Four civilian employees at a Maryland military facility have been indicted on charges of stealing metal and selling it for scrap, making tens of thousands of dollars in the process. Prosecutors allege that Aberdeen Proving Ground electricians 52-year-old Timothy Bittner, 29-year-old Robert Reynolds and 33-year-old Steven Coale made $87,000 selling copper wire they stole from the facility.
The trio swiped the wire while on the job or when they were working paid overtime between March and November 2011, according to an indictment filed in federal court in Baltimore.
In a separate indictment, prosecutors say 62-year-old Ronald Baker Sr., who operated a patrol boat on the Chesapeake Bay to keep boaters away from APG waters, stole more than 27,000 pounds of aluminum between September 2010 and April.
No attorneys were listed for the men in court records.
The indictment says Bittner, Reynolds and Coale used their government equipment to pull the wire out of buildings and transport it to a parking lot at the proving ground, where they then transferred it into their personal vehicles.
Then, the indictment says, they used a machine to remove insulation from copper wires to increase the sales price. The three would then take the copper to metal recyclers in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware to sell it. They made about $87,000 through such sales, prosecutors said.
“The indictments should send a strong message that this type of egregious behavior — allegations of theft while supposedly working on the government clock, to include even stripping active copper wire from an APG building — will not be tolerated,” Robert Craig, a special agent in charge of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, said in a statement.
In the aluminum theft case, Baker is accused of using his security clearance to access APG boat docks and steal aluminum outriggers. In one instance in April, he stole 2,740 pounds of aluminum worth more than $100,000, according to court documents.
In total, prosecutors allege that he stole about 27,496 pounds of aluminum from the facility.
