If Statement Not recognizing negative long

This is probably me being blind from staring at the code for too long, but is my if statement not working properly? I am reading numbers from a file through stdin using scanf (I redirect the input when I run the program), and after reading a list of numbers, I am expecting a -999999999 to know that my list is over. I can read the -999... no problem, but when I try to use an if statement to to confirm the number of elements I read, it never goes in there. I'm using gcc on a linux environment.

Any comments?

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main (void)
{

        long itemsA, itemsX, counter, reader;
        int * A;
        int * X;

        //read in the size of A and X
        scanf("%d %d", &itemsA, &itemsX);                                                                                                                 printf("\n a = %d, x = %d", itemsA, itemsX);

        //allocate the arrays
        A =(int *) malloc(itemsA*sizeof(int));                                                                                                            X = (int *) malloc(itemsX*sizeof(int));

        //read in A and X
        //counter=0;
        for(counter=0; counter<itemsA; counter++)                                                                                                         {
                scanf("%d", &reader);
                A[counter]=reader;
        }
        scanf("%d", &reader);                                                                                                                                     printf("\nReader: %d", reader);

        if(reader==-999999999)
        {
                printf("\nRead %d elements of A", counter);
        }