Stealing Steel
Whoso is partner with
a thief
hateth his own soul:
he heareth cursing,
and bewrayeth* it not.
-- Proverbs 29:24
( * to reveal or
expose)
Lately, there've been some real
doozies on the crime scene: in Alliance, Neb., a guy shot another guy in the
leg. Only it wasn't his leg -- it was his prosthesis. It's bad enough to shoot
a guy in his artificial limb. But then the prosecutor wouldn't return it to the
victim because they needed it to prosecute the case. So the victim had to sue
to get his leg back, and won . . . even though he didn't have a leg to stand on
in court.
Ba-boom CRASH!!!!
Then there was the not-so-intrepid trucker
in New York City who allegedly rigged up a folding contraption connected by a
cable to his cigarette lighter to cover his license plate when he drove by the toll
authority's cameras on the road, so that he could avoid paying the $40 toll. Only
he got caught, and now he's in big trouble. Guess you could say he DIDN'T have
a license to steal!
Badda-boom badda-boom CRASH!!!!
And there was the 7-11 robber in Dallas, wheelchair-bound,
who beat open the cash register with a baseball bat, skipped taking the cash,
but fled with 10 boxes of condoms and an energy drink. Not sure exactly how
those two types of loot are connected, but am sure you could cite some more
criminal exploits from your neck o' the woods, too.
Boy, we seem to be surfing on a crime wave these days. And I
mean: doesn't anybody have any SHAME any more? I know that God loves criminals
every bit as much as the law-abiding. It just seems like they're drowning out
His commandment to be honest, committing more and more brazen crime these days.
When it happens to you, you take
notice bigtime. See, a few weeks, ago, and this is all according to police
reports and still in the allegation stage, a trailer laden with $60,000 worth
of fabricated steel was stolen from my husband's steel plant. The trailer load
carrying 42 tons of erection-ready steel was waiting to be delivered to a
construction site, a hospital in Norfolk, Neb.
Someone must have hitched up a truck to the trailer, perhaps
in broad daylight during the momentary confusion while the two shifts were
changing, and vehicles were coming and going. Nobody noticed his rig pull out
with the neatly-arranged I-beams and angles behind, as if heading out to
deliver them to the job site.
The cold steel had become hot steel
again - red-hot.
But where does one "fence"
fabricated steel? A pawn shop wouldn't seem to have enough shelf space.
Apparently, the thief stashed the
steel somewhere over the weekend, and first thing Monday morning drove straight
to a local scrap yard, trying to pass off the precisely fabricated and
organized steel as useless scrap, good for nothing but the junk yard.
But my husband's co-workers had
noticed that the 48-foot trailer was gone, and in a panic, fanned out and
started calling every scrap yard within a 100-mile radius, hoping to prevent
the transaction which might spell the loss of that steel. They needed it back,
pronto, to make their delivery deadline or face weeks of delay and enormous
fines.
They happened to reach the scrap
yard where the thief was at that moment with the stolen steel. The scrapper noticed something odd: there was
a piece of paper over the place on the trailer where the company name and logo
usually were. Hmm. Why wouldn't someone want a company name and logo to show?
"I think I've got your guy right here," he told them.
Before he could go out in the yard and ask questions,
though, the thief got nervous and sped off in his rig.
A little over an hour later, he had
found another scrap yard in an adjoining state which paid him something like
$3,400 for his $60,000 load. Ignoring the obvious newness and neatness of the
steel, and the papered-over sign, that scrap yard unloaded the steel, paid him,
and sent him on his way.
But then THEY went back in THEIR
office . . . and heard the police radio squawking about a stolen load of
fabricated steel in a trailer that matched the description of the one they'd
just bought steel off of.
GULP!
They were in possession of stolen
property! If they didn't report it, they would be in even worse trouble. So
they did. And shortly thereafter, thanks to alert police officers, the thief
was arrested in his truck in downtown Omaha, pulling the empty trailer with the
papered-over company name and, reportedly, the money in his pocket.
The steel was returned, the thief
was arraigned, the scrap yard was out their money, it was on all four TV
stations and the newspapers, giving my husband's company more publicity than
they've had in 125 years in business . . . and everybody will live, if not
happily, then at least more lawfully, ever after. To try that again in this
town, you'd have to have . . . nerves of steel. †
