He had been convicted of theft — iron, steel and other scrap from a railroad site — and occasionally provided information to the police, according to Mumbai's joint police commissioner, Himanshu Roy.
Nor did Gephart's empire long survive him; little more than a decade after his death, the furnaces were demolished, the mines shut down, and one railroad scrapped.
During the next 17 years, using scrap stone and a railroad spike and a hammer as tools, he produced hundreds of sculptures, most of them figurative, others near-abstract, as tombstones and garden ornaments for the city African-Americans.
The L.I.R.R. now runs only six trains to and from Montauk most weekdays, and two a day to and from Greenport; last year, the railroad considered scrapping the two branches entirely to help close a budget shortfall.
I rode the train past scrap metal yards, lonely lots and railroad tracks — the return seeming almost clandestine.
Talk of dismantling existing lines and selling the tracks for scrap while seeking billions to extend a railroad tunnel to Lower Manhattan sends a confused message about priorities.
Investigators said the stolen wire included new spools, severed sections of spools and discarded copper wire that the railroad was gathering to sell for scrap.
In 1987, the company started construction on the long-neglected, 42-acre Herr's Island, which had been the site of slaughterhouses, a scrap yard and a company that refurbished old railroad cars.
The largest rail merger in North American history was formally scrapped yesterday, as the railroads involved complained about regulatory interference and shippers remained convinced that they had not seen the end of the consolidation that has so far left just a handful of major freight railroads to serve the United States and Canada.
That energy can saturate the cores of transformers burning out the insulation literally welding the innards of railroad car sized electrical equipment into useless scrap.
