Subway copper thieves brought NYC's underground transit system to a screeching halt last week after a midnight heist of over 500-feet of vital railway cable.
The brazen theft seriously snarled some of the most traveled routes of the subway, causing delays and detours for at least 100,000 commuters, an MTA spokesman said.
"This is a money making crime," the commander of the NYPD's Transit Bureau, Chief Joseph Fox, angrily told reporters. "It's economy-driven."
Copper has become exceptionally valuable in recent years, and thieves even bolder than ever because of the sharp increase in value of the once dirt-cheap metal.
Stealing it from NYC’s electrified subway where it helps to power the infamously-deadly “third rail” takes a lot of chutzpa and courage, but at $3.00 a pound -- up from a scant 80-cents only ten years ago, the risks are apparently well worth it.
The fact that no one did get fried in the heist, however, has raised some investigators’ suspicions that it might have been an inside job, not to mention that the copper purloiners chose an area of track where they knew no security cameras were installed and that was also conveniently situated beside an unlit parking lot.
As well, electrical switchboxes had been tampered with in a manner that would temporarily divert power and thereby delay discovery of the theft for at least a day; a further act of sabotage which could have damaged rail infrastructure and caused injuries to passengers in the process.
New York City has almost 900 miles of subway tracks which have been similarly plundered and pillaged of copper cables about a dozen times already in 2015 alone.
That crime wave and its repercussions has prompted at least one irate New Yorker -- US Senator Charles Schumer -- to propose legislation permitting stiffer penalties for copper crooks and their conniving cohorts.
"It is time to put thieves who steal scrap metal from critical mass transit infrastructure, as well as homes and businesses, behind ironclad bars," Schumer said. "Every ounce of copper or metal stolen from New York's critical infrastructure could cause the next big commuter delay, a subway line suspension, or even a disaster."
