The Great Copper Heist

For almost a year, Mid City Recycling operated out of a cavernous warehouse next to a liquor store on South Industrial Boulevard in the seedy south side of Dallas. The startup seemed to have popped up out of nowhere. Out front there was a sidewalk sign with a Mexican flag letting everyone know that the proprietors spoke Spanish. Beside it, a small truck draped with a banner read, “$We Pay Big Bucks$.” There was no need to say for what.

For five weeks during the summer of 2009, undercover agents with the Dallas Police Metal Theft Unit watched Mid City. One at a time, they pulled into the rutted parking lot in unmarked sedans or SUVs. With tiny spy cameras attached to their shirts, they lugged in buckets of insulated electrical wiring and suspiciously stripped transmission lines, threading past dunes of scrap metal piled high enough to block out the ceiling lights far overhead. The metal was weighed on a small scale and the transaction finished at a glassed-in cashier’s window.