Longfellow Bridge thefts to cost taxpayers $500K

(David L. Ryan/Globe Staff/2005)

Three white arrows added to this 2005 photograph point to the stolen trim, which was two-feet wide.

By Stephanie Ebbert, Globe Staff

Two employees of the state Department of Conservation and Recreation allegedly stole a large quantity of historic, cast-iron decorative trim that had been removed from the Longfellow Bridge, prosecutors said today.

While they sold the trim as scrap metal for $12,147, it will take $500,000 to replace it, officials estimated.

Richard Stewart, 42, of Saugus, Middlesex Fells district manager for the DCR, and Joseph Falzone, 43, of Nashua, N.H., a DCR worker, are facing charges of receiving stolen goods and conspiracy, Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone said at a news conference this afternoon. The two men were to be arraigned this afternoon in Malden District Court.

"We're outraged," DCR Commissioner Richard K. Sullivan Jr. said. "These types of actions will not be tolerated, and we will follow through with the fullest extent of the law."

The men allegedly brought about 300 sections of the metal from a state storage yard to a junkyard between July 26 and Aug. 16.

The DCR, which owns the bridge, announced a week ago that the trim had gone missing from the yard where it was being stored while the bridge undergoes repairs.

The DCR said that about 2,347 linear feet of the trim had disappeared from the Stoneham Labor Yard and that it had asked the district attorney's office to investigate.

A total of about 3,647 linear feet of the decorative parapet coping was removed from the outside edge of the bridge to make way for repairs. The state planned to refurbish the sections and reattach them.

Sections that were 7 feet long, 2 feet wide, 3.8 inches thick, and weighed 350 pounds were placed onto trucks. They were stacked in piles of 13 or 14 at the yard. As recently as three weeks ago, all the sections appeared to be there. But a later check found that more than half the trim had disappeared.

“We allege that these employees abused their access to taxpayer property and equipment to steal this valuable material and sell it for their own personal gain,” Leone said. “It is a violation of the public trust made all the more outrageous when you consider that they stole more than $500,000 worth of historic, public property to make $12,000 for themselves."

Sullivan said the department expected to replace, or replicate, the trim as part of the bridge overhaul that is to be completed in 2012. He also said DCR would undertake an audit of security at storage yards and take inventory of its property.

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