Old cooking oilahot commodity
Officials eye crackdown on thefts
In the parking lot behind Flipside Burgers and Bar sits a 500gallon container holding a substance so valuable that the Fairfield restaurant for years has been battling thieves who arrive at night armed with pumps.
The bandits are hunting used cooking oil — what’s left after Flipside cooks its french fries. The oil can be sold to recyclers, who turn it into profitable yellow grease for use in shampoos, cattle feed and biodiesel.
Sometimes Flipside owner Mike Baffa makes up to $35 a month off his used vegetable oil. But when the thieves come, he loses money.
“It’s just too easy to pry up the lid, or smash the lock or drill a hole in the top and siphon the oil out,” Baffa said.
Around Connecticut, theft of used cooking oil appears to be on the rise, driven by increased demand for biodiesel. Police have made numerous arrests of cooking oil thieves in the past few years, particularly in Fairfield County.
Now, the state is fighting this flourishing illegal industry with increases in criminal penalties and police surveillance.
“They’ll come into a community and they’ll hit very hard for a night at several locations and then they’ll dance off to another community,” Stamford Police Capt. Richard Conklin said.
Connecticut lawmakers passed legislation in June to double the maximum prison time for stealing cooking oil. Now thieves may face up to one year in prison or a $2,000 fine. The bill is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Ned Lamont.
“People are coming mostly out of New York state and stealing the oil,” said Rep. Tami Zawistowski, REast Granby, who sponsored the bill. “There was somebody that took 450 gallons of this stuff and put it in the back of a panel van ... this stuff was sloshing around in the
back of a panel van.”
The issue came to Zawistowski’s attention while she stood in the rain and mud on Election Day. Zawistowski was greeting voters outside a Suffield polling place when Terrence Plakias approached her to ask for her help.
Plakias is the loss prevention executive for Western Mass. Rendering Co., which claims to be New England’s largest, independent, familyowned recycler of used cooking oil, fats, bones and meat trimmings. Its 12acre facility uses massive ovens and boilers to transform waste into a moneymaking commodity.
Western Mass. Rendering collects used cooking oil from Flipside Burgers and Bar and restaurants and food businesses all around Connecticut.
In 2018, the company recorded nearly 2,000 known or suspected thefts in Connecticut, resulting in the loss of more than 1 million pounds of oil.
Dave Kuban, owner of Planet Pizza in Norwalk, said his business is hit by cooking oil thieves once a week. The thieves started coming three years ago. The worst part is the mess, he said.
“They get it all over the parking lot and the landlord gets mad at us,” Kuban said.
In 2018, Stamford Police arrested two men from Yonkers, N.Y., who were stealing used cooking oil to sell on the black market.
In March 2017, two New York men were apprehended for the same crime in Danbury.
A few months later, Bridgeport cops arrrested two men from Flushing, N.Y., who said they were ordered by Russian businessmen to siphon used cooking oil from local restaurants.
The thieves often hit many businesses in a night, trekking New England highways in their white vans filled with oil. In the early morning hours, they may appear to be delivery men bringing supplies to local restaurants. They cut locks, open or puncture oil containers and pump the valuable liquid into their trucks.
“If they are any good, they are in and out in five minutes or less,” Plakias said.
Sometimes the burglars spill or purge the oil on roadways if police are in pursuit. Cooking oil recyclers have insurance to pay for the cleanup cost of spills — like when a crash caused a Western Mass. Rendering truck to leak 900 gallons on Norwalk’s East Avenue — but oil bandits do not, leaving the public to pick up the tab.
“It’s not only an economic problem; it’s an environmental problem possibly,” Zawistowski said.
The thieves target densely populated cities and towns, mostly near the New York border, but sometimes hit smaller municipalities too, said Plainville Police Chief Matthew Catania, whose force has been investigating thefts at J. Timothy’s Taverne in 2016 and 2017.