Speaker 1: You may remember a couple of years ago there were
Speaker 1: all these news stories in the US about people going
Speaker 1: to start their cars and finding thieves had stolen their
Speaker 1: catalytic converter. And then tons of videos popped up on
Speaker 1: YouTube and the evening news. They showed people brazenly crawling
Speaker 1: under cars in parking lots and sawing off catalytic converters
Speaker 1: in broad daylight.
Speaker 2: These sixteen cars at Drivers Village in Cicero are now
Speaker 2: sitting in park after two sneaky thieves stole each of
Speaker 2: the vehicle's catalytic converters back.
Speaker 3: In night ONNYA. This crew was captured on camera by
Speaker 3: the car's owner. Look at them, jack up the car
Speaker 3: and off they go. The owner said they had a
Speaker 3: catalytic converter in the hand.
Speaker 2: Turns out, unfortunately, even police vehicles are not safe from
Speaker 2: catalytic converter thieves.
Speaker 1: It was happening all over the country, and it kept happening.
Speaker 1: That made Bloomberg BusinessWeek contributor Evan Ratleff wonder was this
Speaker 1: just an uptick in petty crime or was there something
Speaker 1: more going on here? So he went to find out.
Speaker 1: The short answer, yeah, there was a lot more going
Speaker 1: on here.
Speaker 4: People are bringing U hauls and trucks full of them,
Speaker 4: and you know, they stand there and they price them out,
Speaker 4: they pay them in cash, and then they're gone.
Speaker 1: I'm West Casova today on the big take. Your catalytic
Speaker 1: converter is worth its weight in gold or platinum to
Speaker 1: be per sext Evan. What is a catalytic converter.
Speaker 4: Well, a catalytic converter is essentially a device, mechanical device.
Speaker 4: Before your exhaust pipe, there's this little structure. It's like
Speaker 4: a fat pipe connected to skinny pipes. So inside the
Speaker 4: fat pipe there's what they call in the trade a core.
Speaker 4: It's usually like a ceramic core, or they call it
Speaker 4: a honeycomb core because it sort of looks like a
Speaker 4: honeycomb from a beehive. And inside of that there are catalysts.
Speaker 4: And what those catalysts do is they clean the exhaust
Speaker 4: coming from your engine before it exits the tailpipe. So
Speaker 4: it takes really horrible gases like nitrous oxide and carbon
Speaker 4: monoxide and converts them to relatively harmless gases, including carbon dioxide,
Speaker 4: which is not harmless to the environment but in terms
Speaker 4: of smog and ground pollution. So the catalytic converter serves
Speaker 4: this important function and the actual catalyst the chemical reactions
Speaker 4: are catalyzed by these three metals that are included in
Speaker 4: a catalytic converter, which are rodium, palladium, and platinum. They're
Speaker 4: part of this group called platinum group metals or PGMs.
Speaker 4: You'll hear all the time PGMs in terms of catalytic converters.
Speaker 4: And so those metals exist in sort of trace amounts
Speaker 4: less than a quarter ounce in inside a catalytic converter,
Speaker 4: and that is where the value lies for someone trying
Speaker 4: to steal a converter.
Speaker 1: And what's so fascinating about that is, for a lot
Speaker 1: of years, as you say, like trace amounts of these
Speaker 1: metal e who cares, they'd go to the junk yard,
Speaker 1: no one give them a second thought, or maybe scrap
Speaker 1: metal places would take come and see what they could get.
Speaker 1: But that changed during the pandemic.
Speaker 4: Right, The metal prices fluctuate on the open market, and
Speaker 4: they're pretty rare metals, especially palladium and rodium. Platinum a
Speaker 4: little less so, but platium and rodium are hard to
Speaker 4: mine their kind of byproducts of platinum mines and other minds.
Speaker 4: So in pre pandemic times, they just weren't worth all
Speaker 4: that much. And then the pandemic struck, a lot of
Speaker 4: the mines were closed, particularly in South Africa, which is
Speaker 4: the predominant place where these metals are mined, and there
Speaker 4: were also infrastructure logistics problems, supply chain problems, so the
Speaker 4: price is shot up of the metals shut up.
Speaker 3: In an extraordinary way in some cases.
Speaker 4: So as the prices started going up, it became more
Speaker 4: and more valuable to have a catalytic converter, So those
Speaker 4: prices went up correspondingly, because if you have a used
Speaker 4: catalytic converter, you can, through a pretty complicated process, extract
Speaker 4: the metals and sell them back to the market.
Speaker 1: So Evan, you said, when you first started looking into this,
Speaker 1: it was kind of a local crime. But then you
Speaker 1: started looking a little deeper, and that's when you found No,
Speaker 1: those people on the street are the beginning of this
Speaker 1: really big, long global supply chain for the metals inside
Speaker 1: these converters.
Speaker 4: The place where I really discovered that this was a
Speaker 4: much bigger story. I was actually piggybacking on the back
Speaker 4: of an investigation that was started by the police department
Speaker 4: in Tulsa Oklahoma, and in Tulsa they had the same
Speaker 4: problem they had all over the United States, which is
Speaker 4: there were a lot more catalytic converter thefts beginning in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty. They tried to figure out what to do
Speaker 4: about it, and within the Tulsa PD there was one
Speaker 4: particular detective who decided that not only should they look
Speaker 4: at the local thefts and what they call cutters, people
Speaker 4: cutting them off the cars, but also where did they
Speaker 4: all go, Like, where were they selling them, where was
Speaker 4: the money coming from? And he started investigation where they
Speaker 4: ended up investigating the whole supply chain of these stolen converters.
Speaker 4: And so I sort of decided to tell the story
Speaker 4: of how that developed.
Speaker 1: So your story starts at in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it's
Speaker 1: with a traffic stop, right like so many other stories
Speaker 1: like this begin.
Speaker 4: Yeah, basically pretty routine traffic stop. Someone called in. It
Speaker 4: was actually an off duty cops saw a pickup truck
Speaker 4: full of catalytic converters called it in because after all
Speaker 4: these steps started happening, it became suspicious to be driving
Speaker 4: around with a bunch of catalytic converters in the back
Speaker 4: of the truck. It turned out there were one hundred
Speaker 4: and twenty something in there. They pulled the truck over.
Speaker 4: At the wheel was a guy named Tyler Curtis. And
Speaker 4: Tyler Curtis's I think at the time he was maybe
Speaker 4: twenty four twenty five. He had grown up in Oklahoma
Speaker 4: and he had got into the catalytic converter business. And
Speaker 4: when he was pulled over, what he said in response
Speaker 4: to why do you have all these catalytic converters was
Speaker 4: I'm a legitimate catalytic converter dealer. I'm a scrap metal dealer.
Speaker 4: And they didn't actually charge him with the catalytic converters.
Speaker 4: He happened to also have a small amount of drugs
Speaker 4: in his car and an unlicensed gun, so they charged
Speaker 4: him with that, but they didn't charge him with the
Speaker 4: catalytic converters. That traffic stop was sort of the beginning
Speaker 4: of tracing this whole network because of what they found
Speaker 4: out about Tyler Curtis.
Speaker 1: Next, and so Curtis really did have this business.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And that's one of the tricky things about this
Speaker 4: whole industry was that Tyler Curtis had actually worked, he
Speaker 4: had learned about the business at a legitimate scrap metal
Speaker 4: recycling catalytic converter recycling outfit outside of Tulsa, and that's
Speaker 4: where he learned the business. And then he said, wow,
Speaker 4: this business is booming. He started his own business. But
Speaker 4: the question with catalytic converters is how much due diligence
Speaker 4: are you doing when people show up with these catalytic converters.
Speaker 4: And if someone shows up with truckload, then if they
Speaker 4: don't have paperwork, they don't show where they came from,
Speaker 4: you might be buying stolen converters. Now, what the authorities
Speaker 4: allege was that Tyler Curtis and the people up the
Speaker 4: chain from him, they really leaned into buying from anyone,
Speaker 4: no matter how sketchy, even encouraging people to bring stolen
Speaker 4: catalytic converters. That's the allegation, but it's very difficult to
Speaker 4: tell if you just look at the catalytic converters where
Speaker 4: they came from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's talk about that for a minute, because we
Speaker 1: talked about how you get underneath the car and take
Speaker 1: this thing off, But how do you take off a
Speaker 1: catalytic converter if you're going to steal one.
Speaker 4: Usually if they're going to steal one, they will pull
Speaker 4: up to a parking lot driveway.
Speaker 3: Someone will hop out.
Speaker 4: They'll have a jack, like a hydraulic jack, or at
Speaker 4: least a floor jack. They'll jack up the car really quickly,
Speaker 4: crawl underneath, take out what's called a sawzle, which is
Speaker 4: a reticular saw. It's a handheld battery powered saw, and
Speaker 4: they'll saw the pipe on either end of the convert
Speaker 4: and then they'll pull it out. They can do it
Speaker 4: in a couple of minutes, throw in the back of
Speaker 4: the car, drive off.
Speaker 3: That's the standard theft.
Speaker 4: But once you have it off the car, there's actually
Speaker 4: no indication where it came from. You cannot look at
Speaker 4: a catalytic converter and say it came from this specific car.
Speaker 3: You can say the make and model.
Speaker 4: They have a parts number essentially that you can use
Speaker 4: to figure out, Oh, this was from a Toyota Tundra,
Speaker 4: this was from a Toyota Prius.
Speaker 1: There's not only a VIN number on the conver.
Speaker 4: There's not They don't come with that. So that means
Speaker 4: if you have a whole box full or truck full
Speaker 4: or warehouse full of catalytic converters, someone can't go through
Speaker 4: them and say, oh, these are stolen and these aren't.
Speaker 4: Now A lot of cops will say I can tell
Speaker 4: because they're rough cut, which means they look like they
Speaker 4: were cut with a saw instead of unbolted from the car.
Speaker 4: But the reality is a lot of junk yards where
Speaker 4: they legitimately cut them off, they also use sazzles. They
Speaker 4: might cut it a little more carefully, but it's very
Speaker 4: difficult to sort of take someone in a serious case
Speaker 4: in front of a court and use like the saw
Speaker 4: mark as the evidence that you're using to try to
Speaker 4: put them away.
Speaker 1: Right, because if it's in a junkyard and the car
Speaker 1: is junked anyway, and you legitimately want to get the
Speaker 1: kind of a converter, why would you take time to
Speaker 1: carefully on bolt the thing.
Speaker 3: Just take it off. Yeah, all they're going to do
Speaker 3: is recycle it.
Speaker 4: They're going to crush it and take the inner core
Speaker 4: dust out, and that's going to be smelted and eventually
Speaker 4: refined back into the metals.
Speaker 3: So it doesn't matter how you cut it.
Speaker 4: And not only is that a legitimate business, it's an
Speaker 4: important business. Like the recycling of these metals is actually
Speaker 4: very important, and I think a quarter of all PGMs
Speaker 4: are actually recycled and it should be more. And so
Speaker 4: you have this strange mixture of this legitimacy and then
Speaker 4: the illegal side of it, kind of infiltrating into a
Speaker 4: legitimate business.
Speaker 1: And that's exactly what drew you to Tyler Curtis. He's
Speaker 1: running this business and the converters he's getting are probably
Speaker 1: coming from all kinds of places, but the cops are
Speaker 1: really suspicious, and so they decide, all right, we're gonna
Speaker 1: put our eyes on this guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean they get suspicious of Tyler Curtis in part
Speaker 4: because they started arresting a lot of cutters street cutters,
Speaker 4: people who they catch cutting them off cars, and some
Speaker 4: of those people lead them to another intermediate buyer. They're
Speaker 4: selling to a guy, and that guy shows up at
Speaker 4: Tyler Curtis's place. So they put a GPS on this
Speaker 4: guy's car, and he shows up at Tyler Curtis's place,
Speaker 4: and they say, well, maybe Tyler Curtis is bigger than
Speaker 4: we thought.
Speaker 3: They get a warrant for his iPhone and iPad.
Speaker 4: And then they discover, oh, he's got links to some
Speaker 4: larger network allegedly, and then they get a warrant for
Speaker 4: what's called a pole camera, which is like it sounds
Speaker 4: a camera that you put on a pole, but surreptitiously,
Speaker 4: so probably like a fake utility guy goes out and
Speaker 4: climbs a pole, puts it outside of his place. And
Speaker 4: then they're watching his facility twenty four hours a day,
Speaker 4: and they start to see the volume that are coming in.
Speaker 4: Pickup trucks pulling up, U haul's pulling up, people with
Speaker 4: trailers attached pulling up, and they've got fifty one hundred,
Speaker 4: two hundred converters in the back and he's pricing.
Speaker 3: Them, or someone he works for him is pricing them.
Speaker 4: They're paying them in cash, and they eventually calculate that
Speaker 4: he's handling five thousand to six thousand converters per week.
Speaker 4: So that's just people showing up pretty much all the
Speaker 4: time with loads of converters. So he's really running a
Speaker 4: booming business. There's millions of dollars coming through, and the
Speaker 4: crazy thing is that all of it.
Speaker 3: Is in cash, like they're really operating in cash. It's
Speaker 3: a cash business. And so now that's not all profit.
Speaker 4: He's not making millions of dollars of profit, but he's
Speaker 4: in the seven to eight figures range in terms of
Speaker 4: what he's doing over the course of less than a year.
Speaker 4: So that's a lot of cash that you need to
Speaker 4: be dealing with and have around all the time.
Speaker 1: The Tulsa is in a very big place, these converters
Speaker 1: have to be coming from all over the place.
Speaker 4: Then, yeah, they quickly discover that they're coming from all
Speaker 4: over the Southwest. They're coming from Texas, they're coming from Oklahoma, obviously,
Speaker 4: but they're coming from the Midwest, like some from California.
Speaker 4: Like they're driving in. People are bringing U hauls and
Speaker 4: trucks full of them, and you know, they stand there
Speaker 4: and they price them out, they pay them in cash,
Speaker 4: and then they're gone. So then it creates this additional question, well,
Speaker 4: where's all this.
Speaker 3: Cash coming from?
Speaker 4: And one of the things they discover is that they're
Speaker 4: packaging them up in these boxes and then shipping them
Speaker 4: to New Jersey.
Speaker 1: After the break, what happened to those catalytic converters in
Speaker 1: New Jersey? Evan, So the cops are now tracing up
Speaker 1: the chain. I think the phrase you use in the
Speaker 1: pieces that they wanted to kind of get the head
Speaker 1: of the snake.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what the detective in Tulsa PD whose name,
Speaker 4: by the way, is Kansas Core, which is a credible
Speaker 4: name for someone who's investigating catalytic converter theft, where the
Speaker 4: prize thing that you're getting is the core and everyone
Speaker 4: calls it the core in the business. So Kansas Core
Speaker 4: was the person who really spearheaded the investigation out of Tulsa, PD.
Speaker 4: He was the person who essentially said, like, we can
Speaker 4: get to the top, and yeah, his superior told me,
Speaker 4: we want to cut the head off the snake.
Speaker 1: So Kansas Core traces these catalytic converters from Tulsa to
Speaker 1: New Jersey and what did they find there?
Speaker 3: In New Jersey?
Speaker 4: They found this company called DJ Auto, which was operated
Speaker 4: by a pair of brothers. The older one, his name
Speaker 4: is Lovin Kanna. Lovin's sort of his nickname, everyone calls him.
Speaker 4: And the two of them had been in the scrap
Speaker 4: metal business for a long time, you know, recycling all
Speaker 4: kinds of things, batteries, air conditioners, that sort of thing,
Speaker 4: and they shifted into entirely dealing with catalytic converters in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty when the prices went up and it was
Speaker 4: clear that this was a huge business. And then pretty
Speaker 4: quickly they started receiving converters from all around the country.
Speaker 4: So they figured out how to sort of network with
Speaker 4: regional players like a Tyler Curtis, who would sort of
Speaker 4: gather up all the local catalytic converters, put them in
Speaker 4: a box, ship a bunch of palettes of those catalytic
Speaker 4: converters to them in New Jersey and then they would
Speaker 4: take it the next step. They built a significant business,
Speaker 4: not just selling the converters, but also this app that
Speaker 4: they launched where you could price catalytic converters. So one
Speaker 4: of the hard things about legitimate or illegitimate business in
Speaker 4: catalytic converters is that the metal prices fluctuate, so by
Speaker 4: the time you go to sell it, the price may
Speaker 4: be different than when you either obtained it legally or
Speaker 4: stole it, and so on their app, you could actually.
Speaker 3: Check the prices day by day.
Speaker 4: You could even lock in prices, so you could say,
Speaker 4: I want to lock in this many converters at this price.
Speaker 4: It's called hedging, so if the price goes down, then
Speaker 4: you're good and you're not going to lose your shirt
Speaker 4: over whatever lot.
Speaker 3: You have of catalytic converters.
Speaker 4: So they were sophisticated Operation and they also were just
Speaker 4: making money hand over fist. I mean, this is where
Speaker 4: the money gets really big. We're talking five hundred and
Speaker 4: forty five million dollars alleged by the Justice Department over
Speaker 4: the course of essentially less than three years.
Speaker 3: Again in revenue.
Speaker 4: That's not their profits, but that's the amount of cash
Speaker 4: that was passing through this business.
Speaker 1: And so they were getting these converters from all over,
Speaker 1: like when Kansas Corps is talking about trying to trace
Speaker 1: up the line. So you have these guys who are
Speaker 1: either selling them legitimately from junk yards or other places.
Speaker 1: We're chopping them off cars and then selling them to
Speaker 1: another person and then selling them to an intermediary like
Speaker 1: Tyler Curtis and Tulsa, and there are Tyler Curtis's all
Speaker 1: over the place, and then they're all funneling to New Jersey.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So the Connup brothers had and Digi Auto, So they
Speaker 4: had a facility. I went there and I interviewed some
Speaker 4: of the other people that worked next to it, and
Speaker 4: they said they were just coming in twenty four hours
Speaker 4: a day, Like we're talking to tractor trailers full of
Speaker 4: catalytic converters. And also they were getting shipments through you know,
Speaker 4: major freight companies, so they're getting pallettes and pallettes of these.
Speaker 4: Eventually they bought a junk yard, which was a larger
Speaker 4: place for them to receive the catalytic converters. And also
Speaker 4: a junk yard is sort of a natural place where
Speaker 4: you would also get legal catalytic converters, so I think
Speaker 4: the authorities would allege that they did that kind of
Speaker 4: as a cover, but it's a great place to receive
Speaker 4: catalytic converters. So they had these facilities, they would receive
Speaker 4: them from all around the country, and then they take
Speaker 4: them to the next step, which is they have in
Speaker 4: the end four decanning machines, which are essentially things that
Speaker 4: you take the catalytic converter and you stick it in
Speaker 4: there and it's like a guillotine and it slices it
Speaker 4: open and then it crushes it and all the dust
Speaker 4: from the ceramic core falls into a box. So then
Speaker 4: you have what's called catalytic converter dust, which is the
Speaker 4: metals are in there, they're amidst that dust. In fact,
Speaker 4: they have a special vacuum that vacuums up the dust
Speaker 4: that kind of drifts into the air because that dust
Speaker 4: that just drifts off of it is also valuable.
Speaker 3: You need to collect it all. So they had four
Speaker 3: of these machines.
Speaker 4: They're running them all the time, and they're taking all
Speaker 4: these converters and they're putting them in boxes and they're
Speaker 4: sending them on to a refiner based in New Jersey.
Speaker 4: So that's where the process kind of like moves on
Speaker 4: to its next step. And these guys were really I mean,
Speaker 4: they were really living the high life.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: They bought Ferrari McLaren, you know, the highest end cars
Speaker 4: for hundreds.
Speaker 3: Of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 4: They bought a big house in New Jersey on a
Speaker 4: big plot of land, and they were basically scrap metal
Speaker 4: dealers made good.
Speaker 3: You know. They were at the top of the industry.
Speaker 1: With Gigi Auto. The cops who are pursuing this case
Speaker 1: have the same kind of question as they do with
Speaker 1: Tyler Curtis back in Tulsa, which is, how do you
Speaker 1: tell whether this is a legit operation? How are you
Speaker 1: able to tell where a crime may have been committed?
Speaker 1: So how do they start to zero in on their case.
Speaker 4: The complicated question for the cops here is they have
Speaker 4: some intuition that these people are dealing in stolen Caldic.
Speaker 3: Converters, but you have to be able to prove it.
Speaker 4: And first of all, you have to prove that a
Speaker 4: certain number of them are stolen, and then you have
Speaker 4: to be able to prove that they knew they were stolen.
Speaker 4: Both of those things have to be true if you're
Speaker 4: going to win the case or get indictments. Even so,
Speaker 4: proving that there were stolen converters in there involved essentially
Speaker 4: tracking who showed up at different places, and then they
Speaker 4: combine that with sending confidential informants in to sell to
Speaker 4: these places, and the confidential informance would often come in
Speaker 4: and tell some story about how, oh, I picked these
Speaker 4: up off a guy who he was chased by the
Speaker 4: cops and then he hit him in the woods and
Speaker 4: then he got him back out, you know, elaborate story
Speaker 4: about how sketchy they were, in order to establish a
Speaker 4: sort of trail of evidence that they were buying catalytic
Speaker 4: converters that they knew had a sketchy origin or knew
Speaker 4: were explicitly illegal.
Speaker 3: You know, they were stolen out of a warehouse, so
Speaker 3: that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: So they sent these guys in there and did they
Speaker 1: buy from them.
Speaker 3: They did.
Speaker 4: It's hard to tell if there were more cases, and
Speaker 4: I'm sure if it goes to trial, the defense might
Speaker 4: offer more cases where they might have rejected that. It
Speaker 4: may be the case that they sent in a bunch
Speaker 4: and they rejected them and they said, oh, I don't
Speaker 4: want to buy those. But they certainly were able to
Speaker 4: document cases where people came in trying to sell sketchy
Speaker 4: converters and they bought them all gleefully, according to the indictments.
Speaker 1: So Evan, how did this ultimately all unravel.
Speaker 4: Well, the investigation became extremely sprawling. It involved the Department
Speaker 4: of Homeland Security, It involved police departments all over the
Speaker 4: United States. The investigation became so large, so unwieldy, that
Speaker 4: all of these different organizations, these police departments and the
Speaker 4: FEDS and everyone else, the important players, had to get
Speaker 4: together in Philadelphia for three days to sort of plot
Speaker 4: the end game of how they were going to take
Speaker 4: these places down, because they had locations all over the
Speaker 4: country to sort of pick and choose from, and they
Speaker 4: wanted to do them all simultaneously. So they came up
Speaker 4: with a code name because cops loved to come up
Speaker 4: with a code name. They called it Operation Heavy Metal,
Speaker 4: and they picked a day in early November of twenty
Speaker 4: twenty two when they were going to take everybody down
Speaker 4: at the same time. The day came and I interviewed
Speaker 4: actually the next door neighbor to Tyler Curtis's business, and
Speaker 4: he had actually rented the warehouse to Tyler Curtis and
Speaker 4: believed from all outward appearances it's a completely legitimate business.
Speaker 4: And he was sort of described that morning in November
Speaker 4: where he was getting a coffee and he just looked
Speaker 4: out his window and there was a tank outside and
Speaker 4: there were like shooters on the roof next door, and
Speaker 4: he was sort of like, what is going on?
Speaker 3: And he thought, oh, oh.
Speaker 4: This guy around of the warehouse two must be dealing
Speaker 4: with drugs and weapons or something. And then he sort
Speaker 4: of went out and talked to the cops and they
Speaker 4: told him it was catalytic converters, and he said, well,
Speaker 4: I don't know, it seems like a little overkill with
Speaker 4: the swat teams that they brought, but they did that
Speaker 4: all over the country. They brought in sort of their
Speaker 4: heaviest tools. They raided the warehouse in Tulsa. They also
Speaker 4: in Nevada, in Wisconsin, they did a rate of Virginia.
Speaker 4: They did multiple raids in New Jersey for the Kanas,
Speaker 4: so that included their facility and also their home where
Speaker 4: they had all the fancy cars and their six car garage.
Speaker 4: This Ferrari is one of several luxury cars sees from
Speaker 4: this one point seven million dollar home Wednesday.
Speaker 3: It's where federal agents say DG Auto LLC is based.
Speaker 3: You're in Oklahoma.
Speaker 2: Our raid took place at a facility in Wagner County
Speaker 2: this morning.
Speaker 3: Analytic converter, theft rink.
Speaker 1: This might be happening in your neighborhood, It's happening all
Speaker 1: around the country.
Speaker 2: One of these defendants is actually has an Instagram account
Speaker 2: with a picture wearing a necklace with a catalytic converter
Speaker 2: on it. So big money here, big arrests, a big
Speaker 2: case by the Department of.
Speaker 3: Justice around the country.
Speaker 4: They arrested twenty one different people connected to the alleged network,
Speaker 4: and the allegations are basically like interstate stolen property and
Speaker 4: money laundering.
Speaker 1: And so they took Tyler Curtis into custody.
Speaker 3: They took Tyler Curtis into custody.
Speaker 4: Actually he had pulled out right when they came with
Speaker 4: their raid, and then he came back maybe to see
Speaker 4: what was going on. They arrested everybody without incident, and
Speaker 4: then Tyler Curtis was Actually he couldn't even get out
Speaker 4: on bail for a good five months after they had
Speaker 4: him in, and the connas to this moment have not
Speaker 4: gotten out on bail. They're actually still in jail waiting trial.
Speaker 1: Tyler Curtis was in custody but made bail and is
Speaker 1: now out awaiting trial. What does he have to say
Speaker 1: about his case?
Speaker 4: Well, he's pleaded not guilty, and I spoke to him briefly.
Speaker 4: He seemed eager to talk about what had happened. I
Speaker 4: think he does have a defense that he could put
Speaker 4: on here. But then when he came back, he said
Speaker 4: that he'd consulted with his lawyer and he had to
Speaker 4: wait till the case was resolved before we could actually talk.
Speaker 1: What do Tyler Curtis's lawyers say about their client.
Speaker 3: His lawyer declined to speak on his behalf.
Speaker 1: And what about the Khana brothers, what do they say
Speaker 1: about the charges against them?
Speaker 4: The Kanna brothers both have pleaded not guilty in California
Speaker 4: to the federal charges against them. Love and Kanna's attorney
Speaker 4: emphasize that he is innocent until proven guilty, of course,
Speaker 4: that applies to both of them, and that he has
Speaker 4: the support of the community. It's worth making sure everyone
Speaker 4: understands that everyone involved here is not guilty until proven otherwise.
Speaker 1: I'm curious. You have so many details about what was
Speaker 1: going on inside the investigation and what they knew. How
Speaker 1: do you know all this stuff?
Speaker 4: Well, some of what I know comes from from the indictments,
Speaker 4: So the indictments are pretty detailed. But then in looking
Speaker 4: for court documents around the case, I sort of happened
Speaker 4: upon the reality that a number of search warrant affidavits
Speaker 4: and seizure affidavits which are filed with federal judges, were
Speaker 4: available through the Federal Court Document System, which called PACER.
Speaker 4: They were not sealed, and typically in cases like this
Speaker 4: they would be sealed. And then I also spent time
Speaker 4: on the ground in Tulsa just interviewing people and talking
Speaker 4: to people about what Tyler Curtis's business was like and
Speaker 4: even the Tulsa PD like what they sort of went
Speaker 4: through in trying to figure it out.
Speaker 1: When we come back where all that dust ends up.
Speaker 1: So after the police had moved in and rounded up
Speaker 1: all these people, then the question became where did all
Speaker 1: that dust that contain these precious metals go that generated
Speaker 1: all that cash that was able to pay for these
Speaker 1: converters all the way down the line, and that's where
Speaker 1: the next step of your story went up.
Speaker 4: From DG, there's another organization and that organization is in
Speaker 4: the court tak position is called a refiner in Burlington,
Speaker 4: New Jersey, and it's actually a company called DOA that's
Speaker 4: based in Japan, and they were buying the dust that
Speaker 4: was being sold by DG. And their expertise is taking
Speaker 4: that dust, shipping it to Japan where they have facilities
Speaker 4: that smelt, and then refine that dust back into pgm's
Speaker 4: platinum group metals, which they then sell to the market.
Speaker 4: So they're ultimately where all the science lives. That's where
Speaker 4: they really can take the inside of a catalytic converter
Speaker 4: and turn it back into the thing that's valuable. And
Speaker 4: again that is an important business because the recycling business
Speaker 4: depends on smell helters and refiners being able to get
Speaker 4: the metals out. Now, in this case, DOA was buying
Speaker 4: from DG. I mean they were buying also some catalytic
Speaker 4: converters too, but they were buying all this dust. And
Speaker 4: if you think about the dust, the dust is so
Speaker 4: far from the catalytic converter that was on the car
Speaker 4: in terms of what you could do, like you literally
Speaker 4: could not possibly trace this dust back to where it
Speaker 4: came from.
Speaker 3: It's dust. And that company is not indicted in this case.
Speaker 1: And we should also say that company is not accused
Speaker 1: of any wrongdoing. Its name was redacted in the indictments
Speaker 1: and prosecutors refer to it only as an unindicted co conspirator.
Speaker 4: Now, I went down to the company to see what
Speaker 4: was going on there. I talked to an assistant purchasing
Speaker 4: manager there. He didn't really want to talk about the business,
Speaker 4: and he didn't really want to talk about stolen catalytic converters,
Speaker 4: and he said we would talk more later, and then
Speaker 4: he sent me to the press liaison, who then never
Speaker 4: responded to any of my requests. But people in the
Speaker 4: recycling business, refiners, everybody has this problem, which is that
Speaker 4: if you get a box of dust that's catalytic converter dust,
Speaker 4: there's a pretty good chance that's somewhere in there. Fractionally
Speaker 4: there's a stolen converter that is part of that dust,
Speaker 4: But how could you possibly figure out.
Speaker 3: Where it came from, which one it was.
Speaker 4: And so that's where the challenge of sort of trying
Speaker 4: to pull apart the illegal business that's infiltrated illegal business,
Speaker 4: trying to pull it back out becomes incredibly challenging the
Speaker 4: further up the chain you go.
Speaker 1: So Tyler Curtis and DG Mike claim, well, we didn't
Speaker 1: do anything wrong, we were just buying a legal product
Speaker 1: on the market. Does that argument actually hold any weight?
Speaker 4: Well, I think there are people in the industry who
Speaker 4: say they're just being made an example of because this
Speaker 4: is such a huge problem and they were dealing with
Speaker 4: it the way everyone else was dealing with it. They
Speaker 4: were buying a ton of converters. Yes, but also I
Speaker 4: had one. And tell me if you look at the
Speaker 4: number of stolen catalytic converters, which is anywhere from the
Speaker 4: low end like sixty five thousand a year to up
Speaker 4: to one hundred and fifty thousand a year in the
Speaker 4: United States, and you kind of run the math on
Speaker 4: even if they had a majority of those that were
Speaker 4: running through let's say DG Auto, it's still not most
Speaker 4: of their business, like most of their business was still legal.
Speaker 4: And so the question becomes, how many illegal converters infiltrating
Speaker 4: your business turns you into a criminal? And I think
Speaker 4: the law is not really set up to try and
Speaker 4: confront that. And the industry is also struggling with that
Speaker 4: because people in the legitimate catalytic converter recycling industry, they
Speaker 4: also want this problem dealt with. They don't want to
Speaker 4: feel like criminals, you know. Some of them said, I
Speaker 4: don't even tell people what I do anymore because people
Speaker 4: think that I'm connected with this thing that got stolen off.
Speaker 3: Their car in their driveway and they hate me.
Speaker 4: And so the legal recyclers are also looking for a
Speaker 4: way to kind of get this out of the supply
Speaker 4: chain stream, but it's extremely difficult to do. It's a
Speaker 4: very strange criminal circumstance.
Speaker 1: So after this dust goes to the refiner and is
Speaker 1: turned back into metals, what happens to those metals.
Speaker 4: They make more catalytic converters. That's the primary use of
Speaker 4: the metals going back into brand new catalytic converters, which
Speaker 4: was one of the things that really just stuck with
Speaker 4: me in the story that if your catalytic converter gets
Speaker 4: stolen from your driveway, you get a new one. There's
Speaker 4: some chance the actual PGMs in your catalytic converter came
Speaker 4: from a stolen catalytic converter. They go back on the
Speaker 4: market in a totally legitimate market and no one knows
Speaker 4: where they came from.
Speaker 1: Sovin, what is the answer here? You said that legitimate
Speaker 1: catalytic converter recyclers want the shady side of the business
Speaker 1: to be shut down, But is there an answer to
Speaker 1: seeing this problem.
Speaker 3: There's not a great answer.
Speaker 4: First of all, the answers are often state by state,
Speaker 4: so states come up with things like people can get
Speaker 4: their catalytic converters etched with a serial number so it
Speaker 4: is actually traceable to your car. If it gets stolen,
Speaker 4: you can bolt it on better, there's kind of a
Speaker 4: cover that you can put over it. But then in
Speaker 4: terms of the law, you know, they always kind of
Speaker 4: fall back on changing catalytic converter theft from a misdemeanor
Speaker 4: to a felony, or making sure that you have to
Speaker 4: have a certain kind of paperwork if you possess a
Speaker 4: catalytic converter. You have to be able to say what
Speaker 4: car did it come from? And you have to have
Speaker 4: a license to possess catalytic converters. But that requires all
Speaker 4: the way up the chain people keeping track of the
Speaker 4: paperwork in a business that when you're dealing with junk
Speaker 4: yards muffler shops, it is kind of tough to do,
Speaker 4: especially if the laws are different for every state. Because
Speaker 4: some of the dealers work across many states. And one
Speaker 4: told me something that I do in one state I
Speaker 4: can get arrested for in another state.
Speaker 1: I guess if you look way a down the road,
Speaker 1: electric cars don't need catalytic converters.
Speaker 3: That's the answer.
Speaker 4: As long as electric cars continue their rise, maybe that'll
Speaker 4: solve the problem, although in the meantime the problem arguably
Speaker 4: gets worse because the higher admission standards you have, the
Speaker 4: higher concentration of PGMs you have in the catalytic converters.
Speaker 4: So as the United States and other countries institute these
Speaker 4: emission standards higher and hire and hire, the catalytic converters
Speaker 4: become worth more, so you might have a short term
Speaker 4: problem and a long term solution.
Speaker 1: Evan rightleft, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you really enjoyed it.
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