Word: stolen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...came as a sickening shock. Two months after he had been kidnaped on his way to parliament and his five bodyguards slain, Aldo Moro, 61, president of the Christian Democratic Party and Italy's most eminent statesman, was brutally assassinated, his body left in the back of a stolen car parked in the historic center of Rome. The cruel ordeal was over, but the grief and anger over his murder had only begun...
...tractor truck simply hooked on to the trailer and drove it away. The driver seemed to know exactly what he was doing and aroused no suspicion. Nor was it the company's first experience. A year ago, two J.I. Case backhoes (trench diggers), worth $18,000 each, were stolen the same...
...Associated General Contractors of America estimates that thefts total more than $500 million annually. The recovery rate is only 5% to 10%, v. 70% for stolen cars. Equipment thieves are specialists, probably organized gangs working with a few crooked employees. Almost invariably, they arrange to fence the machinery before they steal it. Says FBI Special Agent James Cadigan: "They do their window-shopping before they go into the store...
Thieves sell such machines at bargain prices: a stolen $60,000 International crawler tractor was offered at $35,000 to one potential buyer, who became suspicious and called the cops. Usually this equipment is left on the job site when work crews head home. Watchmen are too expensive for many contractors, and the ones that are posted are easily overpowered by thieves. Says Hugh Goulding, vice president of Howell Tractor and Equipment Co., "The thieves simply winch it onto a lowboy trailer and drive it away...
Some of the stolen equipment is enormous. A 50-ton crawler bulldozer was stolen from a Chicago-area dealer and hauled away on a weekend, when this kind of equipment is forbidden on the highways. A full 13½ ft- wide, the machine is worth $130,000. It was later traced through Indiana and finally disappeared forever in the coal-mining area of Kentucky...