Cop Cracks Crooks’ Copper Caper

The copper thief confessed to hitting homes all over town. That meant Detective Joseph Aurora’s investigation was just beginning.

By the time Aurora finished his investigation months later, police arrested two men in connection with 13 separate thefts of copper pipes from vacant houses. Reported copper thefts had plunged in New Haven. And stayed that way.

The TV version of this case would have wrapped up last July 31, the day police picked up a pair of men for breaking down the door of a vacant city-owned home on Clifton Street in Fair Haven Heights and making off with copper pipes. It was one of dozens of reported copper thefts from abandoned homes. The crime was on the rise thanks to a rise in copper prices, easy accessibility to vacant homes across town, and the fact that stolen copper, which doesn’t bear serial numbers, is difficult to trace. Owners of vacant properties sometimes report the thefts to insurance companies without bothering to tell the police too, meaning that while they may recover their losses, another victim is more likely to get hit.

The day of the arrest Aurora interviewed the two men. One of the men admitted to carrying out 19 such thefts over four and a half months. He offered as many details about the jobs as he could remember.

But in real life, that was not enough to make a case. Aurora now had homework to do — lots of it. Checking databases, Google Earth. Visiting houses. Confirming details, acquiring evidence. It would take months. He got the job done, and has now obtained the last of 26 warrants, 13 for each suspect.

The 33-year-old detective, who joined the department eight years ago, has earned a reputation in the police department’s robbery and burglary division for following trails, sticking with cases, and making them stick.

The city was fielding 10 to 11 copper-theft complaints a week before Aurora cracked the case, according to his supervisor, Sgt. Manmeet Colon. ​“Now it’s at about two or three.”

She called Aurora a ​“very passionate and very diligent” investigator. ​“He goes out to the pawn shops and scrap yards. They know him on a first-name basis. He always follows up.”

Aurora’s pawn shop sleuthing solved a second, unrelated case that led to an arrest Monday. A former employee of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM) was charged with first-degree larceny for allegedly swiping tens of thousands of dollars of Dell computer gear from the group’s 900 Chapel St. offices. Aurora tracked down and recovered $48,662 worth of the equipment. (More about that later in this story.

That case and the copper case were all about follow-up, demonstrating how the tedious, less glamorous aspects of detective work can make the difference.

Grand Apizza Dreams

Aurora learned about copper and cops growing up in Fair Haven and Fair Haven Heights. He accompanied his father, a plumber, on plumbing jobs; he learned how to solder at a young age. He also learned how to cut copper pipes if you plan to install or fix them, rather than steal them. ​“It takes time,” Aurora said. ​“You put it on a wheel and spin it. You want to get a clean,” round cut.

Aurora got to know cops as he grew up, too, especially when he got an after-school job waiting tables and making pies at the old Grand Apizza. He thought he might want to be a cop; he enjoyed the interaction with people. He also had a passion for building. As a student at Platt Tech, he particularly liked woodworking.

Upon high school graduation, he chose the building route. He landed a carpenter position with Petra Construction.

He noticed something then that he’d remember later when he switched careers: In the construction trade, companies didn’t usually take small amounts of scrap metal to a yard after a job. They let the material accumulate, then cashed it in in bulk. It’s legal to gather smaller amounts of scrap metal and sell it at a yard. But someone who does that a lot bears watching.

Aurora made his career switch in 2007, becoming a New Haven cop. He worked his way up to detective. He became the point person in the robbery and burglary unit for investigations involving pawn shops and scrap-metal yards.

He heard about the arrest of the two alleged copper thieves on July 31 over the police radio. ​“His name rings a bell,” he thought about one of the suspects, who was 32 at the time. Aurora called a contact at the Alderman Dow Scrap Yard on Chapel Street. The contact confirmed that the suspect had made 19 transactions totaling $5,143.24 over the previous four and a half months. The transactions included well over a thousand pounds of copper. It also turned out that the suspect was on parole after having admitted to committing 20 previous burglaries.

One at a time, the suspects were brought from the police lock-up to the third-floor detective bureau for interviews with Aurora and fellow Detective Brian DiAnge. Eventually the 32-year-old suspect admitted he’d participated in 17 copper burglaries from vacant homes in recent months. He told police that the ​“majority of houses they burglarized were unlocked and explained the points of entry varied from basement door, back door, front door and windows,” Aurora would later write in an arrest warrant affidavit. “[I]f the house was locked they would usually either find a hidden key around the property or [one of them] would kick open one of the doors.” Sometimes they would discover that other thieves had already swiped the copper. If not, they carted away copper as well as baseboard heaters (which contain copper too). They got up to $2.70 a pound for clean copper. “[O]n a good day of scrapping he can make between $150.00-$600.00 and some days more depending on the size of the load.”

The suspect’s method for cutting the copper differed from the one Aurora learned as a child: He told the detective he used ​“loppers.” Aurora had to look up the term. It refers to ​“large cutting shears typically used for landscaping.”

“When you’re using loppers,” Aurora said, ​“you’re crushing the pipe.” You’re not worried about a clean cut; you’re worried about getting out fast. In many of the houses the water was still turned on, so the duo left behind flooded basements that owners or real-estate agents or remodeling crews wouldn’t discover for days or more. The copper thieves, Aurora noted, sometimes left thousands of dollars in damage behind in order to pocket a few hundred dollars.

Piecing It Together

At Aurora’s urging, the suspect sought to summon details of the 17 burglaries. ​“I have a bad memory,” he told Aurora. He had only a general sense of dates and locations.

As Aurora and the suspect spoke, DiAnge transmitted the details outside the room to Sgt. Colon, who heads the robbery and burglary unit. She in turn scoured the department’s database for outstanding cases that might match the details.

“Do you recognize this house?” Aurora asked the suspect about one Fountain Street property captured on Google Earth.

Yes, he did.

Six matches looked promising. But Aurora couldn’t go simply on the suspect’s confession, even in those cases.

“It’s like pulling teeth sometimes,” he said of the process of matching a handful of details to the right burglary. He scrutinized more than a dozen outstanding copper burglaries. The suspect had described one house in a particular neighborhood with high ceilings requiring him to stand on a crate to get the copper. Aurora checked with the owner of a burglarized home in that neighborhood. The ceilings matched, along with other details, and a crate had been left at the spot of the copper swipe.

In another case, Aurora found a Bellevue Road house with a paint color and ​“doggie door” that matched the suspect’s description. He zeroed in on a property with a brick front matching the suspect’s description.

Aurora wasn’t able to devote all his time to the case, by any stretch. The police department’s detectives help each other out on cases. They work as a team. And violence always takes priority. Aurora often had to set his investigation aside to check out other burglaries or to jump onto a fresh murder or shooting probe along with his colleagues.

By the new year, he had pieced together 13 burglaries at homes. They occurred on streets including Westville’s Alston Avenue and Fountain Street; Upper Westville’s Englewood Drive, Judwin Avenue, and Curtis Drive; Beaver Hills’ Bellevue Road (three separate properties between Crescent and Dyer); and Fair Haven Heights’s Lexington Avenue, Glen Haven Road, and Foxon Hill Road. All 13 homes had been vacant and for sale.

One of the suspects had remained locked up for all that time and the other most of the time before police served the last of the warrants. They remain behind bars, with court dates scheduled this week. They have yet to enter pleas on the numerous felony larceny and burglary offenses with which they’ve been charged for the 13 thefts.

Amid all his investigatory work, Aurora hasn’t forgotten the tools of his former trade. He helps friends and family with construction projects in his spare time. Back at 1 Union Ave., other investigations have kept him busy beyond the copper thefts. The CCM heist, for one.

Down in The Dell

A CCM employee called cops back in December to report that Dell equipment appeared to be missing. In his 15 years at the not-for-profit advocacy group, the employee said, he had never encountered this amount of equipment unaccounted for.

Police came to take a report. The employee called police again three days later to say he saw one of the missing objects on eBay.

Aurora said he was able to search the name of the seller on a database. It came back to a different CCM employee. This employee had a larceny record. The employee had seemed ​“off” lately, according to a colleague.

Aurora kept searching databases, working the case along with Detective Juan Ingles. He found that the ​“off” employee had been bringing lots of equipment to a Milford pawn shop.

“At this point,” Aurora recalled, ​“I knew this is our guy.” He obtained the serial numbers from CCM of the missing equipment.

Police seized a haul from the pawn shop. The equipment’s serial numbers matched those of missing CCM equipment.

The total value of the recovered items came to $48,662, according to police. The haul included 11 new Dell laptops, six older models, an iPhone 6, and eight OptiPlex PCs.

The alleged thief had a needle on him when Aurora met him, Aurora said. During a subsequent interview, the suspect said he remembered stealing ​“a few laptops and a few computers” to support a heroin problem. Once again, it was up to Aurora to do the homework to fill in the blanks.

Read other installments in the Independent’s ​“Cop of the Week” series: 

• Shafiq Abdussabur
• Craig Alston & Billy White Jr.
• James Baker
• Lloyd Barrett
• Elsa Berrios
• Manmeet Bhagtana (Colon)
• Paul Bicki
• Paul Bicki (2)
• Sheree Biros
• Bitang
• Scott Branfuhr
• Bridget Brosnahan
• Keron Bryce and Osvaldo Garcia
• Dennis Burgh
• Anthony Campbell
• Darryl Cargill & Matt Wynne
• Elizabeth Chomka & Becky Fowler
• Rob Clark & Joe Roberts
• Sydney Collier
• Carlos Conceicao
• Carlos Conceicao (2)
• Carlos Conceicao and Josh Kyle
• David Coppola
• Mike Criscuolo
• Roy Davis
• Joe Dease
• Milton DeJesus
• Milton DeJesus (2)
• Brian Donnelly
• Anthony Duff
• Robert DuPont
• Jeremie Elliott and Scott Shumway
• Jeremie Elliott (2)
• Jose Escobar Sr.
• Bertram Ettienne
• Bertram Ettienne (2)
• Martin Feliciano & Lou DeCrescenzo
• Paul Finch
• Jeffrey Fletcher
• Renee Forte
• Marco Francia
• Michael Fumiatti
• William Gargone
• William Gargone & Mike Torre
• Derek Gartner
• Derek Gartner & Ryan Macuirzynski
• Tom Glynn & Matt Williams
• Jon Haddad & Daniela Rodriguez
• Michael Haines & Brendan Borer
• Michael Haines & Brendan Borer (2)
• Dan Hartnett
• Ray Hassett
• Robert Hayden
• Robin Higgins
• Ronnell Higgins
• William Hurley & Eddie Morrone
• Racheal Inconiglios
• Juan Ingles
• Paul Kenney
• Hilda Kilpatrick
• Herb Johnson
• John Kaczor & Alex Morgillo
• Jillian Knox
• Peter Krause
• Peter Krause (2)
• Amanda Leyda
• Rob Levy
• Anthony Maio
• Dana Martin
• Reggie McGlotten
• Steve McMorris
• Juan Monzon
• Chris Perrone
• Ron Perry
• Joe Pettola
• Diego Quintero and Elvin Rivera
• Ryan Przybylski
• Stephanie Redding
• Tony Reyes
• David Rivera
• Luis & David Rivera
• Luis Rivera (2)
• Salvador Rodriguez
• Salvador Rodriguez (2)
• Brett Runlett
• David Runlett
• Betsy Segui & Manmeet Colon
• Allen Smith
• Marcus Tavares
• Martin Tchakirides
• David Totino
• Stephan Torquati
• Gene Trotman Jr.
* Elisa Tuozzoli
• Kelly Turner
• Lars Vallin (& Xander)
• Dave Vega & Rafael Ramirez
• Earl Reed
• Arpad Tolnay
• John Velleca
• Manuella Vensel
• Holly Wasilewski
• Holly Wasilewski (2)
• Alan Wenk
• Stephanija VanWilgen
• Elizabeth White & Allyn Wright
• Matt Williams
• Michael Wuchek
• Michael Wuchek (2)
• David Zannelli
• Cailtin Zerella
• Caitlin Zerella, Derek Huelsman, David Diaz, Derek Werner, Nicholas Katz, and Paul Mandel
• David Zaweski