STEALING FERRIS WHEELS AND GOLD BATHTUBS (COMMENT).
STEALING FERRIS WHEELS AND GOLD BATHTUBS (COMMENT). Dick Weisfelder commented on yesterday’s post about the theft of school buses to be resold as scrap that in Toledo a chop shop operation which stole and chopped up semi-trailer trucks had been broken up. I realize that while I have been posting about what to me are exotic thefts, I have not been thinking of them with the vision of a criminal. I posted here about the theft of a gold bathtub and remarked that Dashiell Hammett claimed to have known a man who stole a ferris wheel. I have been quoting the Hammett line since I first read it some fifty years ago, but it had not occurred to me until today that the man must have stolen the ferris wheel for scrap value. He had never had to address the problem of fencing a ferris wheel. And, of course, to the thief or thieves, the gold bathtub was simply a large lump of gold.
Have we already covered the cast iron that was stolen off the New York City lot when
an historic cast iron building was taken down, but its pieces, destined for reassembly, were, instead, stolen by random people to sell as scrap metal. There had been no
attempt to guard the pieces just sitting there. In Manhattan!