Wednesday, May , 2004

Tin signs lead to Atlanta city worker's arrest

By JOHN MUNFORD
jmunford@TheCitizenNews.com

Deputy sheriffs believe a city of Atlanta employee has gotten rich by selling thousands of pounds of brand-new unpainted metal street and traffic signs at a Fayetteville scrap yard.

The graft has likely cost Atlanta taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, said Lt. Col. Bruce Jordan of the Fayette County Sheriff’s Department.

Michael Ray Peterson Jr., 21, of College Park, made routine trips to Sweet Returns Recycling at West Georgia Avenue in Fayetteville for almost a year to sell the blank tin signs, Jordan said.

Peterson was arrested Monday morning when he drove up at the scrap yard to sell another carload of the tin signs as a surveillance team lay in wait, Jordan said. Peterson is charged with three felony counts of theft by receiving stolen property, but Jordan said Fulton County may be allowed to take jurisdiction in the case.

Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard told Jordan that his office’s public integrity unit would be investigating the matter.

Deputies were working on a tip that Peterson would come by on Mondays to make the sale, getting approximately 20 cents per pound instead of the going rate of 55 to 60 cents that would be paid as a normal price, Jordan said. Typically, Peterson would be paid $350 for a 1,400-pound trunkload of tin, Jordan added.

Two large bins and two pallets of signs were found on Sweet Returns’ property, but that doesn’t account for the signs that had already been recycled, Jordan said.

Peterson was employed by the city of Atlanta’s lighting department, which is located next door to the city’s roads department where the signs were stored.

Employees of Sweet Returns were cooperating with the investigation, Jordan said.

Some salvage yards require persons to have identification when recycling tin signs, but some don’t, Jordan added.

Because it was originally suspected that the signs were coming from DeKalb County, several DeKalb public works employees helped with the sting, with participation from that department’s director, Jordan said.

“We knew somebody was stealing these signs from some government somewhere,” Jordan said.

Some of the signs were worth as much as $15 each new, Jordan said.

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