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Update - I called Mike Dewine (Ohio AG and acquaintance - we have some mutual friends) and told him my problem and something happened and now we have a deal again and a closing tomorrow.
I caught one of the people who were stealing from me - it was my employee (hired through a temp agency).
I was in my shop Monday AM and all was well. There was a period of about two hours where he was on the property alone doing work that would not give him any reason to be in the shop. I came back and a number of small tools were gone. They hang on pegboard so it's pretty obvious if something is missing.
So Tuesday I set up a video camera in the shop and "left" for an hour. Actually, I drove down the street, parked and walked back to the house. By the time I got back he had moved his truck to the shop building and I sat in the house and watched through the window at him carrying my stuff to his truck as I called the sheriff. He had finished and moved his truck back to his parking space by the time they arrived. They talked to him while I retrieved the video. He was swearing the stuff was all his and the cops were buying it. They left him in their car and came into the house to watch the tape. They went out, got him out of the car, and arrested and handcuffed him. YESSS!
Then it got interesting. The guy didn't take anything all that valuable. He reached right over a $200 electric impact wrench to get a screwdriver off the wall. He even moved a new torque wrench out of the way to get a strip of sockets. He actually took less than $75 dollars worth of tools. The officer said I could press charges if I wanted, but the prosecutor isn't likely to work real hard for a $75 theft and he'll probably walk.
In the mean time our HR person did a background check on him and came up with 2 theft convictions, a criminal destruction of property, carrying a weapon while on parole, and found out he was still on parole from his last conviction. She brought this to our attention while the police and I were talking and I said, "How much does he have to steal to get his parole taken away?" and the officer said something like, "A toothpick or two." So I said hell yes let's prosecute.
I told the temp agency I wasn't going to pay them for any more of the guy's work because they advertise that they do background checks and don't hire criminals. They said his record was clean and just to be sure they called whoever they hire to do background checks and ran him again and he came back clean again. Our HR person found court records and even a newspaper story about his crimes. I told them they'd better get a new company to do background checks for them and I sure as hell wasn't going to pay this sumbich for the time he spent stealing my stuff from me. Their response was "we'll talk."
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