Masonry Magazine September 1979 Page. 13
THIEVES
Nationwide are a low 5 to 10 percent, contrasted to 70 percent for automobiles.
Although contractor associations, law enforcement agencies and insurance companies are beginning to come to grips with the problem, much remains to be done. Most of the equipment thieves appear to be specialists who may get inside help from a few dishonest employees who work for a contractor.
Inflation is a big lure in this kind of operation. With costs of heavy equipment soaring, many users of construction equipment are eager to buy without asking questions. The stolen machinery is usually fenced by the thieves, who receive a percentage of the sale price from the fence.
While automobiles are registered and titled, and carry standardized vehicle identification numbers, off-highway vehicles such as construction equipment carry identification numbers that vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and are sold without titles to provide proof of ownership. In 1977, federal investigators lost a case involving a stolen industrial vehicle because the suspect produced a piece of paper topped by a phony, handwritten letterhead proclaiming he was the legal owner. His lawyer argued he had purchased the machine not knowing it was stolen. The man was well known as a trafficker in stolen vehicles, but there was no way for the authorities to prove it.
In addition, says Hugh Goulding, president of the Illinois Equipment Distributors Association, "police wouldn't know the equipment if they were face to face with it."
That's one of the reasons Goulding has helped form E-TIP, or Equipment Theft Information Program. He is trying to set up a system of prevention and recovery that ranges from educational programs for law-enforcement people to plans for a two-way radio system that would link all the state's construction crews as lookout for stolen property.
At the request of the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) and the American Farm Bureau, the FBI has modified its National Crime Information Center (NCIC) to include owner-applied identification numbers of construction equipment and components in its stolen vehicle file, which is used by virtually all law enforcement agencies across the country.
The AGC has also received the cooperation of four of the leading companies which auction construction equipment. The four have agreed to run a serial number check of machinery through the NCIC before allowing it to be put up for auction.
Henry Balevic, a former FBI agent, has started his own business to deal with equipment theft. Called the Equipment Recovery Corporation, the firm is based on the concept of building a private computer data bank similar to NCIC.
Balevic says few stolen off-highway vehicles are actually registered with the NCIC, because of the confusion over the widely varying vehicle identification numbers. Another problem that Balevic hopes to solve is that of parts: although off-highway vehicles do carry some sort of number which can be listed with NCIC, serial numbers on engines, transmissions and other components do not, making it almost impossible to recover stolen parts.