According to my roommate (who's had a check stolen and another piece of mail tampered with) and a neighbor (who, according to said roommate, shooed this guy out of the mail drop area of his apartment building), there's a thief going through mailboxes on the South Side. He's active in the 2200 block, and if he's poking around there it's a good bet he's active elsewhere.

In the case of my roommate, one piece of mail has been tampered with and one piece of mail has "never arrived" (and has as a result had to be reissued, causing him and his employer undue inconvenience). For some reason the interwebs has "mail theft" tightly wound around "identity theft," both of which are federal offenses. I've had mail "fail to arrive" at my house before. It's one of the reasons I get things shipped to work whenever possible. I've also had mail just sit in the mailbox for weeks at a time - my house revieces a nearly endless stream of junk mail, tax information, credit card applications (and sometimes bills) and other miscellanious garbage for the last half a dozen tennants. There's a pile of the stuff in the kitchen. But it's been quite awhile since I've failed to receive an expected piece of mail, and I've never had mail in my name arrive in tampered condition. A mutilated UPS order in 2001, but that hardly counts. That's background noise, the price of city living. But my roommate getting fucked with - and my neighbors getting fucked with - in such a short period of time isn't background noise. It's suspicious. And as much as I dislike having neighbors, I dislike the possibility of a thief in the neighborhood even more. Hopefully this is a freak apparition - but on the off chance that this isn't, the guy was dumb enough to almost get caught before... so he'll probably screw up again. Hopefully on somebody else's block.

Combine this with the recent theft of a pair of headphones from my office at work and I'm feeling a bit more paranoid than usual.

Which is pretty damned paranoid, really.

Yes, a mail slot in the door would completely solve the problem - but this isn't a high tech house - and that would only solve for this house, not the neighborhood.