FOCUS: CRIME
The Great Copper Ripoff: Police are hitting back
Strip, desecrate and steal.
It’s an old story — and a brand new one, thanks to a market that’s turned copper and other ingredients of the region’s landmarks and old buildings into hot commodities.
Day after day, all over the country, opportunistic thieves are cashing in on what has become a twisted version of a gold rush: a hunt for scrap metal that has left historic homes looted, neighborhoods without electricity and police frustrated and exhausted.
Nothing, it appears, is too sacred to steal — not anymore.
Take the case of the the 1912 Larkin House, owned by Drs. Lisa Hansen and Gurmeet Dhillon.
Hansen went numb this week when she learned that the historic Lincoln Parkway house she and her husband are refurbishing had been violated by metal thieves.
“I felt sick,” said Hansen, who lost custom-crafted copper gutters in the theft, as well as century-old heat register covers that she had recently burnished to a high shine. The thieves just tore those out, leaving about two dozen gaping holes behind.
“I felt as if someone had kicked me in the stomach,” she said.
What’s happening, and why? Driven by rapid increases in global commodities markets, criminals are turning old metal into money by stealing whatever they can get their hands on — from copper pipes to sheet metal — and wheeling it off to scrapyards to sell it.
They aren’t picky. They’re stealing from whomever they can, including municipalities, utility companies, industry, homeowners and even cemeteries.
“It’s fueled by supply and demand,” said Dennis J. Richards, Buffalo Police chief of detectives. “Copper is 100 percent recyclable, and it’s often difficult to trace ownership.”
Buffalo police say the number of copper-related thefts in the city has spiked over the last couple of years.
In 2005, when copper sold for under $2 per pound, police took 56 theft reports.
By 2006, there were 314 reported thefts, a more than 460 percent increase. Not coincidentally, the commodity price of copper more than doubled that year.
Copper thefts increased another 34 percent in 2007, when there were 420 reports.
The price of copper closed at $3.59 per pound Friday, a more than 18 percent increase since the start of the year. During the first three months of 2008, Buffalo police took 176 reports of stolen copper. That puts the city on pace to record more than 700 thefts this year.
Hansen’s story is one of many — and they’re not just taking place in Buffalo. In recent weeks alone:
• Seventy bronze and copper urns were pilfered from century old gravesites at Elmlawn Cemetery in the Town of Tonawanda;
• A live electrical transformer was cut down from a National Grid power pole on Baraga Street in South Buffalo to be harvested for its metal components, darkening hundreds of homes;
• Five men were arrested after nine 300-pound, industrial-sized copper wires were torn from amusement rides at a church carnival in Hamburg and scrapped in Buffalo, and
• A 6-foot, 250-pound copper bar was stolen at the DuPont plant in Niagara Falls after thieves cut a 3-foot hole in an exterior fence there.
“There’s so much theft going on,” said Rick Redino, co-owner of R&R Salvage on William Street. “We’re constantly being called by various law enforcement and industries about stuff that’s all of a sudden gone missing.”
Mark Meyerhofer, the local government affairs manager at National Grid, told a recent forum of scrapyard owners, law enforcement officials and victims that there were 184 separate cases of metal theft to the utility in 2007.
Those included thefts at electrical substations, service centers, vehicles and utility poles. In some cases, customer service interruptions occurred.
“The safety of the public is put at risk,” Meyerhofer said. “This is dangerous.”
Five serious injuries and one fatality resulted from the thefts at National Grid, including one suspect who lost both of his legs when he came into contact with live wires.
Thieves cashing in on stolen metal seemed to have had a head start on authorities, but that’s changing.
Lawmakers and law enforcement say new laws and new multi-agency task forces designated to combat metal theft now lead to more arrests, prosecutions and jail time for thieves.
Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, D-Buffalo, was behind legislation that went into effect at the start of the year, requiring scrapyards to obtain photo identification from anyone reselling more than $50 worth of scrap metal and to keep records of their transactions.
“This has reached a crisis level,” said Hoyt, who hosted the forum in late May to further communication between scrapyard owners, law enforcement and government officials. The new laws assisted police in tracking down thieves and making arrests, including at least one targeting unscrupulous employees at an East Delavan Avenue scrapyard.
There, four people were arrested May 22 on a charge of felony criminal possession of stolen property after they allegedly received 509 pounds of stolen copper and a National Grid transformer valued at $1,500. They reportedly paid an undercover detective $1,000 for the items while also failing to ask for the required identification and properly recording the transaction.
Industry under siege
Scrapyard owners are quick to defend the vast majority of the industry saying it is run by honest business people who follow the rules and want nothing to do with the byproducts of crime.
“The guys that come in with shopping carts, unless I’ve known them for a long time, I’m not taking it here because I’m afraid of it,” said Laurie Brock, owner of Brock Max in Buffalo and the president of the Empire Chapter of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.
“We take everybody’s [IDs],” Brock said. “If [the purchase] is $10 or of it’s $1,000, we take their license.”
George Ostendorf, the general manager of Metalico Buffalo on Fillmore Avenue, said scrapyards are unfairly bearing the brunt of criticism because of all of the metal theft.
“Our industry is under siege,” he said. “Everyone blames us. We’ve been around for 100 years and never paid us any attention when things weren’t worth anything.”
He said price has driven criminals into the marketplace. Now, tougher laws and stiffer sentences for copper and metal thieves is what’s needed, Ostendorf said, not more regulations on businesses.
“We’re a legitimate industry,” Ostendorf said. “We’re not some backroom industry taking copper gutters from crack addicts. We don’t want anything to do with that.”
Moreover, Ostendorf said scrapyards are themselves becoming regular targets of thieves.
Not only has Metalico hired security guards to protect its own property, it also has cameras on the scales at the business.
“What happens now is that law enforcement comes in and they say they’re looking for this guy,” Ostendorf said. “Almost all the yards now have cameras on the scales, so I can burn DVDs of who’s selling the scrap and what time. We do probably have an arrest a week.”
Holding out hope
Meanwhile, Hansen, of the Larkin House, holds out hope that some of the one-of-a-kind items taken from her home will be recognized by a scrupulous scrapyard so she can eventually get them back. She’s called them all.
What she knows about the theft is that the thieves apparently entered the historic home through the garage and then punched out a basement window.
Taken were rebuilt copper gutters from the outside of the house as well as copper plumbing from the garage and basement that left those areas flooded with water.
Hansen and her husband bought the mansion last summer from Buffalo Seminary. It had been given to the school in 1954 by descendants of John D. Larkin Jr., the son of the Larkin Soap Co. founder.
Since then, the couple has poured their hearts into renovating the house, which also included new custom cabinets that were ruined by the deluge left behind by the stolen pipes.
“I was trying to do something for the community and restore something of architectural significance to the city and this is how it’s received,” said Hansen.
An astute neighbor provided descriptions of possible suspects to police as well as license plate numbers of their cars. Police are, thus far, still following up on leads.
tpignataro@buffnews.com and jbonfatti@buffnews.com
