildings’ co-owner.  

“He’s crowbarred doors and smashed glass” to break into the locked lobbies, Elfant said. “He is relentless. He isn’t just picking on my buildings. This guy is doing this everywhere.”

Package theft is a national problem. According to a January 2024, report from Security.org, 44 million Americans were victims of porch pirates in the last three months of 2023. The online security company placed the three-month monetary loss at $2.2 billion. Projected over the year, that would round up to almost $9 billion.

To date, eight states, including New Jersey, have made stealing packages a felony. So far, Pennsylvania, ranked among the states with the lowest rates of porch piracy, has not. 

Gary has confronted the man he believes is the culprit. It didn’t end well. The man reached into Gary’s car and knocked Gary’s cell phone to the ground.

“I had the police here, but they advised me not to follow him because of the danger,” Gary said. “They weren’t really interested. So, I stopped.”

Gary did give police the name of a deli the man frequents, along with videos of the man. The recordings appear to match the person caught on surveillance cameras snatching packages from the lobbies of Elfant buildings. The videos, Elfant says, “are not perfect.”  

Police declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, but Elfant and Gary said police told them that unless the man is caught committing a crime, there is nothing they can do. Elfant says catching the man in the act will be difficult since it only takes the thief 15 to 30 seconds to grab a package from a doorstep, smash a plate glass window, or crowbar open a door. And package theft, Elfant concedes, isn’t exactly the department’s top priority. 

“Obviously, I am making it out to be more important than they do,” Elfant says. “Not that they don’t think it’s important. They have their hands full with obviously more pressing matters and you hear that they are short staffed.” 

But Philadelphia Councilmember Cindy Bass, whose 8th District includes Mt. Airy and Chestnut Hill, wants the man preying on her constituents caught. In an email to the Chestnut Hill Local, Bass said that she was unaware of the buildings’ robberies until contacted by the newspaper. 

“We certainly intend to speak with local law enforcement to ask them to come up with a game plan to catch the perpetrators in the act,” Bass wrote in the email. ”If they need to do a sting, then let’s do that. I say let’s do whatever is necessary to not only stop this individual but also send a strong message to others that we take this matter seriously. In the meantime, I strongly urge community members to have their packages delivered to a secure location, such as a locker.”

In the meantime, Elfant has changed the door locks in his lobbies and repaired the broken glass windows. His rental agents and maintenance staff have been directed to move packages from lobbies to a secure location, and posted notices urging tenants to promptly pick up their deliveries. He is also considering installing an Amazon Package Lock Box in one building.

“Amazon indicates that they are pretty reliable and very hard to break into and will take responsibility for it,” he says.

As for Gary, he will continue to vigilantly track his packages, waiting on the sidewalk to greet the delivery truck.

“I’m almost to the point where I don’t care,” Gary says. “I called the police. I don’t know what else to do. There are other people in this area that are concerned. But they basically are where I’m getting to -- throwing up their hands.”