Thieves no match for steadfast bear cubs

Bears on a pickup.

Each of the 15 cubs weighed more than 100 pounds. The pickup was stolen. Somebody was in big trouble.

At an abandoned airfield in Tacoma last weekend, the thieves may have turned to each other and said something equivalent to "I've had it with these [!@#$%] bears on this [!@#$%] pickup."

The thieves abandoned the truck and got out of there.

Tacoma police arrested an associate the next day and are hot on the trail of the not-very-slick bear-nappers. The owners of the bears are so happy, they're giving out free car washes Thursday all over the region.

Cast in Thailand

The bear cubs, each worth more than $1,000, were copper and bronze statues belonging to the Brown Bear car-wash chain.

Special-ordered from Thailand, they were stored in a company warehouse in Fife ready for deployment as decorative branding logos outside the company's car washes in the south Puget Sound region. Grouped as a mother and two cubs, the bears are already familiar at some of the chain's North End locations.

Sometime between Aug. 8 and Aug. 10, thieves broke into the warehouse and — leaving behind the mother statues, which were likely too heavy to move — made off with 46 cubs in three different poses. The booty was worth "north of $50,000," according to Lance Odermat, vice president and general counsel of Brown Bear, and son of 76-year-old Vic Odermat, who founded the chain in 1962.

It seems the thieves were interested only in the scrap value, said the younger Odermat. He added that police said they suspected drug addicts looking for quick cash. Odermat saw their sorry work when police found remnants of some of the statues in tiny pieces.

"It looked like they tried to use a saw, then got frustrated and took a sledgehammer," said Odermat. "... If you saw what they did, there's no method to their madness. They must have spent hours."

Odermat said 27 of the 46 stolen statues have now been recovered along with the chopped-up remains of perhaps another 10. That leaves nine or 10 unaccounted for.

Recycler suspicious

The thieves' master plan to mine the statues for the copper and bronze unraveled quickly.

On Aug. 10, one day before the theft was discovered at the warehouse, two men approached scrap dealer Tacoma Metals with bits of cut-up metal that they tried to pass off as a discarded decorative tree. Suspicious, the dealer took their driver's-license information and license-plate number before he paid them. After they left, he called police to check if they were looking for any hot copper and bronze, said Detective J. Rackley of the Fife Police Department.

After the theft was discovered, that tip led police Aug. 12 to a house in east Tacoma, where they found six bear statues and one bear head. They arrested 40-year-old Lawrence Vanham, who was arraigned Aug. 14 for possessing stolen property. But Vanham likely wasn't one of the two guys who brought the stuff to the scrap yard, Rackley said.

He said police have identified two to four people suspected of obtaining illegal scrap metal and trying to sell it, and that a drug link is "very, very possible."

"We are still looking for those people," Rackley said.

Meanwhile, the same day as the arrest, some dirt-bike riders zooming around an old airfield in the south of the city east of Tyler Street — long disused land, now littered with junk cars and with trees and bushes providing cover — reported finding a bear-cub statue lying on the ground. Nearby, police discovered the pickup, which had been stolen in early July, with the hoard of bear statues in the back. They also found metal shards, suggesting some statues had been chopped to pieces right there.

Since then, said Rackley, three citizens around Tacoma have called in finds of bear statues discarded apparently at random, with the most recent call coming Friday.

Odermat said that in thanks for the leads that led to the recovery of so many of the statues, and because of the sympathetic public response — "People really like the bears," he said — Brown Bear will provide free car washes at all its 19 tunnel-wash facilities in the region (not the self-serve car-wash sites) on between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Thursday. The company is also offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the thieves.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com