It started with a call for a routine burglary.
It was anything but routine.
Someone cut a fence, backed a truck onto a lot of a nondescript warehouse on East Biddle Street and made off with shipping containers filled with nickel briquettes and ferrochrome, metals used to keep steel from corroding.
The total haul: 321,872 pounds. The total value: $2.6 million.
What started as an investigation by the Baltimore Police Department's Pawn Shop Unit grew into a federal probe that reached companies in Switzerland and Australia and led to charges filed this week by the U.S. Secret Service.
The owner of a West Baltimore scrap yard, Alan A. Verschleisser, 65, has been charged with federal crimes and is awaiting trial. He is pictured at left in a city police mug shot. According to court documents, the suspect just couldn't unload the goods. He tried a company in Switzerland, but officials there quickly forwarded the e-mail he sent -- boasting he had 20 tons of nickel in pillows -- to its original owner, a mining company in Australia, who got the e-mail to the police.