Hot Rods Thieves

Had a similar experience where one of my cameras picked up a couple kids pulling into a neighbors driveway and kicking in their door. I found out later the police in my town keep a note of who has a camera system once they find out you have one and on more than one occasion they have shown up at my door to view footage.

 

I had a friend in a big machine shop, some new guys at work walked out with some aluminum forgings and used the company truck... down to the scrap yard. They were in uniform and the scrap yard owner called the shop owner, thanked him and said he would come by to pick up scrap in the future... what?? The cops got called, they got arrested and the shop got their parts back. The crooks gave back the cash.

 

Oddly enough, I was up at the Church this morning and my Pastor told me they got 3 of our catalytic convertors off the vans last night.

 

I live in a 40 X 40 building with my cars and junk. I have been here for 26 years patiently waiting for thieving morons who think my stuff should be their stuff to come on by and grab it all for easy money. I'll be moving within the next few years I hope they show up soon. they will be in for a big surprise.

as for cameras, I have 4 outside. can't really see faces or license plates, you get what you pay for and my set up was only about $250.00. I do see people out there from time to time so I go out and politely suggest they leave. I had a great video of a guy stealing a tank of gas I just got, and another where a guy removed the spare from my Blazer but did not take it.

 

one more thing, at my job the warehouse just got broken into. industrial metal door and frame, heavy duty lock. they took a cordless 4" grinder with a cut off wheel and slid it between the door and the jamb and cut the bolt off the dead bolt.

they didn't steal anything as all we sell is shipping boxes and tape. if they want in they are getting in.

 

The place I used to work at was in the heart of the hood, with a huge homeless population. Across the street is a metal recycler and we would get calls from them all the time because they had a camera pointing at our building. We had people get their batteries lifted, cats cut during work hours.

 

Cats getting swiped is a huge problem in St. Louis. Not a week goes by without one of our customers coming in missing cats. The problem with cameras is the police in city pretty well refuse to do anything about it. My boss said one day, due to shear laziness, no one will go to jail today. We ended up getting an electric fence at work.

 

Tbe ops manager got fired at a company I used to work for after he was discovered (by our new CFO at the time) keeping the cash for all the scrap steel, copper, and aluminum we used in our manufacturing (HVAC units and heat exchangers). He started with company, and initially he would just buy coffee and the odd pizza, etc for his shop employees when we only had one CNC punch machine. However, as the company grew quite quickly (multiple CNC press punches, and coil manufacturing), the owners were too busy to keep track of such “trivial” things like scrap. Because he started with the company, the owners let him off without pressing charges even though he probably made off with between $50K-$100K!

 

They were clipping them at work, off cars in a far lot. Then we went to a secured lot with gates we had to badge into after 7 AM.

 

Where I last worked, we just gave our scrap away to a place that came and took it, just to stave off any thing shady. They'd take the full barrels, drop off empty ones. Rinse, repeat.

 

would have to have a receipt for the tonnage....

 

My dog, a rottweiler, barked at something in my front yard one evening. I stepped out on my front porch to see a guy climb up on my 1952 Ford tractor with a wrench in his hand. I yelled threatening to let the dog loose and then throw some hot lead at him, he climbed down and said he needed a part. I just can't believe some people. I must have had a very rare day because rather than shoot him I gave him the name and number of a guy that sells Ford 8N tractor parts.

 

Well, isn't this timely, two weeks ago, I had a chat with a fellow casing mine and two other properties in my neighbourhood. So....I see this little brown chevette pull up my driveway, I share with two others, and he disappears above my house on my friends place. Now, we live on a hillside, you gotta know us to come up here, there's nowhere to hide once you do, so I walk out to the end of my yard and wait for him. On the way down after about five minutes, He stops, I ask him who he's looking for, he gives me a name, I tell him that name never lived here, ever, and we both knew it, if he or his friends came back they would stay, and because we both knew nobody else would know they were here, it was a pretty safe bet nobody would come looking for them.
To say I got a shocked look was understated, he jumped in his car, drove off like a madman, hasn't been seen since, and I'm fairly certain he won't be back. I live in a small town, no brown chevettes here, specially ratty little drug looking its all I can afford looking kinda car. Not exactly an inconspicuous ride, pretty easy to spot.

 

In the end, they should all be shot!..

 

"One word: Landmines .” “I want to say one word to you. Just one word: Landmines. There’s a great future in landmines. Just think about it.”

 

If you banned scrap yards It'd stop a lot of this.

 

It really pisses me off. Because i know that nothing exists without someone making it.
The kind of people that steal, are stupid & think this stuff comes back via magic or something.

In 2015 if you told me there wasn't a single piece of copper wire left in the world, i'd have believed you. Why? Because there wasn't anything left where i lived. None. And i will never forgive them.

 

There must be a huge black market for cat converters. The scrap yard I got to will not take them unless you have a business license or are ASE certified and can prove it. Then, the last one I took in, I got 15 bucks. I can’t figure out where these Thieves are getting big money for them. I would love to catch one in the act and stomp their nuts.

 

Cops wont do much unless theres evidence at the scene.

You have to diligent to search out leads to your stuff. They have to sell it or use it. Look for sale of equipment, sale of parts, people with vehicles that your stolen stuff fits. You were targeted for the theft, its usually a person that in your general area.

Ive been robbed before, have recovered some of my stuff by finding a link to the sale of my stuff and going to the cops with that info. They still didnt want to do anything, had to push the process along.

 

I work for a manufacturing company, we shut down a production area for conversion and threw away a full roll-off of new hardware, and machined parts. Im sure its not shocking for scrap yards to see piles of new stuff coming in the door.
There is a difference between that, and a tweaker showing up with a bunch of copper with hacksaw edges.

Where does the scrapyard draw the line ?

 

The mention of copper wire theft reminded me of something that happened a few years back in my area. Some clown climbed into a fenced off area that contained very large electrical transformers or whatnot that was part of the local hydro supply/infrastructure. On the fence are more than a few signs declaring HI VOLTAGE, DANGER etc. The local police can only assume he was after some copper. The reason an assumption was necessary? He was, as they might say in culinary circles ... "fried to a crisp".

 

Son told me about a local company that went out of business. Some fellow bought the building and lot and was going to open a different kind of business. Don't remember the exact details, but it went something like this............
The local power company informed him that they needed to remove some really LARGE transformers and other equipment from the property, and the new owner would be responsible for the cost of the removal. The guy said he wouldn't pay for it and it wasn't his responsibility. Anyway they went back and forth about it and then one day when the power company went back out there..........it was all gone.

Now again, this was really large stuff weighing thousands of pounds and required heavy equipment and possibly a crane of some type to remove it. Also turns out that a lot of the weight was thousands of pounds of copper. I think just one of the units weighed 10k lbs, but I may be wrong.

So the power company asks him where it went.......and the guy tells em "somebody musta stole it"

My heart goes out to the power company................

 

Years ago, when cracks in the "high trust society" were first starting to show, they still published names and addresses and things like that in the newspaper obituaries. Thieves would then know who, when, and where certain people would be. At the Funeral.

Perfecttime to hit the bereaved's house, grandma, grandpa, and anybody else. They might even be out of state for a day or two. This happened to my parents, got cleaned out pretty good.

When the cops showed up to take a report, I thought they were gonna dust for prints and that kind of stuff, like they do on TV. Yeah, no. They don't do that kind of thing. It kind of knocked the cop shop down a peg in my estimation. Maybe a bit unrealistic, but I wondered what the point of all those taxes were, if they were just like "F it".

 

My dad told me about a buddy of his who bought some old factory building or somesuch at a pretty good price, he was a sharp guy and recognized something others didn't. I can't remember the details, but the upside was at one time, probably during World War II, it had some connection with explosives manufacture. Consequently all of the extensive railroad track and sidings around the building was solid copper or brass, not steel and the scrap was worth quite a bit.

 

Sadly, if it isn't a violent crime, most Police Departments don't seem to give a @#$%... even if it is a high dollar theft.

In the late 90s somebody broke into my Dad's building and stole probably 10k worth of parts and tools. The cops pretty much just went through the motions but didn't actually DO jack squat. A couple months later he noticed some of his property in the back of a pickup. He confronted the guy and the guy told him where he had gotten it. Dad mentioned some of the other things that were stolen and the guy confirmed that this individual had many other items that matched his description. The person who had all our stuff was some punk druggie who lived about a mile from where the property was stolen. The cops weren't interested until Dad informed them that he was going to confront this individual with or without them. Being a small town where everybody knows everybody they knew that if Dad confronted the thief they would have a lot bigger mess to clean up. So, they got a warrant and found almost all of our stuff(much of it already trashed) and a bunch of drugs. But, they couldn't send the guy to jail for the drugs since that wasn't on the warrant and they let him go on the theft because he claimed to have bought our stuff from another druggie who had died recently.

This was one of the first steps on the road to realizing that the "justice" system is a complete joke.

 

A word in defense of the police not being too enthusiastic........
It's not their fault.
The buck stops at the desk of the DA or "Prosecutor". These guys (and gals) are empty suits using 'law' as a stepping stone to get into politics. They cherry-pick which cases are 'home runs' and so which cases will raise their score to look good and boost their reputation. If in the judgment of your local DA, your stolen treasure was just 'junk that walked off'', the police will get the message; "Don't waste my time. Bring me a Winner." The police learn to focus on incidents that will get prosecuted by the system the DA creates.

 

Im with ya, I support the police and police dept. But, at the time I was robbed I lived in a small town, they owned 5 cop cars so you could tell where they were.

We used to keep track of where the police cars were,with CB radios. How many were patrolling or at the station and when shift change was. Everyone had an old CB sitting in the garage, we had a lot of kids in on it.

They werent busy, common stopping place was the gas station with a good looking counter girl, lot of times it took 45 min to fill up that coffee cup.

If we knew where the cops were, we knew what side of town to go race.

 

Not to be facetious, but "justice system" is a middle school concept. What we have is a "legal system", designed by and for the legal profession to line their wallets. It seems that justice is an occasional, accidental by product that occurs if and only if it can not be prevented. Apologies to any of you who are decent, upstanding members of that profession.

 

The best 'legal' advice I was ever given was by a LEO who said if you catch the thief, the best 'punishment' tool is a piece of 500 or 750 MCM aluminum wire with the insulation on. Wrap one end with friction tape for a grip. He said this won't break any bones or kill them, but does the best job of raising bruises. He said get 'em on the ground then beat 'em until your arms are tired... They won't be back for seconds.

 

"All The Usual Standard Disclaimers Apply."