My Mother Irons and My Father Steels: Confessions of a Scrap Metal Czar
Chapter 1
An Introduction to the Scrap Business
It’s an old saying in the scrap business: “My mother irons and my father steels.” And in my case, it was pretty much true, with the exception being that we usually had maids doing the ironing. After all, guys in the scrap metal business throughout the twentieth century had several basic things in common: For the most part, all were Jewish and all became wealthy. Very wealthy. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this phenomenon as well. Jews were traditionally peddlers or merchants going back for many generations in the old country – that being Russia, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and so on, so they’ve had plenty of practice in buying and selling stuff. If you couple that with a tradition of education and an evolving paradigm of acceptability in America at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution that Jews created as their own, then one can see how so many Jews in this profession became successful. It is well known that Jews have succeeded in many fields in a vastly disproportionate ratio to the number of their “Tribe.” Although comprising only 0.2% of the world’s population, and only about 2.4% of America’s population, it is no secret that they dominate the professions of doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial investors and consultants, scientists, intellectuals, business owners, Hollywood and television, and classical musicians – especially violinists and pianists. But few are aware of this specialized niche that has been flying under the radar throughout the twentieth century. Herein lies the purpose of writing this essay.
For those who don’t know, the scrap metal business refers essentially to two types of commodities – ferrous and nonferrous metals. A third can be considered precious metals such as gold, silver and platinum, but at that level, it isn’t really scrap anymore. Ferrous metals refer to iron and steel. These materials are worth very little per pound, but by handling large numbers of tons of it, the value can add up. Nonferrous metals are those that contain very little iron or steel, and include copper, brass, bronze, aluminum, nickel, tin, zinc, stainless steel, tool steels, tungsten carbide, and all the various combinations and permutations of these known as “alloys.” This is far more expensive material than iron or steel. Back in the day, a 40 ft. trailer of scrap steel would be worth about $500. The same amount in copper would be worth $30,000. Some scrap dealers handled both and some specialized in one or the other. Our company was strictly a nonferrous operation.
The basic premise of the scrap business is the same as that of any others – to buy as cheaply as you can and sell as high as you can. The major difference with scrap is that a scrap salesman, unlike any other type, is not trying to sell anything, but rather trying to buy scrap. A scrap salesman is really a buyer, but since his job is to go out and try to procure material to buy, he has to essentially sell himself and the virtues of his company’s service to an industrial purchasing agent to get him to sell his scrap to him. Conversely strange is that most of the guys (I had never encountered women purchasing agents in the business, at least at the time of my involvement) who were in charge of selling their scrap were also in charge of purchasing things for the manufacturing companies. So what you had were scrap salesmen buying from purchasing agents who were selling. Go figure.
What is scrap, where does it come from and how does it figure into the food chain? Scrap metal can appear in many applications. Stamping operations may stamp some sort of widget out of a sheet of copper or a beer manufacturer will stamp the top of a can out of a sheet of aluminum. The leftover form is scrap. Broken railroad train brake components are made out of alloys called “manganese bronze” and “aluminum bronze.” Giant machine gears are made out of silicon bronze or hygrade bronze, and when they wear out, they become scrap. Electrical cable and wire is generally copper or aluminum with a plastic or rubberized insulation, which can become damaged or can get stripped out of a building during a renovation, or out of a machine. Tools and bits made of very hard exotic steels containing valuable nickel and/or tungsten wear out and become scrap. Some car components are zinc die cast which have value. Heating elements on electric stoves are incalloy (incoly) or inconel, both containing nickel for heat resistance. Stainless steel of various grades are also commonly used in any application when the component must be extra strong, heat resistant or rust resistant. When holes are drilled in metal, the bit displaces metal like drilling through wood causes sawdust. In the case of metal, the “dust” is called bushings or borings.
Being a scrap dealer engenders two sides of the moral spectrum, like having an angel on one shoulder and a devil* on the other. The angel side is such that the object of the scrap dealer is to actually recycle this previously used “scrap,” so that it can be reused again – a fairly noble cause in all actuality, as is done with plastic, paper and other commodities. The way it’s done is to segregate and sometimes clean the metal so that it becomes a single commodity that can be sold to a smelter, who in turn melts it down, pours it into molds and can sell it as fresh metal, ready to be reused by industries. There are numerous ways the scrap dealer prepares or “processes” the metal for smelters. In the case of wire and cable, he must burn off the insulation, wash the copper or aluminum down, then shovel it into a machine that bales it into large bales with cardboard on the top and bottom and steel strapping holding it together, or into smaller briquettes that are strapped to a skid. In both cases, large machines compress the wire together into these bales or briquettes. Sometimes all that is necessary is to segregate a mixed load of scrap into individual 55 gallon drums. A load from a steel mill may contain 20 or 30 different types of metals. It is the job of a trained metal sorter to know how to identify the different metals in order to properly sort them.
Prior to the days of academically trained metallurgists using sophisticated spectroscopes and other laboratory equipment to identify metals, there was an old school “street” method of identifying metals. I couldn’t really tell you the origin, but it was passed on orally from generation to generation. It would be quite interesting to find out how it came to be. Since I learned it first hand, I can only tell you what I witnessed. I learned to sort metal from an old Polish guy named Stanley Herman. He told me he learned from someone back at Tyroler, another older scrap company. I don’t remember if he was connected to this guy, but I remember hearing about a one-armed guy named Izzy Sachs who owned Sachs Metals. I wonder if Izzy also was the guy who was the real killer in the Fugitive. Probably not. Not something a Jew would get involved with. At any rate, what Stanley taught me was pretty remarkable, and I have much to say about him later in this story.
A few examples of identifying and sorting scrap metals would be utilizing the tools of the trade. No, not a fancy spectroscope or chemical analysis, but a steel file, a drill, a magnet, some sulfuric acid and a grinding wheel. With some metals such as brasses, you would smack the edge of the object with a heavy file and look at the chipped away color. From that, you could tell if it was red brass, yellow brass or hard brass. You learned to know what objects and forms were likely to be a type of brass. With large, heavy slippers and other parts of heavy machinery, you would drill a small hole and pour acid in it. By observing the length of time it took for the acid to begin smoking, you knew what it was. In addition, you got clues by how strong the magnet took to it. Silicon bronze slippers were identified by feeling the bottom of it. If it was silicon, it was “smooth as a baby’s ass.” Various stainless and tool steels could be identified by how strong the magnet took, and also by touching it to a grinding wheel. Some types threw off tiny orange balls, and some we called “Hollywood metal,” because it threw off sparks that resembled stars. You learned to recognize the difference between cast aluminum and extruded aluminum, as well as number one copper from number two. Looking back, I’m amazed at how this process operated, and still wonder how it came to be.
In addition to buying mixed metals, sorting them and selling them to a smelter or foundry, sometimes you would get a straight load of one type of metal, so the whole key would be to buy it cheap and sell it for as much as you can get. Other times, you could simply broker the material. You would go and look at it, and if it seemed like the right situation, you could call other dealers or smelters and either deliver it directly to them, or get them to pick it up, so essentially, you’re just getting a finder’s fee.
*The devil side is explained in Chapter 4
Chapter 2
A Brief History of the Scrap Business
From what I can gather, the scrap business had its humble beginnings in the time-honored Jewish tradition of peddling. Many Jews were peddlers back in the old country. Due to rampant anti-Semitism, they had to use their wits and adapt some way of making a living under the radar. This tradition continued in the New World as well, at first, primarily on the lower eastside of New York City. Jews would sell anything they could, such as clothes (known as “schmatas” in Yiddish), jewelry, books, and what was known as “junk.” Yes, any discarded material, including nonprecious metals of any kind, were referred to as junk. Therefore, my grandfather and others of his ilk were in the junk business. Of that junk that relates to metal, as I previously mentioned, nonferrous metal has considerably more value than iron and steel which needs to be handled in great volume to acquire any significant value, thus, my grandfather and his two sons specialized in nonferrous scrap.
Speaking of my grandfather, he was the youngest of many brothers living in Odessa, Russia. His dad didn’t want him to be drafted into the army so he sent him off to Ellis Island in 1913. Arriving with only the languages of Yiddish and Russian at his disposal, he settled somewhere on the Lower Eastside and perhaps for a time in Brooklyn where he learned English and worked various jobs including milkman before going into the junk/scrap business. Eventually he married, moved to Newark, New Jersey, and raised two sons. The story I heard was that he was partners with a couple of other guys known as the 3 thieves (more on that later). Eventually, in the early 1930’s, they had a falling out and my grandfather headed for greener pastures in Cleveland, Ohio where he had a friend or relative. He continued to buy and sell scrap metal while his sons did some time in college and the navy. Eventually they both joined him in the scrap business driving a dump truck around to various industrial sites – an activity known as “chasing smokestacks,” and asking the purchasing agents or foremen there if they had any scrap to sell. Since they needed to segregate the different metals for resale, they had to rent a warehouse. Eventually they hired a few guys to help sort metal and do grunt work loading and unloading the truck. The aforementioned process of metal sorting was quite remarkable as a word-of-mouth folk process handed down from generation to generation, almost like something a native American would learn about nature from an elder. How anyone originally thought of this stuff is simply baffling! At any rate, it was around this time, in the early 1950’s that I came into the world: Cleveland, Ohio; son of a scrap metal czar.
As I grew up, my dad and his brother purchased a much larger warehouse and hired a fairly large crew of workers. The guys burning insulation off copper and aluminum, bailing and briquetting the clean material, driving towmotors, loading and unloading trucks, and other duties were all black. The foreman and the primary metal sorter were Polish brothers and the scale-master was Jewish. All were characters in one way or the other. Some of the black guys were brothers – literally. One of them named Willie had several wives, amongst them a couple black ones and a white hillbilly one. One day an unfortunate groundhog made his way into the warehouse. One of the guys beat it to death with a pipe. Where one would see intrusion, Willie saw opportunity. He brought it home to his white wife to cook up with potatoes. He was very excited. Baked groundhog? “THAT’S GOOD!” There was a guy named Bill whose grandmother died about 8 times – an excuse he used for not coming to work that he forget he’d used several times in the past. He also didn’t believe we landed a man on the moon. He believed it was on a planet that was closer! Then again, Bill used to eat cat food for lunch. A big guy named Calvin once got in a fight with another guy. He got smashed on the top of his head with a lead pipe. As his skull was cracked open and was bleeding profusely, he was rushed to St. Alexis Hospital. Yet Calvin was back at work a day or two later! Talk about hard heads!
Some of the blacks guys were offered foreman positions for more pay but none of them except one, later on, wanted any more responsibility. The extra money wasn’t worth it to them. They just wanted to put in their 8 hours and head off for some whiskey, a little gambling and a romp in a brothel. One day Eddie, the scale-master and later on my partner, a little Jewish guy older than my dad and my uncle was climbing around on the roof for some unknown reason and fell through it about 50 feet down into a steel drum. He broke a few bones but managed to recover and go on with his business. I went on a few runs with two different hillbilly truck drivers, both named Fred. One Fred, who looked like a country and western singer with greasy hair slicked back, had this strange habit of exclaiming every time he’d be behind a car at a traffic light, “Ain’t but one shade of green in the state of Ohio!” There was not a single vehicle in Ohio that accelerated fast enough for Fred after waiting for a red light to change. The other Fred was a little guy with coke bottle glasses. Every female he saw on the street between the ages of 12 and 102 were Bridgette Bardot to him. If he even saw an old lady with a cane, he’d go crazy – “Wow, look at that!” One could only wonder….
My uncle mostly stayed at the warehouse overseeing the operation and doing the books. My dad traveled around the country getting new accounts. He was incredibly successful and in a few years, was buying scrap from the largest companies in the country: General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Inland Steel, Youngstown Sheet & Tube, General Fireproofing, Westinghouse, General Electric, and so on, in addition to many smaller local accounts. In the summer months, my grandfather used to drive down to G.F. in Youngstown at lunchtime with a truckload of corned beef from Cleveland and feed dozens of their employees outside on picnic tables. This gesture bought him good will and continued business with a valuable client. Likewise, my dad built good relationships with purchasing agents by meeting with them on a regular basis, playing golf and taking them out for lunch or dinner. I recall one who brought his family up from Texas to spend the day at our swim club. For several years, my dad and uncle merged with another company who had a vastly larger facility in a rural town outside of Cleveland called Windham. It was manned by white hillbilly laborers and they could get away with burning insulation off wire in the open air without getting caught by the EPA or OSHA. Eventually the merger went sour and they split up. The guy in Windham continued to do what he had been doing prior to the merger. My uncle up and left for sunny California. And my dad went back on his own to the warehouse, changed the name of the company and continued to do gangbuster business with large companies.
Chapter 3
Portrait of a Young Man as a Scrap Czar
As the subtitle of this little essay goes, “My Mother Irons and My Father Steels,” my father engaged in what was a little known part and parcel of the scrap metal business – thievery! There’s really no term or euphemism to sugar-coat what was going on. To my knowledge, all or most scrap metal dealers were thieves. Don’t get me wrong – not every transaction was illicit, but many were. Sometimes they’d buy material at a low price and sell it for more and make a legitimate profit. But other times, they had to bid on material against other dealers. At times, one would have to bid even more than one could sell it for. The only way to make money on it was to steal it. My mother irons and my father steals! So you may be wondering, just how does one steal metal? As Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it, “let me count the ways.”
My favorite story told to me by either my dad or my uncle was in the early days, either before I was born or was just knee high to a grasshopper, the two brothers were chasing smokestacks in their old dump truck when they happened upon a factory somewhere in Ohio or Pennsylvania. The foreman or owner indeed had some scrap to sell, so the Jones boys offered the guy a price which he accepted, rolled up their sleeves and began carting the 600 pound 55 gallon drums onto their truck. But first the material had to be weighed since the price is always “per pound.” To their incredulous delight, they found the scale-master to be…..blind! Harold and Marvin looked at each other doing everything in their power not to let out shrieks of delight. The guy asked them how much each drum weighed. Without having been there, I can assure you that you never heard of such light barrels! The Jones boys laughed the entire way back to Cleveland with their booty! But this was just the tip of the iceberg.
In some summers between school years of high school and college, my cousin and I would work in the warehouse sorting metals, loading trucks and doing pretty much all the laborious tasks the other employees would do. It was work that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Well, maybe one or two of them…. In the summer, it was swelteringly hot, humid, filthy and polluted from the dirt, grease, and engine fumes from trucks and towmoters, not to mention being located in an incredibly polluted industrial section of Cleveland. We’d have a mountain of mixed scrap from a 40 ft. trailer in front of us with about 30 empty 55 gallon drums – one for each type of metal. We’d have to identify each piece, some weighing 30 or 40 lbs and drenched in grease by seeing how it took to a magnet, chipping it with a file, drilling holes and pouring acid in the hole, hitting it on a grinding wheel and other methods, then chuck it into the corresponding drum, with which it would land with an ear-shattering clang. Our mentor Stanley, the Polish guy, would often call in sick when our dads needed him the most and instead, be out on a boat in Lake Erie fishing and drinking a case of Michelob – as he proudly proclaimed, “The only beer I’ll drink.” When he passed away, my father sent me to attend the wake. He had no love lost for old Stan. It was the first time I saw a dead guy in a casket.
At lunch time, my dad would take us first to Cleveland Trust Bank, where he would bypass the customers waiting in a long line and have one of the tellers come running over to immediately service him. He and my uncle were like Jed Clampett at Mr. Drysdale’s bank because they did so much business with that branch. After the bank, we’d go to a little diner called Linka’s named after the owner Pat Linka. My dad loved that place because they served you immediately, brought the food out in about 2 minutes and he could be back at work without wasting time. On Fridays, they had two specials – whitefish and macaroni and cheese. Every Friday, we’d tell the waitress we wanted the whitefish with a side order of macaroni. Every Friday, a different waitress would tell us that those were both main dishes and couldn’t be made into a side order. Every Friday my dad would tell her to go into the kitchen and ask Pat if it was okay. Every Friday, she’d come out of the kitchen and say, “Pat said it’s okay.” You can’t make this stuff up! Other than learning how to sort nonferrous metals and get a side order of macaroni and cheese with my whitefish, the only other thing I learned is that this is a job that I didn’t want to ever do again in my life. After graduating college with a degree in fine arts, I moved to New York but to my surprise, I found it exceedingly difficult to get a job as a world famous artist, so decided I moved back from New York to Cleveland to work as a salesman in my dad’s business as a temporary way to build up some capital so I could return to New York and afford to live.
As I signed on, I was indoctrinated with the four prerequisites to the job: Get up early, work hard, be prepared to travel wherever is necessary to get accounts, and leave your morality and ethics at the door. None of these were particularly appealing to me, however they all beat being a starving artist living in a shithole apartment in Brooklyn. Be that as it may, I was given a company car, bought a couple suits, and hit the road. I’m the opposite of a morning person but I was helped by a system I devised that included running several miles at night so I would fall asleep quickly, setting the alarm clock, and taking advantage of having a good friend as a roommate who delivered newspapers very early in the morning. What he’d do is stop a this Jewish Hungarian bakery after his route, pick up some freshly baked poppy seed Danishes and leave the box on the kitchen table before retiring. Some strong coffee and those Danishes would get me fired up enough to hit the highway.
I ended up flying all over the damn country renting cars and calling on purchasing agents. Newport News, VA, Chicago, Indianapolis, Dallas, Tulsa, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, as well as nearly every town in Ohio, western PA and Indiana. Once I had an appointment with Coors Beer in Golden, CO. I flew to Denver, rented a Ford Mustang which turned out to be so underpowered I could hardly make it up the mountains. They had a big fancy headquarters with a gym in it, but when I reported to the desk, the secretary said the guy was sorry but he was too busy to see me! I grabbed some lunch, went back to the airport and flew back across the country. So basically, I went to Denver for lunch! There were times I drove through the worst blizzards and torrential downpours you’ve ever seen. Zero visibility. How I ever made it alive I’ll never know. Other times I’d have to drive 4 or 5 hours to meet a truck driver at 8 am, then help load a trailer with 700 lb drums filled with brass borings wheeling them 100 yards through a plant.
One of the cool things about traveling, however, was discovering things in the most unlikely places I never would have seen otherwise. For instance, once I was traveling on a back road near a tiny town called Mount Gilead, Ohio and of all things, spotted a gourmet vegetarian restaurant. Something like The Red Radish as I recall. I went in and the food was terrific! In that area, you would have expected hog jowls or something. Another time I passed by a strip mall in the outskirts of Toledo and stopped in a Chinese restaurant. They had this spectacular dish of huge shrimps on a platter that was on fire with sparks flying up toward the ceiling! And it tasted great. This wasn’t San Francisco or New York. It was a strip mall in Toledo. And once I was on a real dark, tiny road through a forest outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana and saw a little sign that said “Mexican Food.” I was hungry so I figured, what do I have to lose? It turned out to be a family with a little house where the grandma made her own tortillas outside, like in a village in Oaxaca or something. You couldn’t ask for more. But who would have guessed? One time, I was holed up in a Holiday Inn in Indianapolis. I went down into the bar for a drink and they had a man in a leisure suit and woman with a guitar and cheesy rhythm box singing Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally.” It was real corn and I thanked God I wasn’t doing that for a living. I went back up to my room where I wrote a long solo classical piano piece based upon the survival of Russian Jews. On the flight back home the next day, there was a tornado near the plane and I thought it was the end, the way the plane was shaking and swooping up and down. Couldn’t figure out why the pilot was allowed to fly in that weather. Maybe his wife gave him an ultimatum that he had to be home for dinner?
So many memories. I was at a plant in Alliance, Ohio that manufactured the largest cranes in the world. This guy who worked near a furnace there came up to me, removed his hat, and smoke was rising from his bald head! Then there was an adventure I had with my friend Dan who I talked my dad into hiring. He had previously worked for a scrap dealer and I wanted some company. We drove to New Jersey to look at some material once – another blizzard there of course. Then we went into NYC to see some music. As I recall, it was a cool woodwind octet led by Paul McCandless of the group Oregon. We showed up with practically no money so I presented the guy at the desk with a credit card, as if the shoebox he had would accept plastic. I acted shocked that he didn’t take credit cards and said I didn’t have any money. He just let us in for whatever we had on us. That’s how things were in the Village or SoHo back then.
Afterward, while driving on Canal St. in Chinatown, my Saab skidded on a slick brick street and banged into something. Stopped dead in her tracks. I had to have it towed to a dealer on the west side, of course on a Sunday night. Waited for over an hour in the freezing cold. We ended up having to fly back to Cleveland. When the car was ready, I flew back, picked it up and drove it back across Pennsylvania. Well, almost across. About two thirds across, it stopped dead in its tracks again. I hitch-hiked across route 80 to Youngstown where my cousin was living, crashed there and then my dad drove down from Cleveland the next day with flatbed trailer attached to the back of his Lincoln Town Car. We drove out to the middle of PA, winched the Saab up onto the flatbed and drove it to Ed Wolf Shaker Saab for yet another repair. Fun and games. How is it that Saab went out of business?
As much as all that traveling wore me down, those times were better than being in my office at the warehouse. The place was filthy with black dirt particles covering piles of old American Metal Market magazines and Wall Street Journals. The windows were opaque glass bricks and the lighting was florescent. The air stank from pollution and filth. I was bored out of my mind sitting there and had these big volumes of manufacturing companies to leaf through and call asking if they had any scrap metal to sell. The clock hardly moved and I couldn’t wait to clock out at 5. Another fond memory was when this raggedy-ass black guy, a regular client of ours would come in buying scrap car batteries. He dressed in old, torn clothes, always wore rubber boots with one heel drooping down under his foot, and he would negotiate with our scale master/foreman Eddie, a tough, old-school Jew with thick glasses. It would be like Ali-Foreman, a warm front meeting a cold front, a recipe for a thunderstorm or tornado. I think those two guys just loved the challenge of out-negotiating each other. So one day, as the story would have it, the old black guy walked into a Cadillac dealer and said he wanted to buy one. The salesman looked him over and to quickly get rid of him, just told him a crazy price that was way higher than what an already super-expensive luxury car would cost. The salesman’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when the guy pulled out a huge wad of cash from his pocket and handed it over! A lesson to be learned: Never judge a book by its cover.
Chapter 4
The Darker Side of the Moral Spectrum
In the Italian film “The Tree of the Wooden Clogs,” they depict some 19th century peasants in Lombardy taking some carts of their corn to market in rickety horse-drawn carriages. Before they get to the merchant’s scale to weigh the corn, the peasants hide big rocks under the corn to get more money for it. This depicts a practice that goes back centuries. When I first saw it, I was amazed. They pulled the same antics as us back in rural Italy! Not any difference than the aforementioned story of my dad and uncle and the blind scale-master. With that said, I would at this time like to open your eyes to some of the techniques we and probably most scrap dealers employed.
Wheels off: Our truck drivers of, (usually 40 ft. long tractor trailers) would pick up the material and on the way out, as they pulled onto the scale, leave one of the wheels that was farthest away from the scale master’s line of sight off the scale so it would weigh less. The extra missing weight was pure profit.
Extra tare: There are 3 weights – the gross of the material plus the container or vehicle it’s in, the tare – the weight of the container or vehicle, and the net – the difference between the gross minus the tare to give the actual weight of the material, which is multiplied times the quoted price/pound. In order to get more material for your money, you could artificially manufacture a heavier tare. This can be accomplished by several means.
Water-Filled Drums: Steel mills are enormous compounds encompassing many acres. For instance, U.S. Steel Gary Works is about 4000 acres. If you fill up a number of 55 gallon drums with water, load the truck with them, have it weighed going in, then between the scale and the location of the material, you pull off the road and dump out the water or even dump out the entire drums, then pick up the material and weigh out, you will have made beaucoup extra money.
The Belly: After being shown this technique and its profitabable effectiveness, I put my creative genius to work and devised a less cumbersome method for adding extra weight onto the tare. I designed a tank with baffles that was fabricated by a local welder below the bed of the trailer. It had a fill spout and drain holes below it. The driver would fill the tank up with water, weigh in at the mill, pull off and open the drain emptying the water into a field, then pick up the material and weigh out.
Disguising Grades: I once found a company in a small town I’d never heard of in rural Ohio that told me they had a significant amount of a scrap product called “Ni-resist” they wanted to get rid of. Even my dad never heard of this stuff but we researched it and found that it had various amounts of nickel in it which was an expensive metal. My dad located a smelter in St. Louis or somewhere who would buy it. So I met a few of our truck drivers at the plant. There were some cheap grades that were mostly iron and some expensive grades that were high in nickel, so I simply grabbed a few handfuls of the cheap stuff and dressed it up on top of the drums of expensive stuff. So simple that a child could do it, if he was a budding deceiving criminal. We took out several 40’ trailer loads of the stuff paying for a lot of cheap grade junk and getting many tons of very valuable scrap. I made my dad well over what would be a million dollars adjusted for inflation with that deal. Of course he gave me only a few lousy bucks commission. I wasn’t properly compensated until 50 years later when I got my inheritance.
Controlling the Weight: One other way to get around weighing the truck at the client’s was to first have it weighed at a public scale and providing the weight ticket. What’s the way to use that to your advantage? Buy your own public scale, of course! Which is exactly what my father did. Across the street from his warehouse was a big sign that read, “60 Ft. Public Scale.” Trucks from the area would use it, so he made money for that service, but the really BIG money was from weighing our own tractor trailers. He could literally write his own paychecks deciding how much money he wanted to make off the job that wouldn’t look too suspicious!
Sowing Confusion: In one deal, my father purchased an enormous amount of scrap from a large steel mill in Alabama. What he did absolutely amazed me. He went down there personally with dozens of trailers. They would drive in and out past the scale all day, some empty and some full. Some would go in and out empty as dummies just to confuse the scale master. Eventually he would just ask if it needed to be weighed and some of the full trailers got through as just being told they were empty. He basically ended up absconding several entire trailers full of scrap copper, brass, bronze and aluminum! It was exhausting in the humid Alabama summer and my dad passed out driving a truck and if not for the quick action of his salesman traveling with him grabbing the wheel, would have met his end.
Getting Bids: In order to be able to buy scrap from big companies, you usually had to bid on it. So my dad came up with a couple of schemes to get a step over the competition:
- The first was to form a minority company. Back in those days, the government was trying to help out minorities that had been formerly excluded from much of the business world due to systemic racism, so they instituted a policy based on affirmative action. Therefore, my dad asked one of the black guys if he’d like to front a dummy company to help us all get more business. His name was Harmon and he was an affable laid-back gent who was never without a cigar in his mouth. Thus “HarMet” was formed, and I would go out looking at material to bid on for that company.
- The second method of getting a leg up on bids was to form multiple companies to bid on the same material. The idea was to overwhelm the purchasing agent at GM or one of those huge corporations with bids that no matter who was the lowest bidder, it would always be us. One of my dad’s semi-retired friends formed a company called “Guaranteed Specialties,” – a name that I always loved for its ability to sound dependable yet say nothing whatsoever about what it specialized in at the same time. Almost a Zen title. We had our regular company, HarMet and a few others. But the hilarious thing was that they all had their own phone numbers that were all answered by our secretary. They just came in on lines 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I asked my dad if he was concerned that the purchasing agent would get suspicious if the guy kept getting the same woman on the phone? He was in such denial that he just responded, “A lot of companies are in buildings with central switchboards.” I don’t know….. But actually nobody ever did catch on.
As far as theft goes, however, what goes around comes around. At our warehouse, the employees made a side career of stealing from us. The primary mode was just putting a couple pieces of copper in your pocket on your way out to lunch or at 5pm. After a number of months, you had a barrel full of it that you could take to another scrap dealer and sell for hundreds of dollars. Also, men would throw material over the fence behind the building, then return later to abscond with it. The scale-master/foreman Eddie declared, “Those guys will steal your eyeballs if you’re not looking!” What we ended up doing was having Eddie search everyone at lunch and at closing time before they walked out. But other guys were more brazen and would break in at night to steal. Once a guy slammed a hole through a brick wall with a sledgehammer. Another time, a truck driver got in through a window, loaded up a truck and drove off with material. I seem to remember all or most of them getting caught by the cops. ADT Alarms had their work cut out for them!
Chapter 5
More Business as Usual
Don’t get me wrong, not every single transaction involved perfidious activity. In 1976, my dad purchased an enormous quantity of truck parts from White Motors. For reasons I can’t recall, they just practically gave away spare parts like seat cushions, mirrors, starters, transmissions, tires, wheels, wipers, and God knows what else. For whatever reason, they just needed all that stuff out of their plant so my dad rented an abandoned Sohio (precursor to Exxon) facility near his warehouse to store millions of parts. He advertised in local papers attracting an enthusiastic blue collar clientele of truck and automotive aficionados to which he sold the parts for a fraction of what an auto parts store would charge yet, since he paid only scrap prices for them, made a huge profit. Then he came up with a brilliant scheme. He took the foam seat covers, had them cut into small rectangles and since it was 1976, America’s bicentennial year, he went to Washington D.C. to have them authorize a “Clean up America” campaign to which he glued stickers with that slogan on the foam squares and sold them as lint removers from clothing. Many other transactions were straight up “buy at one price, sell for a higher price,” as strictly brokerage deals or the usual buy a mixed load, segregate likes with likes and resell them to smelters for more money. Also worthy of note is that we never accepted any merchandise that appeared to have been stolen. Part of this was not wanting to have cops or Feds show up and find us in possession of any pilfered property. When sketchy-looking so-and-sos would come in with copper plumbing pipes, wiring, drinking fountains, or any other things that looked stolen, we would send them across town to this other dealer who was known for taking plundered booty. Worth noting that the other dealer became a very wealthy philanthropist in later years, although nobody knew much of his wealth was obtained via ill-gotten gains. At any rate, I suppose in retrospect, our motto was “If anything was to be stolen, we’ll be the ones to do it.”
Another fascinating dimension to this business that I discovered the hard way occurred one time that I visited a local manufacturing facility and talked the purchasing agent into dumping his current scrap guy and selling to us. I was all proud of myself but when I told my father, he hit the ceiling. “You can’t take that account away. It belongs to Weinberg!” As I found out, my dad was in a kind of cabal with two other scrap dealers. It was sort of like a mafia thing where everyone agreed to have their own territory. I don’t know if either one of those guys were prone to violence or not, but it sure seemed like something out of a movie or TV show. They wouldn’t touch any of our accounts and we wouldn’t touch any of theirs.
In the meantime, I picked up a temporary teaching gig as a professor at a private art college in Cleveland. I taught 3 classes for one semester while still running around looking to buy scrap metal. Being able to do it was admittedly a perk of being the boss’s son. After a couple of years, my dad sort of sold the business to a guy in Chicago who wanted him to retire and take it easy. But my dad loved the business – had it in his blood. So he set up a dummy business run by me, the scale master foreman, and the bookkeeper. I was the guy who was supposed to bring in new accounts, but my dad withheld several accounts from the sale, so we had seed money. That went on for a while until we’d had enough. The market had changed by the late 70’s and early 80’s. Well before China became a thing, Japan and Germany began overtaking American manufacturing, and exporting became more of a viable option. The so-called “rust belt” became an unfortunate phenomenon and many manufacturing plants closed. In addition, many plants figured out that they could do the same thing with their scrap that they were selling to us to do. So they were recycling nonferrous scrap in house. We decided to call it quits, so that was that. The warehouse finally closed its doors, and I moved back to New York where I belonged and still remain. The scale master guy Eddie retired to Florida and died there. I have no idea whatever became of John the bookkeeper. My dad rented an office in the suburbs and brokered metal using the members of his old mafiaesque cabal for a number of years until dementia started getting the better of him and he split his time between Cleveland and Florida where he passed on.
Chapter 6
Epilogue
As for me, it was just a phase. Lennon sang, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans,” (although the origin of that quote has been attributed to one Allen Saunders.) I needed money and this was the most direct way of getting it, not that it was easy. But it was less time consuming that enrolling in law school or medical school then building up a practice, and I couldn’t even afford to pay tuition in any college anyway. I most certainly regret all of the thievery I took part in, but it was just so normal for that business – a part and parcel of it, that it didn’t really seem like a big deal at the time. And no little guys were ever short changed. It was only the giant robber baron manufacturing industries run by fat cats with 5 luxury houses, country clubs, and major political influence that were busy polluting our air and water. Still, given the chance to do it all over again, I certainly wouldn’t, but 20-20 hindsight is easy. It all came via an evolutionary process of survival by Jews in Eastern Europe living by their wits as merchants and peddlers, dodging pogroms and widespread anti-Semitism, and establishing the same means of survival beginning on the Lower East Side and then throughout the US and Canada, teaching their craft to each succeeding generation as my grandfather did to my father, and him to me. Like all things I’ve done in the past from businesses to art shows to concerts, it all seems like a movie that I can’t even begin to imagine I was ever involved in. Like an alternative reality I somehow know about. But I know it really happened and like everything in life, it plies you with rich experiences and memories and as you see here, something to write about.
*Some names were changed in order to protect the privacy of those dead and living (although I doubt the dead will notice.)