1 -ton Bronze statue stolen and sold to scrap yard

[Anita]

Did anyone see this in the paper yesterday? Someone stole a 1-Ton horse statue, cut it up, and sold it for scrap. This is a sculptor's worst night mare (no pun intended).
Looks like they caught the thieves...hope they do something besides let them do. Why don't they have the scrap yards start asking for some type of verification of where the scrap items came from. Not everyone would have 2000 lbs of bronze sitting around, regardless of what size the pieces were.

Stolen horse statue worth $4,000 as scrap, $500,000 as art

Associated Press
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
CHERRY HILL, N.J. -- Police say a bronze horse statue stolen from a now-defunct New Jersey racetrack has been broken up and sold to a salvage yard for a fraction of its value.

At the going rate, the bronze from the 1-ton statue sells for about $4,000. As a piece of art, it was worth about $500,000.

The statue was cut off its base outside the old Garden State Park horse racetrack. Part of it was found nearby, the rest at a Camden salvage yard.

Police say a tip led to Saturday's arrest of 33-year-old Ian MacDonald. He is charged with theft and conspiracy. Police are looking for three other suspects.

MacDonald is being held in lieu of $55,000 bail. Messages left with the police spokesman and at MacDonald's home weren't immediately returned.

Here are two other links:

3 others charged in theft of horse statue
Joseph Lesniak, 32, of Pennsauken, Brian McMullen, 33, of Sicklerville and John Silcox III, 36, of Mount Ephraim are charged with conspiracy and theft, Cherry Hill police said. If they're convicted, they face up to 10 years in prison for each offense.

Ian MacDonald, 33, of Audubon, arrested over the weekend, also faces conspiracy and theft charges in the case. Police Lt. William Kushina said MacDonald "may or may not" have shared information that helped lead detectives to the other three men on Monday.

"At this point, I'm pretty confident and think we have everyone who was involved," Kushina said. The men are due for a preliminary hearing July 30 in Superior Court in Camden.

MacDonald was released from the Camden County jail Sunday evening. Lesniak, McMullen and Silcox were released from police custody Monday on their own recognizance.

The bronze racehorse statue, known as "Primitive," was one of two remaining at the old track when it disappeared sometime in the past week or so.

Weighing in at roughly a ton, the artistic piece was reported to be worth about $500,000. Its scrap value was about $4,000, based on the current price of bronze.

Kushina said he understands that all four men helped plan the theft.

"They used a piece of construction equipment to knock it from its pedestal, then broke it apart, I guess, in manageable pieces and carried it away in a truck," Kushina said.

The pieces were taken to a Camden scrap yard. The name of the scrap yard was not immediately available Monday. Police are investigating whether the scrap business knew the metal was stolen, Kushina said.

He said the men were due to receive "less than a few thousand dollars" for the material.

"I would think that it is not salvageable," Kushina said. He said a couple of the men may work in construction near where the statue stood.

A tip helped lead detectives Paul Coxson and David Dlug to MacDonald, Kushina said. Throughout the investigation, he said, the detectives "got a lot of information from a lot of different sources," though he declined to share many specifics.

Anita

[Anita]

This is the photo I found of the stolen and destroyed bronze statue. Can anyone identify the sculptor?

[Landseer]

Saw that but not a photo till now, shame!

"Why don't they have the scrap yards start asking for some type of verification of where the scrap items came from. Not everyone would have 2000 lbs of bronze sitting around, regardless of what size the pieces were."

because SOME of those scrap yards are pretty shady themselves, maybe run by those with criminal pasts and the like, let's face it, for some convicted felon or ex drug lord what other kind of work or business could they possibly do that requires zero skills, and only a vacant lot and is basically on par with a garbage collector?

Any idiot could tell this was stolen, the scrape dealers also know that heavy copper wire is stolen from utilities, espcially when a couple of gringo type greasers drive up in an old beat up truck full of fairly new looking copper cable, it's obvious they were not remodelling their dining room witing when they come with 3/4" thick cables!

[donnadodsonarti]

Anita-
Is it possible to post the message with the image to the National Sculpture Society in order to identify the artist? They are mostly all realist sculptors.
Donna

[fritchie]

I didn't reply right away, but I seem to remember a similar theft at a defunct NJ racetrack roughly a year ago. As I recall, the other was of a horse but without rider, and in a traffic circle the artist or community hoped could be incorporated into the incoming real estate development. I suspect this is at the same site.

I don't recognize the style at all, but I like the work.

[rustyjames]

It get's worse, there's been incidents of cemeteries being robbed of grave markers and other items such as some doors on a mausoleum that weighed about a ton. I agree, the scrap yards should know better. Around where I'm at when you bring in substantial loads of copper, bronze or brass, you get a check and they want to see your drivers license. Sometimes the police are hanging around the yards.

[rustyjames]

Here's link to name of statue and artist:

http://cbs3.com/local/bronze.horse.statue.2.774136.html


edited to add:

http://www.nbc10.com/news/16881543/detail.html?rss=phi&psp=news

[Landseer]

Here's link to name of statue and artist:

http://cbs3.com/local/bronze.horse.statue.2.774136.html



Gee, the reporters can't even coordinate their stories there LOL they all said "SLICED" off the base- like slicing cheese maybe? and they said one ton, half a ton, more than a ton, worth $1.85 a pound worth over $2.00 a pound.

"I was shocked," said Cherry Hill Mayor Bernie Platt. "I couldn't imagine anybody picking up a more than a ton horse and carting it off!"

It's a snap with a stolen front-end loader, one ton, two, doesn't make the controls any heavier!

"Tracks from a nearby front end loader lead to the sculpture's base.

"We theorize that someone got into the front end loader, knocked or cracked the statue off its concrete base, picked it up in the bucket and took it out of Garden State Park," said Detective Sergeant Joe Vitarelli."

WOW!! did they have to assign several detectives to figure that out??

Let's see, front end loader and construction equipment all around, tracks leading up t othe statue's base, nah, must have been hauled off by 10 to 15 really strong youths from a local street gang with ropes and a furniture dolly!

"Although the statue is valued at $500,000, says Vitarell, it could be worth even more because the pair was commissioned specifically for Garden State Park."

Somehow I seriously doubt being made for a now defuct demolished race track of little importance would add value.
$500,000 seems a bit "padded" to me.

[sculptor]

therein lies the downside to casting in bronze(with the hope that it will last generations or centuries)


"scrap" (one whole series of deleted expletives)
every age has it's irreverent savages

hell-----even an old fart like me could back up a pickup and tilt the thing into the back alone---
don't need no crew (it's only a ton)

nothing lasts forever

[grommet]

so is this an admission of guilt?:rolleyes:

[chris 71]

heres another story of a sculpture theft
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2007/01/02/statue-bronze.html

[Mr. Malloy]

Wow- Around here, you need a state business license as a "recycler" to get money for large quantities of anything. I can't even turn in a junk car that some person gives me because I do not have the right papers. But these cases show something else altogether; the state of public value of art is low.

[iron ant]

my uncle owned a scrap yard in Atlanta,south of the stadium in a ruff "hood".I cryed when he sold it,but I did get ten years worth of foriging.I asked him once about stolen goods,as it did not take a rocket science to figure out how wino's walked in with machined stainlees parts that where really heavy,plates of 1/2 metal,ect,the list is a mile long.His reply was his business was to buy scrap,not to question where it came from.I found that he had a point,but it was a intersting one to ponder.Freeking his partners son bankrupted the joint,found 50 gallon drums of lottery tickets,basically pissed it away.I believe I would have used some MMA on that punk,but jusctice works in a strange way,sell stolen goods,get put in the joint for blowing the profits he stole ,and spent on lottery tickets,I guess it is the american way? IA

[GlennT]

I guess it is the american way? IA

No, it is the way of a selfish individual who made bad choices.

The American way is to provide each individual the opportunity to pursue their dreams, and also to have the freedom to experiment and learn from their choices, be they good or bad.

[Landseer]

I asked him once about stolen goods,as it did not take a rocket science to figure out how wino's walked in with machined stainlees parts that where really heavy,plates of 1/2 metal,ect,the list is a mile long.His reply was his business was to buy scrap,not to question where it came from.

Some of that might be thrown out, I've seen lots of metal thrown in the trash in NYC, including a 12" x about 8" brass plate 1/2" thick, to a multi-million dollar a year business $20 worth of leftover scrap or discards is chump change, not worth having an employee take it on the subway or bus or their car to a scrap place a couple of miles uptown for $14 they'd get.
Time is money in business, and where I'm at it's $50 an hour they figure is what it costs them for shop overhead, so to send an employee out to a scrap yard and it takes an hour, it would cost them $50 in wages, SS, insurance etc etc. For $20 worth of scrap they'd LOSE money on scrapping it, so it winds up in the trash.

Wino's are trash collectors.

Not everyone knows the VALUE of scrap either, back in the 70's brass was worth 35 cents a pound and copper was 60 cents, nothing to get excited about unless you have a few hundred pounds worth collected. Aluminum takes a LOT of pieces to add up to a few pounds because it's so light.

OTH, with the statement that " his business was to buy scrap,not to question where it came from." wrong, if that was true then it could be applied to every other business with disasterous results. It WAS his business to not buy what was to a reasonable person- something stolen- cemetary grave markers, statues, new looking copper power pole cable, to knowingly do otherwise is receiving stolen property which is illegal.

Not metal, but there was a case a few years back of an Art Deco Detroit apartment building- the Lee Plaza, a 16 story building on the National Historic Register that was vacant and cement blocked windows on the lower floors to keep vandals etc out.

They broke in and over some unknown period of time stripped the entire gabled copper roof, turrets and all, copper wiring, plumbing etc, all of the windows and then all of the terra-cotta lions and other sculptures. The police estimated there were around 56 lions by counting the holes left in the brick facade.
Removing the roof left the entire building open to the rain and weather, as a result the interior, floors, plaster-work etc rapidly deteriorated.

The lions and sculptures allegedly were bought by a salvage place in Chicago, and several were sold to at least one developer who installed 6 of the stolen lions on his new brick apartment building in Chicago.

The police got involved and the salvage dealer claimed he bought the ones he had at an "antique fair" from an unnamed "dealer" and he was threatened with arrest and helped the cops locate and retrieve 24 of the others. They never recovered but maybe half of them and the photo shows them in the police storage room.

The other photo shows one of them closer up, an interesting design transisitional from Victorian to Art Deco (1928) even a hint of modern minimal.

If the building is demolished if it hasn't already been, then these will never go back up and recovering them was a waste of time in the end.

This says a lot from the article:

"The folks at Greene & Proppe say they had no reason to believe the lions were illegally taken from Lee Plaza, and, in fact, say they purchased them from the giant antique/salvage warehouse in Chicago, Architectural Artifacts.
Stuart Grannen of Architectural Artifacts says he bought them from an unnamed dealer at the Saline Antique Fair."


STORY:
http://metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=4663

PHOTO GALLERY:
http://www.forgottendetroit.com/leeplaza/photos.html

[iron ant]

hey know...I said it was the american way toung n cheek.Also the yard was huge,he ran the office and did not know what was comming and going unless he looked at numbers.I don't belive they would have taken facades or gravestones,where talking about people scraping large amounts,and until it is sorted it is all by eight.Oh well,It happens in every yard.Wino's srap is a reasonablobstervation,I guess that makes me a wino,although I don't drink anymore.....IA