Thieves exploit chaos in Katrina Zone (robbing & stealin
http://risingfromruin.msnbc.com/2006/06 ... theft.html
Thieves sting good SamaritanPosted: Sunday, June 25 at 11:04 pm CT by Mike Brunker
Contractor Dwight Billingsley, who helped battered Hancock residents after Katrina, says he’s going home after being hit twice by thieves.
WAVELAND, Miss. – When contractor Dwight Billingsley rushed to the Mississippi Gulf Coast just days after Hurricane Katrina struck, he figured he could use his house-moving equipment and expertise to make some money and at the same time help people in need.
Ten months later, the 45-year-old Pine Bluff, Ark., resident is demoralized, tens of thousands of dollars in the hole and ready to head home after losing most of his heavy equipment and tools to thieves.
“I’m going to finish the house I’m on now and go home,” he says morosely, reclining on the bench of his cramped camper’s dinner table. “It’s all I can stand.”
Law enforcement officials along the Gulf Coast say Billingsley’s experience is hardly unique. Rings of thieves increasingly are taking advantage of the industrious chaos in the hurricane zone and making off with anything that isn’t guarded, locked up or nailed down, including heavy equipment and more easily stolen items like power tools, lawnmowers and golf carts.
The National Insurance Crime Bureau, a nonprofit organization that works with local law enforcement, recently established a Gulf Coast task force to focus on the equipment thefts as well as other insurance-related crime in the area.
The initiative already has borne fruit with the bust of a ring in Livingston, La., according to NICB officials.
In that case, authorities arrested five people, issued a warrant for a sixth and recovered 27 pieces of equipment, including “Bobcats (loaders), golf carts and Gators (small utility vehicles),” said NICB Special Agent Phil Clark. The defendants were working as contractors when they weren’t robbing their competitors, and had a lucrative sideline selling the stolen equipment, he said.
Thefts of heavy equipment pose a difficult challenge for law enforcement because much of it isn’t registered in the way that other motor vehicles are.
'So available and so hard to track'
“That’s one problem that makes equipment so available and so hard to track,” said Allen Applewhite, a retired Mississippi state trooper who is heading up the NICB’s Gulf Coast task force.
Construction equipment like bulldozers and backhoes usually bear vehicle identification numbers (VINs) on metal plates, but they area easy to remove and few operators bother to file a report when they disappear.
“(The thieves) will pop the VIN plate off a piece of equipment and put it on something they’ve stolen, and the owner isn’t worried and he’s not going to report it,” Applewhite said.
In one recent case, he said, “Officers checked the VIN plate on a new bulldozer and when they ran it, it showed it belonged on a 1973 hay-bailer in Illinois.”
Often pieces of heavy equipment lack any identifying plates or tags other than manufacturer’s serial numbers, which can’t easily be checked by officers on patrol, said Bay St. Louis Police Chief Frank McNeil.
“If our officers see something without tags, they’ll stop them. But if the guy says he doesn’t have the paperwork, you don’t just want to just seize the equipment on the spot if he didn’t do something else illegal,” he said.
A rash of rip-offs
Officials with all three major law enforcement agencies in Hancock County say they are working numerous cases involving the theft of construction vehicles and heavy equipment.
Hancock County Sheriff Steve Garber said has investigated the theft of between 15 and 20 trailers since the storm.
“We have found some of the stuff that was stolen and we got the guys that did it,” he said. “At least some of it is being taken by other contractors so they can use it on their jobs.”
McNeil says his Bay St. Louis officers are investigating the theft of “a bunch of ‘Cats, bulldozers and one big track-hoe.”
The department also helped bust a man accused of stealing a bulldozer and trailer in Missouri, which he used to work as a contractor at the Bay-Waveland Yacht Club.
The suspect, Lewis Griffin of Sikeston, Mo., ran into trouble when a coworker saw him driving out of Bay St. Louis with a 25-foot cabin cruiser on his trailer.
“He called him on his cell phone and said ‘Why are you stealing that boat?’ but the guy just kept on going,” said Bay St. Louis police Capt. Tom Burleson. After the coworker reported the theft, Griffin was arrested in Missouri, where he faces grand larceny charges, Burleson said.
Waveland Police Chief James Varnell said his officers also have numerous reports of heavy equipment theft on their caseload.
So many contractors, 'Nothing looks suspicious'
He said accelerating rebuilding process makes it hard for patrol officers to spot suspicious activity because “with thousands of workers down here and the amount of people on the streets, nothing looks suspicious.”
He also said many contractors who were hit were parking their equipment overnight in the parking lot of a shuttered shopping mall.
“They leave a truck full of tools sitting there without locking them up,” he said. “Yes, it’s our job to protect that stuff, but you’ve got to help yourself too.”
Read previous post about how the hurricane has changed the face of crime
In addition to costing contractors and insurance companies millions of dollars, the heavy equipment thefts can charge a substantial non-monetary toll, as Billingsley’s case illustrates.
Because of the thefts, Hancock County -- where many homeowners face long waits for qualified contractors -- is losing a skilled craftsman who did double duty as a good Samaritan.
Billingsley, who has the dimpled chin and chiseled good looks of a Marlboro cowboy, says he didn’t intend to do good deeds when he arrived in Waveland in early November after spending a month working in Louisiana.
“I came down here to get rich,” he says. “But when you come down here and you see the big picture, things change. … So much destruction, so much devastation. It’s absolutely heart-breaking."
So between paying jobs, Billingsley helped his new neighbors, cleaning out drainage ditches, scraping lots, hanging screen doors, “whatever helped them, made them feel better.”
“I told him a long time ago, ‘You probably ought to go home. You’re not making any money giving it away,’” says neighbor John Impson, husband of “Rising from Ruin” citizen diarist Gwen Impson.
Hoisting a home
Billingsley also earned a photo in the local newspaper, the Sea Coast Echo, by using his crane to carefully lift a home belonging to Edward and Gloria Cook approximately 40 feet from Mollere Street in Waveland, where it had been deposited by Katrina's floodwaters, back onto its foundation.
The Cooks said they contacted Billingsley, who charged them the bargain price of $7,000 for the move, after finding his name and phone number on a sign he left on their property that read: “Katrina moved it; I can move it back.”
Edward and Gloria Cook are once more living in their home in Waveland after contractor Dwight Billingsley hoisted it back on its foundation.
The Cooks moved back into their good-as-new home at the beginning of June.
“I tell you it feels good,” said Edward Cook, 83. “That bed feels better than a shower.”
But Billingsley also ran into some people who were glad he was in town for an entirely different reason.
His big rig, with a specialized Lowboy trailer he used to haul his crane and a container full of tools, was parked on a dead-end private road in the Kiln, a rural community about 10 miles north of Waveland, when it disappeared the night of Jan. 23.
'They took everything'
“I left at 8 p.m. and went back at 4 a.m. and it was gone,” he says. “They took my truck and trailer, tools, all my clothes, my tennis shoes, everything.”
The tools included the jacks he uses to raise homes back onto their foundations, boxes of hand tools, “come alongs” (ratcheted hoists), and “so much else I can’t remember.”
Billingsley himself found the truck cab “eight or nine days later,” parked on a rural road in neighboring Harrison County with the cab lights on and the windows rolled down. His trailer and tools have not been recovered.
Billingsley says his insurance company paid him only about $9,000 for his trailer and tools, so he had to take $10,000 out of his savings to get his crew back to work. His biggest purchase: An $8,500 hydraulic jack system to allow him to lift and stabilize houses knocked off their foundations by the storm.
But on the night of May 6, the thieves struck again. This time they entered a job site where Billingsley and his crew were jacking up a house on St. Charles Street in Bay St. Louis, broke the connections on the pump and made off with the 300-plus-pound piece of machinery.
“It wasn’t a crackhead,” Billingsley says. “It was somebody who knew what it was and what it’s used for.”
This time Billingsley sent his crew back to Arkansas
“It’s not only the loss of the pump, but the down time and the other customers that go elsewhere because we can’t get to them because all our tools have been stolen. It hurts us more than one way.”
Late-night vigil
Since the second theft, Billingsley hasn’t been working or sleeping much. He began creeping around at night, often on foot, in an attempt to identify the thieves.
Big rigs and heavy equipment sit unguarded at night in a parking lot in rural Kiln, Miss. (Jim Seida / MSNBC.com)
“I’ve been in every bush in Bay St. Louis the last few weeks, behind every stump,” he says of his nighttime forays.
Back in Pine Bluff, Billingsley’s wife, Sandra, says she wishes her husband would come home. But she knows he’d like to do one more good deed for the hurricane survivors before he pulls out.
“It’s not just him; there’s so many people down there who have had their trailers unhitched and stolen,” she says of his quest to identify the crooks. “Katrina took just about everything they had and now the thieves are coming in and taking the rest.”
