Denny Kowalski heard the reciprocating saw before he saw the man under his delivery van, parked in the alley behind the Mill Street Diner. By the time he got outside, the thief was gone and so was the van's catalytic converter, one of 63 stolen in Foundry Row in the past three months.
Bellwater police recorded 63 catalytic converter thefts in Foundry Row over the past three months, triple the 21 reported in the same stretch last year and the sharpest concentration of a problem that has crept up citywide, according to figures released by the department’s property crimes unit. The neighborhood’s mix of long-dwell parking lots, taller work vans and late-night streets has made it what one detective called “a target-rich environment on a platter.”
Detective Alicia Munn, who leads the property crimes unit’s response, said the thefts follow a consistent pattern: two- or three-person crews working between midnight and 4 a.m., a battery-powered saw, and less than ninety seconds under each vehicle. The converters — prized for the platinum, palladium and rhodium inside — resell to unscrupulous scrap buyers for $50 to $300 each, while victims face repair bills that routinely top $2,500.
“The economics are brutally simple,” Munn said. “Ninety seconds of risk for a few hundred dollars, and the victim pays fifty times that to fix it. Until the resale market tightens, we are chasing a business model, not just a burglar.”
Small businesses absorb the hit
Denny Kowalski, owner of the Mill Street Diner, lost the converter off his delivery van last month and spent $2,800 on the repair — a painful bill for a business still rebuilding its cushion after a long fire closure. “Insurance covered some of it, but the deductible plus three days without the van, that’s real money for a diner,” Kowalski said. “The guy was under there for a minute. I heard it and I still couldn’t get out fast enough.”
At Forge Bellwater, the startup incubator whose lot fills with employees’ cars on weekdays, operations staff counted nine thefts in a single month before hiring an overnight security patrol and petitioning the city for brighter alley lighting. Hybrid models have been hit hardest — their converters carry more precious metal — and several biotech employees have taken to parking blocks away near occupied residences, trading convenience for coverage.
We tell people Foundry Row is the future of this city, and then they come out at lunch to a car that sounds like a stock car and a $2,500 bill. It only takes one of those to sour someone on the neighborhood.
Luis Bettencourt, City Council member, District 5
A push to squeeze the resale market
Bettencourt, who represents Foundry Row, said he will introduce an ordinance modeled on measures adopted in other states: requiring scrap dealers to record seller identification, vehicle documentation and photographs for every converter purchased, and to hold the parts for a waiting period before processing them. Two scrap yards operate within the city limits, and Munn said detectives believe most stolen converters flow through informal buyers who then move them out of the county in bulk.
The proposed ordinance has drawn a wary response from the recycling industry. Gil Hardaway, who has run a scrap yard on the neighborhood’s industrial edge for two decades, said legitimate dealers already refuse walk-in converter sales and worry the paperwork will burden honest operators without touching the bulk buyers working out of box trucks. “You can regulate my yard all day,” Hardaway said. “The guy paying cash out of a truck bed at 2 a.m. doesn’t fill out forms now and won’t then.”
Police acknowledge enforcement alone has limits, particularly with the department operating well below its authorized strength. Overnight patrol coverage in Foundry Row competes with priority calls elsewhere, Munn said, and stakeouts on parking lots are a luxury the current roster rarely allows. The unit has instead leaned on prevention: a weekend etching event at Founders Park’s lot, where officers engraved vehicle identification numbers onto more than 400 converters, making them traceable and harder to resell.
The department also credits camera footage from newer buildings with two recent arrests. A crew caught on video working a loft building’s garage was stopped three weeks ago with eleven converters in the trunk; both men face felony theft and organized retail crime charges, and Munn said detectives are working to link them to additional cases through tool-mark analysis on the cut pipes.
For now, Munn’s advice to Foundry Row drivers is unglamorous: park in lit, trafficked areas; ask building managers about garage access; consider a welded cage or cable device for high-clearance vehicles and hybrids; and call immediately about anyone working under a car at night. “Nobody changes their own oil in a parking lot at 3 a.m.,” she said. “If you see it, we want the call while they’re still under the vehicle.”
Bettencourt’s ordinance is expected before the council’s public-safety committee next month. Kowalski, for his part, has already made his adjustment: the diner’s van now spends its nights parked directly beneath the alley’s one working floodlight, wearing a welded steel shield. “Twenty-two years in this neighborhood and I never locked the van,” he said. “Different times. You adapt or you pay.”