Sunday, July 22, 2001

Lost: Tractors, cranes, buildings, even bodies

Others not immune to FBI-tis.

By Marc Schogol and Robert Zausner INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

How do you lose construction cranes? Or houses? Or four tons of uranium and plutonium? Or dead bodies?

Easily, say those who work in purchasing, inventory control, and property management.

In the public and private sector, said Tom Orlowski, vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, "things like that happen all the time."

So when Orlowski heard last week's news reports of hundreds of missing FBI weapons and laptop computers, he was hardly shocked.

In just about every company, agency, organization or institution, Orlowski said, just about everything and anything can and does get misplaced, lost, forgotten about, or simply walk away.

Philadelphia's city controller is still conducting a review of all city property, but auditors already are scratching their heads over the whereabouts of two cranes valued at $70,000 and a $23,000 tractor that the Streets Department can't seem to find.

Auditors also are busy searching for missing cash registers, trash compactors, EKG and X-ray machines, microscopes, microwaves, floor polishers, sofas, lawn mowers, camcorders, and cell phones.

"They're not necessarily lost. They're unaccountable," said Tony Radwanski, spokesman for the controller's office.

In New Jersey, an audit of the West New York School District found that 115 computers were missing from one school and 18 from another.

"We can't exactly say they're stolen. They could be stolen. We just can't find them," said Peter Guilfoyle, assistant New Jersey state auditor.

Guilfoyle said audits sometimes uncover missing laptop computers and other items at New Jersey state agencies, but "they're not that frequent. A lot of times it comes down to sloppy records . . . or we don't have the serial numbers in the records."

In Harrisburg, Mayor Stephen Reed said 1,000 computers were missing from the city's school district. School officials disputed the figure, contending instead that in a district with nearly 8,000 students, the 89 missing computers constituted an "acceptable" number.

The office of Pennsylvania Auditor General Bob Casey Jr. has repeatedly cited school districts for poor inventory control. It often finds that computers are missing at schools, like the nine (worth $12,765) gone from the Duquesne City School District.

In 1989, after the Capitol's East Wing was completed, Pennsylvania records showed that about $100,000 worth of unused granite was missing.

The state sued a developer who had bought $7,500 worth of granite, charging that he'd knowingly hauled away more than he paid for. Threatened with the loss of future state business, the developer agreed to return the granite.

Granite is one thing. In 1977, the federal government admitted that it had no idea what had happened to more than four tons of "closely guarded" uranium and plutonium used to make atomic weapons.

Also supposedly closely guarded was the 81 pounds of heroin New York City police recovered in the famous 1962 "French Connection" case.

But 10 years later, authorities disclosed that 261 pounds of heroin - including the French Connection haul - and 137 pounds of cocaine had been stolen by officers from the police property clerk's office.

Some people don't even know where the bodies are buried.

"Without getting into too many specifics, we lost track of buried human remains," said Edward Novak, a spokesman for Elizabethtown State College in Pennsylvania.

"And I bet it happens all the time on other college and university campuses," Novak said. "People want to be buried at their alma mater, and years later they get forgotten.

"In our case, a gentleman's ashes were buried next to a lake on campus. When the bulldozers started to move in to enlarge the lake, someone said, 'Wait a minute! I think someone's buried out there.'

"No one knew about it, including the president. It turned out this was a private arrangement involving very few people and fewer witnesses. Lawyers were consulted, the ashes were moved, the widow was satisfied . . . but we had some nervous moments there."

Another category of property that gets lost is property.

"When I was at the University of New Hampshire . . . there was an excessive inventory of real estate property," said Michael Bruckner, a spokesman for Muhlenberg College in Allentown.

"Some were off-campus houses, some was willed to the college, and some [were] other buildings that the college owned near the campus. Nobody knew what the college owned."

That the missing FBI equipment included weapons isn't unique either.

In 1996, an antique Thompson machine gun was stolen from an unlocked cabinet in the Chester County Detective Bureau. A year later, a former courthouse employee, who had been convicted a decade earlier of repeatedly stealing evidence from the bureau, admitted that he'd stolen the gun and sold it.

One of the missing FBI weapons had been used in a homicide - obviously a serious matter, Orlowski said.

But he said most of the missing FBI items probably could be traced to people who had retired or been fired and didn't return their equipment and weapons.

"When you look at the number of layoffs that have occurred and the number of quick sales [of businesses] . . . any time you have that kind of activity, there's going to be people who are going to walk away with equipment," Orlowski said.

And when large companies buy large amounts of stuff, such as 1,000 PCs, "theoretically, somebody is supposed to count to see if they got all 1,000," Orlowski said. "Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes a receiving clerk looks at the stack and says, 'Yeah, it looks like 1,000.' "

Some of the best policing of supplies is done by the police.

State police in Pennsylvania and New Jersey say tight controls keep them from losing items such as guns, handcuffs and flashlights. Troopers in both states have equipment inspections twice a year; in New Jersey, retiring officers must turn in every item on a checklist before their pensions are processed.

But not even the police can keep track of everything. On Thursday, police in Aliquippa, Pa., reported that nearly $8,200 had disappeared from a safe in City Hall. A former assistant police chief said he'd given the money to a city employee for safekeeping before he retired in 1999.

He'd done that, he said, because he had to do something with the money, and at the time, the Aliquippa police didn't have a safe of their own.

-- Anonymous, July 22, 2001