Scrap Metal

The green patina gave the bronze statue of a gold miner a sense of antiquity, speaking to its 80 years of service in a small park in Mid-City Los Angeles. And then last week, a 22-month-old boy on his way home from day care noticed something awry in his daily routine. "No, no, no," he said from the back seat. His mother, Clara Magyar, turned to look. The 7-foot miner was gone.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has a special interest in supporting two state bills aiming to stop the widespread and rampant theft of valuable metals, including copper wiring and pipes. Sometime around 4 a.m. July 26, thieves climbed the walls of four office buildings in Santa Fe Springs and stripped large air-conditioning units of their copper wires, insulation and fans. One of the buildings hit: the sheriff's Commercial Crimes Bureau.

For the second time in four months, suspected scrap metal thieves have stolen a bronze statue in Covina, part of a collection of public art funded by a local developer. The theft occurred in front of a bank building late Friday or early Saturday. The thieves apparently used a truck to drag the 300-pound statue until it broke loose from its base, said Sgt. Ray Marquez of the Covina Police Department.

On a cold, wet morning at Atlas Iron and Metal yard south of downtown, scrap peddler Charlie Anderson was not happy about the cash he was handed in exchange for a truckload of junk. "Oh man, it took a week to collect this stuff," Anderson, 75, groused to his associate, Sunny Miles, also 75. "All we get for it is $17. After $10 for gas, that leaves us with $3.50 each." Atlas owner Gary Weisenberg sympathized with his customers.

Tap it, don't scrap it. With metal prices rising, beer makers say they expect to lose hundreds of thousands of kegs worth millions of dollars this year as those stainless steel holders of brew are stolen and sold for scrap. The brewing industry is coupling with the scrap metal recycling industry to let metal buyers know they can't accept kegs unless they are sold by the breweries that own them.

A rhythmic clamor of pounding hammers, buzzing grinders and clanging metal reverberates from the stone gateway of Eritrea's oldest open-air market. At first glance, the dusty bazaar behind downtown Asmara appears to be little more than a sprawling junkyard of rusted car parts, broken appliances and scraps of steel. But this isn't where old metal comes to die. It comes to be reborn. Used artillery shells are recast as combs for beauty salons. Empty vegetable-oil tins morph into coffee pots.

About once a month, Ying Guangwu tucks some cash inside his black shirt, slings a knapsack over his back, and hits the road. The square-jawed 33-year-old doesn't always know where he's headed or when he'll return. But he knows exactly what he's looking for: tons of scrap metal. A pen-shaped magnet in his pocket helps him determine the quality of some metals. In December, Ying spent two weeks in Guangdong province, a 20-hour bus ride away, rummaging through factory warehouses and scrap yards.

There's something big and metallic 60 feet below the ground in this town near the Czech border. Whether it's the fabled Russian Amber Room, gold or even scrap metal isn't known. But treasure hunter Christian Hanisch hopes to snake a camera into an underground cavern to prove he has discovered Nazi plunder buried in the final weeks of World War II. "I am sure that there is gold or silver down there," said Hanisch, who hopes to begin drilling within days. Hanisch was led to the spot on the fringes of Deutschkatharinenberg, about 100 yards from the Czech Republic, by a set of coordinates he found in a notebook belonging to his father, a former Luftwaffe radio operator who died last year.

Grave robbers, a curse of burial grounds for centuries, are back for new valuables: metal ornaments that can be melted down for quick cash as copper and other metal prices climb. In West Virginia, it was vases bolted to headstones. In Washington state, it was bronze markers on veterans' graves. In Chicago, it was nearly half a million dollars' worth of brass ornaments. "It's a crisis of the times," said Ruth Shapleigh-Brown, executive director of the Connecticut Gravestone Network, which monitors cemeteries for theft and vandalism.

Like many entrepreneurs, Nathan Frankel sees money where others see nothing. In the last five years, he has built a $15-million-a-year business selling scrap metal from abandoned appliances, assembly line discards and used car parts. So when Chinese companies offered to pay a 30% premium a few years ago for scrap to feed their booming factories, Frankel jumped at the opportunity.