Fantastic news! I’m sure the owners were thrilled get that phone call. Hopefully they catch them soon or maybe they have these bastards in jail now.

The thieves were likely drug heads and may have been in jail for other charges which stopped them from proceeding with stripping the car and paying the storage bill.

Back in about 1986 or so my 1966 Mossport green, 427/390, A/C. PS, PB, PW, teak, tele, side pipe, KO equipped car was stolen. I only had the minimum insurance on it so it was a total loss to me.Two weeks later on a Saturday night I got a call from the police that they had found the car and would like for me to come ID it and pick it up. I had visions of it being in the AZ. desert burnt up.They directed me to a self storage facility that was only a few miles from my house. The manager of the storage facility had some knowledge of old cars and thought that the guys that rented the space did not look like a match to someone that would own a car like this so he called the police. It was set up so that when the returned to the storage unit he would call the police which he did. The police swopped down on these three guys in the middle of removing the engine from the car. When I arrived the engine was hanging from the engine hoist over the front of the car. The three thieves were sitting on the ground against the storage unit and handcuffed. They had also taken needle nose pliers to both the V.I.N. and trim tags and ripped them off and they were still laying on the floor of the car. After I went to court and they were imprisoned I spoke to the arresting officer to get a special report required by the people that were going to make repo tags for me. He asked if I had seen the newspaper article about one of the thieves, which I had not. So he tells me that one of the guys that got 40 years (previously convicted felon) attempted escape when they were disposing of some old clothing lockers at the prison by hiding in one waiting to be picked up as garbage. Little did he know it was picked up by a compactor truck. The last thing he heard was GGGRRRRRR. of the hydraulic ram as he was being crushed to death

Man, this is CRAZY!!I think a lot of it has to do with the over crowding of prisons these days. I think it filters down to the police because there is no room for them in our systems. They probably got sick of arresting people only to see the courts let them go. When the criminals know this it just makes things worst.You can say what you want about Maricopa county’s old Sheriff Joe, but when he created “tent city” in AZ. because they had no room in the jail for more people it did the job. He gave them pink underwear to wear, feed them bologna sandwiches' and made them stay in tents in a huge enclosure in the hot Phoenix desert. His motto was “do the crime do the time.”