Rough hustling
in the industrial corridor
Cops, business owners
say scrap-metal scavengers are getting more prolific
By TIMOTHY
INKLEBARGER, Staff Writer
Equipped
only with a grocery store shopping cart and his leg muscles, Michael Lee heads
out every day to the Kinzie Industrial Corridor west of downtown in search of
wooden pallets.
Lee, 49,
said he easily makes $150 a day collecting and selling the discarded pallets
from businesses in the area. But he is not the only one in the manufacturing
district bounded by Grand,
Erin
Crouch, director of the
"We
spend a lot of time talking to [the police] on behalf of our companies,"
she said.
Lee said
he only collects wooden pallets, but added that 10 pounds of copper will get
you more than $20 at a junkyard.
"Copper
used to be cheap but now it's like $2.10 a pound," he said. "You get
you 30 or 40 pounds of copper-do the figuring yourself."
With 13
wooden pallets stacked on top, Lee pushed his shopping cart up the middle of Damen on a Tuesday afternoon. Lee said he was heading for a
nearby shop where he said he could get $45 for his load.
"They
call this here rough hustling, but it pays off," he said. "It's a
legit moneymaking business, but there's people who
take the legit-ness out of it. You know how that goes."
ICNC
member Bill Truppa, who runs Acorn Garage at 417 N.
Hoyne, said his business has been robbed so many times he had to install video
surveillance cameras to catch the thieves. About a week ago, Truppa said he caught a homeless man in the middle of the
afternoon cutting the copper wiring off of a set of jumper cables in the back
of his service truck.
"They'll
steal anything that's not nailed down," he said. "You can report it
to the police but it's the homeless people that's doing it … you've got to
catch them."
Truppa said thieves also stole the metal door from the toolbox on his
service truck last summer. He said he suspects many of the thieves are living
under the nearby Metra rail line between Carroll and
Hubbard.
Crouch
said some 20 homeless people can be found underneath the viaduct on any given
day. She said she's heard from the 13th District police that it has gotten so
bad some have started stealing manhole covers from the street.
Juan Clas, community-policing sergeant for the 13th District,
said he was unaware of manhole covers being stolen in the industrial corridor,
but he acknowledged that scrap metal thefts are common there.
Beat
officers make a sweep of the Metra viaduct area about
once a week, ordering the homeless to leave, he said.
"For
some reason they keep coming back," he said. "They refuse to go to
human services. We are trying to reach out to them, especially now that it's
going to get cold."
He said
police give the homeless 24 hours notice before coming and they allow them one
bedroll, five blankets, and no more than two bags to take their belongings. Clas said they sometimes have furniture such as couches and
chairs set up under the viaduct; he was told by other police officers that
during one of the sweeps they discovered that a homeless man had hooked into
the Metra's power supply and had plugged in a
television set.
Clas said police still have no idea where the scrap metal is being
sold, but surveillance cameras installed by businesses in the area have helped
identify those committing the burglaries.
Crouch
said the ICNC has requested that police sweep the area several time a day for a
few weeks to send the message that the homeless cannot simply leave until the
police are gone. But Clas said the district does not
have the manpower to monitor the area that heavily.
"If
we shoo them off twice a day, they would come back twice a day," he said.
"We can't arrest them for being homeless because it's not a crime to be
homeless."