Move out of the way, catalytic converters with fancy metals like platinum, palladium and rhodium; some thieves like to stick to the basics, namely copper.
Police made an electrifying bust at a West Roxbury Home Depot, where they say six Rhode Island men were in the process of stealing spools of electrical wire after already accumulating an estimated $31,000 worth of the stuff over the course of a day.
Police responded to the VFW Parkway store for a call of a larceny in progress a little bit before 6:30 a.m. Friday and rounded up Jonathon Amperez-Perez, 31; Miguel Perez, 36; Abner Perez, 28; Jose Pirir, 37; Abraham Dayger-Enrique, 23; and Franklin Salas, 25; all of Providence, R.I.
The defendants are all expected to appear in municipal court in West Roxbury to be arraigned on charges of shoplifting, $1,200 and over.
Just last month, on Nov. 12, Boston Police arrested Jamal Stephen, 29, of Dorchester and Lorenzo Beechman, 35, of Hyde Park on charges that they had broken onto a construction site on Chestnut Hill Avenue in Brighton and attempted to get away with 18 spools of copper wiring.
While the theft of electrical wiring could well be for saving some money on a Do-It-Yourself electrical project, it’s the metal within — with just the right tensile strength, conductivity and ductility to make cables do their thing — that’s the hot commodity.
Copper values took a beating along with everything else in the recession of 2008 — a deep valley in the otherwise upward trajectory of the Commodities Exchange, or COMEX, charts where the value plunged from $3.88 per pound on June 23 to a mere $1.29 per pound on Dec. 22 that year.
It took nearly two years before it reclaimed its value in November of 2010, but since then, for the most part, things have never been hotter for the red metal.
Just a few years later, CNBC declared copper theft “like an epidemic” in the U.S. in a July 30, 2013 article — copper was valued at $3.04 that day. Slate deemed it “the golden age of copper theft” in an Oct. 1, 2013 article when it was $3.27.
Earlier this year, copper hit its highest-ever value, at a hair under $4.90 per pound on COMEX. While it has since dipped to a low of $3.21 in mid-July, it has been on the rebound once again.
That could be because of extraordinarily low levels of stock, as reported by the Financial Times.
At that newspaper’s Mining Summit in October, Kostas Bintas, co-head of metals and minerals trading at Trafigura, declared that global supplies of the metal are dangerously low — with inventories able to shoulder only 4.9 days of global consumption and forecast to drop an additional two days’ worth of consumption by the end of the year.