For Thieves, Copper Is Gold in the Gutter
Soaring Prices for Salvaged Metals Spark a Wave of Property Crimes

By Candace Rondeaux and Dan Morse
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 25, 2007

In the District's affluent Chevy Chase neighborhood, the thefts began when the spring rains arrived. Copper downspouts vanished from the side of a house, causing its basement to flood. Later, someone was spotted pulling the gutters off another residence.

In all, thieves hit about 15 homes, police say, making off with a commodity that is more popular than ever on the black market: used copper.

Soaring prices for salvaged metals, driven by a global demand in Asian markets, have turned scrap into the new gold for the sticky-fingered set, leading to spikes in an array of property crimes in the Washington area and elsewhere. Manhole covers, beer kegs, light poles, air-conditioning units and even catalytic converters -- valued for the small amount of platinum they contain -- have been targeted to feed a $65 billion domestic scrap-recycling industry.

On several occasions this month, thieves dug up hundreds of feet of underground copper cable used to illuminate ball fields in Anne Arundel County, forcing the organizers of a youth baseball tournament to reschedule a half-dozen games. "We got hit three times in eight days," said Ray Fox, president of the Linthicum Ferndale Youth Athletic Association.

In Northern Virginia this year, crime reports are peppered with metal thefts. Among them: bronze cemetery flower vases and stainless-steel construction edging stolen in Fairfax County, copper gutters and tubing taken in Loudoun and aluminum siding removed from a yard in Prince William.

Thieves in recent weeks have crawled under cars to cut out their catalytic converters, a component of a vehicle emissions system, in a parking lot in the Annapolis area and a junkyard in Howard County.

With the price of aluminum near a 20-year high last summer, someone carted away the bleacher seats at the District's Fort Greble Field, home to Ballou Senior High School's baseball team.

In some cases, thieves have put themselves in great danger by stealing live electrical wires from buildings. A 41-year-old man was electrocuted this month in a vacant building in Pasadena, and a 47-year-old man was killed while stripping wire from a D.C. school last year. In the past year, about two dozen people have been killed across the country while trying to steal metals, according to news accounts.

Pepco spokesman Robert Dobkin said thieves in search of copper broke into the utility's substations eight times in the past year. "It's a commodity and they want to cash in on it, but our concern is injury," Dobkin said. "It's one thing to steal copper wire from a yard, and it's another thing to break into a substation with live electricity."

Metal scrap is often more easily unloaded than other stolen goods. Some dealers pay in cash, and scrap is typically processed in ways that obliterate any indication of its provenance. With the price of metal so high, an unscrupulous dealer might not be motivated to investigate where and how a seller's scrap was salvaged.

Legislators in many states have acted recently to more closely regulate the industry or are now considering doing so. In an effort to tighten controls on stolen material, the Virginia legislature approved a measure this year requiring metal buyers to record an identification number for unauthorized sellers, such as a Social Security or driver's license number, and make such records available to police upon request.

Because booming economies in such nations as China and India require massive quantities of metal, the market principles of supply and demand have made metal theft far more profitable than it once was. Copper traded for $3.35 a pound in June, a more than fourfold increase over its price in 2003. Platinum traded this month at about $1,300 a troy ounce, more than twice its value five years ago -- fueling the criminal appetite for catalytic converters.

Chuck Carr, a spokesman for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade association, said industry watchers have seen a rise in relatively large-scale, brazen thefts, such as the stealing of scrap-laden trucks. "We've seen situations where loaded shipping containers have been stolen," he said.

Carr said his organization has encouraged dealers to join a nationwide alert system that tracks unusual thefts and warns dealers to be on the lookout for stolen scrap.

In Chevy Chase, which has among the lowest crime rates in the District, the downspout thefts created a localized uproar. "When there's thefts like this, people get nervous, and their sense of calm, their sense of safety, gets broken," said Andy Solberg, the police commander whose district includes the neighborhood.

The crime wave lasted about a month, until police arrested two men in a stolen car on their way to a scrap yard in Prince George's County. The trunk and back seat were loaded with crushed copper downspouts, Solberg said.

The men could face stiff penalties for driving a stolen car -- a felony -- but the copper heists are misdemeanors and probably won't bring much jail time, Solberg said. "You can steal a lot of copper downspouts in Chevy Chase, or you can steal three bars of soap from CVS, and in the eyes of the law there's no difference," he said.

Metal bandits watch prices closely, of course, including those for stainless steel. In April, Ernest Vinson of Landover was charged in Charles County with the theft of as many as 35 empty beer kegs snatched from behind two Waldorf restaurants, an Applebee's and an Outback Steakhouse.

In a sworn statement, Sheriff's Detective J. McKenzie wrote that Vinson admitted that he stole at least some of the kegs. At the Applebee's, he and an accomplice are suspected of cutting the lock of a dumpster-area enclosure and loading the kegs into a sport-utility vehicle. McKenzie wrote that Vinson told her he had sold the kegs to a scrap buyer for about $27 apiece.

Some beer distributors have sought to protect themselves by increasing the deposits keg beer buyers plunk down for the kegs, which is traditionally as little as $10. The thinking is that people will keep them tightly secured.

"We're not trying to penalize anyone," said Keith Chmiel, vice president of sales at an Anheuser-Busch distributor in the Washington area. "We just want to get our kegs back."

He might be in luck. The price of stainless-steel scrap dipped recently to about 36 cents a pound, according to the average price given by four area recyclers. That translates to only about $11 a keg.

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.