An uncle owned an apartment house........the tenants would break out the windows, steal the copper pipes, pull out the wiring, sell everything they were able to reach. Then when winter would come there would be howls of complaint because the cold air was coming through the places where there used to be windows.
In the end, my uncle just turned over the building to the city. Hopeless!
They stole all of the Brass hand railings at St. John the Baptist's Cathedral in Paterson, NJ. When the firemen go out to save their lives from burning buildings, they pay them back by robbing their cars in the parking lot, how nice.
http://www.patersondiocese.org/cathedral/Default.htm