CINCINNATI - It happens several times a week just in Hamilton County. Thieves break into homes, construction sites, cars, even churches to steal copper piping, catalytic converters, and other metals.
Now a Hamilton County assistant prosecutor says he knows how to stop the problem in its tracks. He says we're not prosecuting the right people, people who could put a stop to hundreds of crimes in our region every year.
Steve Tolbert points to crimes like the one that hit a new nursing home in Anderson Township overnight in September.
Building site manager Joel Lawarre showed the I-Team the results of the crime, during which he says thieves took about $10,000 of HVAC and other units to get to the precious metals inside. They left behind the metal outer shells.
Lawarre says the thieves “Took it all apart, took what they wanted, the copper and the aluminum on the inside of it, and then left the pieces."
Lawarre says there wasn’t a lot of copper inside one huge unit so he doubts the thieves got more than a few dollars for their effort. "That's what's amazing about it," he says.
The I-Team documented more metal thefts, at homes like one in Norwood, where thieves tore out the copper pipes in the basement.
Businesses get hit too, sometimes big businesses. Thieves cut through the fence at a Duke Energy substation in Norwood and stole one of their huge rolls of copper wire.
They even hit a Catholic church, Immaculate Conception, where two men tore away a beautiful, weathered 40’ high copper downpout. Someone saw them and called police, who say they caught them at the scene.
Norwood Police Lieutenant Tom Williams says "They simply just started ripping it off and pulling it right off the wall." He says they planned to stomp the spout flat "Fold it over and fold it over, put it in their truck and the next thing you know, they're taking it to some recycling place."
That’s where Tolbert gets animated. "Where do the scrap yards think this stuff came from?" he asks.
Tolbert says enough is enough. He runs the grand jury, handing down indictments every day, and he says two to three times a week, he processes cases that make him shake his head in disgust. There was the case of Christopher Taylor, indicted for selling 370 copper railroad ties to a scrap yard even 'though they were stamped property of "Norfolk Southern Railway."
Tolbert says workers at that scrap yard had to know Taylor wouldn’t own 370 new railroad ties stamped someone else’s property. "I don't know how you could NOT know that it was stolen."
So Tolbert wants to prosecute scrap yards that buy metal he says they know or should know is stolen. He says current Ohio law should cover such prosecutions.
For him, as long as there's a market for stolen metal, thieves will supply it. But "if the people who are going into these apartment buildings and tearing the pipes out don't have somewhere to take it and sell it, then they'll stop doing it and the problem goes away."
Tolbert points to cases like that theft at the Duke Energy substation. Contractors there found the cut fence and minutes later saw two men carting a 31-pound spool of wire less than a mile away to a scrap yard called King Recycling. The police report says King bought it for $79. We wanted to talk to King but a man who wouldn't identify himself told us to stay off the property.
A quick search online shows King Recycling accepts "aluminum, copper, insulated wire, catalytic converters and more."
Tolbert says, "No one who legitimately purchased that wire is going to take it to a junk yard and sell it for scrap because they're not even going to come close to what they paid for it."
But Kathy Weber says, "I completely disagree with that." Weber’s family runs another scrap yard, Garden Street Metal, on Spring Grove Avenue in Cincinnati.
Weber says contractors bring leftovers from jobs all the time, sometimes complete spools of wire or pipes. She says, "Copper pipe in my house is the same as copper pipe in your house and so I can't say that this is stolen copper or if it's copper from a legitimate person who's bringing it in."
Business is brisk at Garden Street, Weber says, between 400 and 900 sellers a day. We saw copper and brass gleaming in bins and garbage cans full. We had no way to tell, much less prove, if any of it was stolen, and Weber says neither do scrap yard workers.
Weber demonstrated to us the sophisticated system Garden Street put in place to discourage thieves. Every seller must provide a valid, original license (no copies) and provide a thumb print. Workers input address, car license plate information, and cameras shoot not only every seller but every item that is sold.
Garden Street keeps this information, including the photos, indefinitely. Weber says that discourages thieves from coming here. "If I'm stealing something, I wouldn't generally give somebody my ID or where I live at."
But Tolbert says that’s not enough. "The fact that you've asked the thief for his real ID doesn't absolve you of your part in this whole thing."
Police have mixed feelings. Lt. Williams likes the cooperation he gets from scrap yards like King Recycling, who he says help his officers find thieves. "I don't want them to be afraid to call me," he says.
But Tolbert says “We're not going to accept the excuse that 'We're cooperating. We'll tell you who brought this stuff.' I think the message needs to be sent. Don't do this any more. It's wrong."
Weber doesn’t get the logic. "We're not supposed to buy scrap any more because it's going to cause people to steal?" She says Tolbert is blaming the wrong culprit.
But builders like Joel Lawarre say scrap yards are just as much to blame. "They're just as responsible as the guy stealing it in my opinion. They're supplying the habit. The guys have someplace to sell it, they're going to take it and sell it. It's just feeding the habit is all it is."
