On Fri, 10 Jan 2014 08:30:35 -0330, Cheryl wrote:

Employees at a local scrapyard recently started wondering if a bell they
had purchased might not have been acquired legally, so they called the
police. Sure enough, it had been stolen from a church.

In the mid-1980s, I worked as a security guard. Some of my time was
spent guarding a scrapyard. At the time, copper prices had not yet risen
high enough to encourage a lot of theft, but aluminum was sufficiently
valuable that they had problems with people stealing drink cans and other
aluminum scrap from the scrapyard, then selling it back to the scrapyard
the next day. So, they invested in a smelter that could reduce the scrap
to ingots weighing about 1000 pounds each. Not only were these ingots a
lot harder to steal, but they also had the scrapyard's initials molded
into them. Incidentally, when an ingot was poured into the mold, it took
about three days for it to cool down to ambient temperature, despite
aluminum being a fairly good heat-conductor.