Copper Thieves Wreak Havoc Across Communities

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RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

Things made out of copper are disappearing: copper vases from gravesites, plumbing from outdoor showers, copper gutters and downspouts. Global demand is pushing the price of copper up. Today it sells for about $3.40 a pound. That's more than triple the price just a few years ago.

And thieves around the country have taken notice. They're snatching all the copper they can get their hands on. NPR's Chris Arnold reports from Boston.

CHRIS ARNOLD: A couple of weeks ago some burglars broke into Antonio Simmons's building in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood and stole something he never expected. Simmons is standing on the street in front of the six-unit apartment building he owns.

Mr. ANTONIO SIMMONS (Apartment Building Owner): We're fixing them up to convert them to condominiums, and we're actually in the last stages of construction here.

ARNOLD: So when Simmons got a call that there'd been a break-in, he was worried about the new refrigerators and appliances he'd just installed. But no, the thieves instead went straight to the basements.

Mr. SIMMONS: They kicked in this door here, and I left everything here for the insurance adjuster. I could bring you inside if you want to see the damage here.

ARNOLD: The thieves tore all the copper pipes out of the basement ceiling, flooding the basement.

Mr. SIMMONS: We opened the door and walked downstairs and found the basement flooded. And I was - I was like, you've got to be kidding me. And we're walking through the basement here and discovering all the copper pipes was missing. You know, not just a couple of pieces. I mean they were here for awhile doing this.

ARNOLD: So they just ripped it right out of the ceiling, huh?

Mr. SIMMONS: They just ripped it right out of there.

ARNOLD: You can still see some twisted stumps of copper pipe where it was snapped off. Simmons thinks they got about $500.00 worth of copper, but he's worried there could be $15,000.00 worth of damage to his flooded furnaces.

Mr. SIMMONS: I was feeling like I wanted to reach out and touch someone, to tell you the truth. And it keeps you up at night, because you go home and you're trying to sleep and you're thinking, are they coming back to break in?

ARNOLD: Around the country, people have been stealing spools of copper wire used for phone and power lines. In some cases employees have been caught stealing on camera. In Florida, if all of a sudden your central air conditioner stops working, you might discover somebody has come along and stolen the copper core out of your outside AC unit. In Grand Prairie, Texas, copper thieves are ripping copper wire out of street lights.

Sergeant BARRY CAMPBELL(ph) (Melrose Police Department): It's becoming a popular crime.

ARNOLD: Detective Sergeant Barry Campbell, with the Melrose, Massachusetts Police Department, is driving in his cruiser. Just this morning, he says, he got a call about scrap metal stolen from a local business, and in a neighboring town a church hall had some copper pipes stolen out of it.

As if stealing from a church wasn't bad enough...

(Soundbite of children playing)

ARNOLD: Campbell pulls his cruiser up by a local elementary school playground and gets out.

Sgt. CAMPBELL: You see the rock there?

ARNOLD: Yep.

Sgt. CAMPBELL: Well, there used to be a statue of a little kid reading a book in front of the rock.

ARNOLD: Not any more. A few months ago somebody managed to steal the bronze statue. Campbell figures it could've weighed 600 pounds, and since there's a lot of copper in bronze, he thinks it was worth a couple thousand dollars for scrap metal.

And in one of the more galling recent metal thefts just about anywhere, whoever took the statue that same night also pried the bronze plaques off the war memorials around Melrose.

Sgt. CAMPBELL: It was all over town: people that had given their lives in Vietnam, a couple of veteran's plaques. It made me angry and it made all the other police officers angry.

ARNOLD: Campbell grew up here in town and knew one of the soldiers who was killed. He says he figures the thief was a local drug user looking for quick cash.

And as angry as he is at whoever did it, he'd equally like to catch the scrap dealer who bought the stuff.

Sgt. CAMPBELL: Anybody that took a pile of plaques for a measly couple of dollars is probably a bigger scumbag than the person who stole them.

ARNOLD: But a detective in a nearby town thinks at least some of the stolen copper in the region isn't getting sold to the local junkyards. He says he's gotten a tip that some fly by night operations are buying up a lot of stolen metal, filling shipping containers with it, and selling it for scrap abroad to companies in China and other countries.

Chris Arnold, NPR News, Boston.

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