Man convicted for stealing parts from submarine at Naval Station Norfolk
05:51 PM EDT on Tuesday, May 20, 2008
NORFOLK -- A U.S. District Judge sentenced a 37-year-old New York man on one count of theft of public property and one count of false statements. According to testimony and evidence from the trail, in December of 2006, Frank E Spaulding, also known as Khalif Immanuel Bey, stole a pair of submarine acoustic device countermeasure domes from Naval Station Norfolk. The domes had been removed from the submarine, USS Hampton, which was home-ported in Norfolk at the time. Spaulding allegedly loaded the domes into his pickup truck, and the next day contacted several local scrap dealers in an effort to sell the domes. Spaulding reportedly sold the domes to a Virginia Beach scrap dealer for around $2,000. One week later, a Navy sailor who worked on the submarine domes spotted them at the scrap yard, leading to an NCIS investigation. Spaulding initially denied stealing the domes, saying he found them behind the dumpster of a Chinese restaurant in Hampton. NCIS agents spoke to the manager of the restaurant and surrounding merchants who all said they never saw anything near the dumpsters resembling the stolen domes. In February of 2008, Spaulding was arrested on the charges and confessed to stealing the domes and lying to NCIS agents. The Navy was able to recover the domes, and say it would have cost around $21,000 to replace them had they not. Spaulding is scheduled for sentencing on August 21st.
OK - now what is the REAL story. Damn lazy reporters...
Whoa, didn't see that coming!
There is a Johnny Cash song about an autoworker who built a Cadillac “one piece at a time” by smuggling parts out in his lunch box. Maybe something similar is going on here.
There has been so much theft of copper pipe from homes under construction that a proposal has been floated to require scrap yards to get positive ID on sellers of scrap.