Building a Billion-Dollar

Scrap Empire

George Adams, Sr.

BUILDING A BILLION-DOLLAR SCRAP EMPIRE
Copyright © 2010 George Adams, Sr.
Chapter 25 © David Williams
Chapter 26 © Kaycee Fink
ISBN-13: ___________________

Edited by Rebekah Hendershot

Cover design by Tamara Buss and Rebekah Hendershot
All rights reserved.

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For my grandchildren;
may they profit from
my experiences

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4
 Acknowledgments

I wish to pay tribute to the many dedicated people who

made this a billion-dollar company.
-Our personal office staff—Allyson Lane and Laura
Spring.
-Our electrical engineering department.
-Our hard-working cement crew.
-Our planning department.
-Our transportation department.
-Our many yard managers and crews.
-Our legal department.
-Our management team.
-Our outstanding mechanical engineering department.
-I’d like to list all the names of the many people that work
here, too, but I’m afraid I might leave someone out, so instead
I will merely include all employees who work for this
company.
I recall an old adage that says something like, “If anyone
working for this company didn’t pull their weight, they
wouldn’t be working here.”
I would also like to thank Rebekah Hendershot, editor,
and Claudine Hanani, consultant, for their assistance in the
preparation of this manuscript.

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 Contents

Preface …………………………………………………………… 9
Chapter One …………………………………………………… 15
Chapter Two …………………………………………………… 17
Chapter Three ………………………………………………… 24
Chapter Four ………………………………………………….. 27
Chapter Five …………………………………………………… 30
Chapter Six …………………………………………………….. 35
Chapter Seven ………………………………………………… 39
Chapter Eight …………………………………………………. 47
Chapter Nine ………………………………………………….. 52
Chapter Ten ……………………………………………………. 59
Chapter Eleven ……………………………………………….. 62
Chapter Twelve ………………………………………………. 68
Chapter Thirteen …………………………………………….. 71
Chapter Fourteen ……………………………………………. 75
Chapter Fifteen ……………………………………………….. 82
Chapter Sixteen ………………………………………………. 84
Chapter Seventeen ………………………………………….. 89
Chapter Eighteen ……………………………………………. 94
Chapter Nineteen …………………………………………… 98
Chapter Twenty ……………………………………………… 101
Chapter Twenty-One ………………………………………. 104
Chapter Twenty-Two ……………………………………… 108
Chapter Twenty-Three ……………………………………. 112
Chapter Twenty-Four ……………………………………… 115
Chapter Twenty-Five (Dave Williams) ……………… 118
Chapter Twenty-Six (Kaycee Fink) …………………… 122
Chapter Twenty-Seven (with Claudine Hanani)…. 128
Final Thoughts ………………………………………………. 136
Appendices ……………………………………………………. 139

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 Preface

This is a book about overcoming obstacles. Specifically,

it’s about how I, my family, and my friends and colleagues
overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles to create the
billion-dollar company now known as SA Recycling—formerly
Orange County Steel Salvage, Adams Steel, and WCS
International. It’s a dirty story in places, but the dirt mostly
isn’t ours. And a big part of that story is the place where it all
happened—Orange County, California.
Orange County and Adams Steel emerged simultaneously,
and share more than the land on which our primary facility
still operates. In many ways, Adams Steel and the county were
images in the same mirror. The evolution of Adams Steel
converged with the evolution of Orange County’s agricultural
land into a powerhouse of commercial development, and each
influenced the other.
Adams Steel’s growth was set against the backdrop of a
political system that evolved as the dirty-tricks capital of

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California. Both began as small seedlings and became
significant forces in their respective spheres.
In the beginning, Orange County was an almost forgotten
paradise, untouched. Before development ran rampant there,
it was primarily the land to which urbanites from Los Angeles
escaped for play. It was a place where the beaches were
pristine and clear and the land was lush and yielding enough
to produce an abundance of citrus, avocados, grapes and other
products. Orange County eventually became one of the
earliest and archetypal examples of what urban planners call
“edge cities,” a term coined by J. Garreau in his landmark
book of the same title. According to Garreau, edge cities are
the new means for urban growth and a departure from the
former model of growth outward from a downtown. The edge-
city model is one in which a former “cow pasture,” a suburban
area, begins to develop into a city, primarily around a freeway
interchange. The edge city has very little heavy industry and is
the place where one can find the convergence of residence,
work, and retail. The Orange County of today epitomizes the
edge city and has become an archetypal urban area.
Now, in its latter stages of development, with very little
land left undeveloped, Orange County has become it all—the
new urban environment where retail and residential join with
jobs and offices.
Orange County was always prized for its land. In the
beginning it was for the extent to which the land could
produce agricultural products, and in the latter days of
development, Orange County was prized for the development
the land allowed, which now supports a metropolis of over 3
million souls.
But as with any paradise, man’s touch led to the
disfigurement of the land and an eventual spiral into the abyss
of corruption. The Orange County of today stands in sharp
contrast to the untouched vistas that once beckoned
Angelenos. It all started with the land. Even today, one of the
most pressing issues facing Orange County continues to be the
tug-of-war between development and preservation.

Cultivating the Land: Development in Orange County

Everything about Orange County has been about the land
and the developers who were able to cultivate, exploit, and

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create new yields—taking the land from food products to
structures and light industry that led to an economic
powerhouse. Adams Steel was a part of this growth of
revenue-enhancing industries—very much indicative of the
contributions industry has made to elevate California to the
ranks of such powerhouses. Indeed, by the 1980s the
population had soared to over 2 million, making Orange
County the second most populous county in the state.
A cursory look at the history of Orange County attests to
this, as does the pace with which growth has occurred. In
great measure, those who were responsible for the
development in Orange County were afforded unbridled
authority and allowed to maneuver at will.
The key participants who were integrally involved with
the commercial and extensive residential development in
Orange County were those to whom that power was given.
These players, those whose work made an impact and
changed the course of the county, were responsible for
pushing the earth to drive forward significant changes, and
they lost no time in exploiting the good fortune they found in
their hands.
The major land developers in Orange County led the
cavalry in transforming the place. Developers were always
impacted not only by county and city jurisdictions but also by
state and federal legislation—hindrances that led them to
engage in the political process. Some of them were arguably
motivated by philosophical principles, but the most assertive
programs were advanced by two companies, the Irvine
Company and the Mission Viejo Company (a.k.a. Phillip
Morris). The actions of these major, for-profit donors and
their undue influence was in large part the catalyst to the
campaign reform movement that resulted in the adoption of
the Orange County Campaign Finance Reform Ordinance,
known informally as TIN CUP. The culture that was cultivated
led to a freewheeling investor named Robert Citron investing
the county’s money in a variety of Wall Street schemes that led
to Orange County becoming the largest municipality in U.S.
history to declare bankruptcy.
Those responsible for Orange County’s development also
became the heavy hitters who exerted the greatest political
influence, and used their significant power to leverage the

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greatest from that influence. Those who have studied the
political structure in Orange County have long noted that the
major land developers had unfettered control of the Orange
County Board of Supervisors since the 1960s, when the
growth was in high gear. The exertions of these developers
were met with open arms by a large number of political
players who embraced the relationships they offered and
joined them in developing Orange County.
The Planning Commission’s five members were
appointed by the Board of Supervisors and had the authority
to recommend the approval or denial of all development
plans. In Their approval was essential to the developers, and
this link led to questionable relationships with the individual
commissioners, as well as the supervisors and their aides.
Interestingly enough, between 1974 and 1978, it has been
estimated that 70 to 85 percent of the total campaign
contributions to those pursuing county supervisor positions
originated with companies in the development business. In
fact, during that time it was commonplace for a cycle of
contributions to be followed by an appearance before the
Board on a development matter. The relationship between
developers and board was so close that developers were
known to complain about board members directly demanding
contributions.
In the end, many of the Board’s members were suspected,
questioned, investigated, charged, indicted, and either found
guilty or led to resign amid controversy. Disgust with the
process eventually became strong enough to motivate a
normally apathetic public to pass TIN CUP.
Some of the key public servants involved included Ralph
Dietrich, Don Roth, Phil Anthony, and Irv Pickler.

Key Players
Ralph Dietrich
In 1972, Ralph Dietrich was elected to the Board of
Supervisors, and by the time of his indictment, trial and
conviction for bribery in 1979, Orange County had undergone
a major transformation. Ralph Dietrich was nicknamed Super
D because of his enormous presence as the chairman of the
Board of Supervisors. A wealthy former developer, he began
his political career when he ran for the Fullerton City Council,

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and used his experience and insider knowledge of real estate
to exploit the potential for profit that the booming
development of Orange County land afforded.
Indeed, Dietrich was known as one of those officials who
eagerly sought out campaign contributions, and was known to
pressure those involved in development to contribute. He
made clear that Orange County was a pay-to-play
environment. Because such requests came when particularly
critical projects were before the Board or the Planning
Commission, these messages were seen as legalized extortion.
The first indictment came down in July 1977, with a total
of sixteen felony and misdemeanor counts involving state
campaign-finance laws. Dietrich fought back with years of
legal wrangling, but eventually relented and pleaded no
contest to one charge of laundering campaign money. This
was followed up with allegations of bribery in association with
a developer, and Dietrich was convicted in 1979. Subsequent
appeals were fruitless. Dietrich resigned from the Board of
Supervisors but never admitted any wrongdoing.

Don Roth
Don Roth also began his career at the local level. He
served as a city councilman and mayor of the city of Anaheim.
He served on the Board of Supervisors from 1986 until 1993.
He too knew the lay of the land as a former realtor, and
evidently knew how well the yield from the land could be more
than the concrete and steel of buildings. Roth developed a
reputation as someone who thoroughly enjoyed his position of
power and who milked the relationships that came with that
position. His efforts to extract favor from developers,
including the Presley Company and Baldwin Company, led to
an eleven-month investigation conducted by the county
district attorney’s office. The list of infractions he would face
included possible theft of public funds and failing to disclose
gifts from lobbyists, developers, and the city of Anaheim, as
well as accepting gifts that exceeded the amount allowed by
California law. Shirley Grindle, an activist and the primary
author of the TIN CUP ordinance, saw an opportunity to lead
the effort when Roth’s aides, immediately on the heels of
Roth’s resignation, had the gumption to accept a lunch
invitation from a lobbyist. At that point, the chairman of the

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board herself commented on the apparent impropriety, and
Grindle, an astute political observer, knew that her
opportunity had arrived. She turned the media coverage and
public concern to her advantage.
The representative from the 4th District eventually
pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts of failure to
disclose gifts from the Presley and Baldwin companies, and
three misdemeanor counts of conflict of interest. He resigned
from office, although it was revealed that just after his
sentencing he had arranged a meeting between officials of the
Orange County Transportation Administration and special-
interest groups who were proposing an electric-bus project—a
clear violation of his probation agreement.
Our involvement with the Orange County Board of
Supervisors was a necessary part of operating. It was
impossible for us to build a global corporation in Orange
County during this era and avoid involvement with the Board.
We were involved with them constantly from the 1970s
forward because of our work with county contracts and our
recovery of materials from county landfills. For a long, long
time we operated without getting much attention because our
actions were a minor component of the entire countywide
operation. But we couldn’t fly under the radar forever.

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 One

Before I go any further, I should mention how I happened

to come out to California in the first place. I was born and
raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and lived my early years in
Erie County, adjacent to Lake Erie, which is a very beautiful
part of the country. As good fortune would have it, I was able
to start an apprenticeship in engineering with the General
Electric Company, and served a very successful engineering
preliminary program there, learning to run all the machines.
I served three eventful years in the military during World
War II, and in the course of my overseas service, I was
wounded a total of three different times. Fortunately, none of
the injuries were life-threatening, although they were quite
painful. Finally, when the war ended, I decided to go to
California.
The Interstate 5 freeway was under construction at the
time, and had progressed to Atlantic Boulevard in Los
Angeles, where a tragic accident befell the freeway

15
contractors. A bridge collapsed over the freeway at Atlantic
Boulevard and trapped a couple of cars and a pickup truck
under there, and several people were seriously injured.
At that time, the freeway really ended at Atlantic
Boulevard and from there on, the only way to get to Orange
County was to go down Firestone Boulevard. There was a lot
of advertising at that time, a lot of campaigns encouraging
people to settle in Orange County. A lot of homes were being
constructed, and some friends of mine that had not gone into
the service were building homes there and were quite excited
about it. So one Sunday afternoon I decided to take a trip into
Orange County and see what all the hullabaloo was about. I
drove down Firestone Boulevard, and was immediately
impressed. The entire countryside was blossoming with
beautiful orange trees, and the fragrance was incredible. You
couldn’t help but fall in love with the lovely country. There
were thousands of acres of flat land in Orange County, and
construction going on here and there, and yet you could see it
was a very rural area, and it took several years for the freeway
to extend out to the place.
I looked around for a while and liked California fine, but I
couldn’t seem to settle into anything.

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 Two

In 1946, I decided to go back to Pennsylvania and

establish myself in the lumber business. One of my neighbors
in Girard, Pennsylvania had several pieces of timber, and
because I was somehow considered a bit of a war hero, they
offered me the timber to go into business. A man by the name
of Kermit Ruland, whom I knew in Ashtabula, Ohio, offered
me a complete mill facility that he had bought, brand new,
and had never set up. I jumped at the chance and soon found
myself in the lumber business, which proved to be a very
successful venture.
I got along well with everybody and manufactured very
good lumber, so I didn’t have any trouble selling my product. I
learned quickly how to run the mill. Things were going well; I
had a couple thousand dollars in the bank and was thinking
about buying a new car. Then disaster set in.
I had sent a load of lumber that we had sawn to
Pittsburgh, and it turned out we had to go through a line of

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striking workers. The war had just ended, and the communists
were stirring up a lot of unrest. We got caught in the middle of
the strike, and my three trucks were turned back on the main
state highway. The truckers called me, and I in turn called the
state police, who said they didn’t want to get involved, and to
handle the matter any way I wanted to handle it. I was angry
by this time, and I don’t like to be pushed around, so I jumped
in my car and drove 120 miles to Pittsburgh to find my trucks
parked at the side of the road and my guys drinking coffee in a
coffee shop. I told them, “I’m going to take the first truck
through. You guys follow me.”
We came to the first roadblock, and a guy jumped onto
the truck and said he wasn’t going to let us through. I didn’t
slow the truck down; I just kept driving. He had a brick in his
hand, and he smashed the windshield. I rammed the truck
into gear, and the guy lurched onto the truck and cut his
jugular vein on the glass he’d broken. We pushed him off the
truck and drove on to deliver our lumber, thinking the police
would be after us at any moment. But as it turned out, my
uncles were well-known and highly placed in the police
department in Pittsburgh—all my mother’s relatives were in
law enforcement. There was never an investigation and we
never heard anything more about it. But things were chaotic
and I rode shotgun on my trucks for the next few weeks—
literally, with a shotgun held in plain sight. If anyone got near
the truck I told them I’d just blow ’em away, and we didn’t
have any more trouble.
Things went along very nicely and very profitably for a
few years, and then suddenly the Korean War reared its ugly
head. At four o’clock one afternoon, two MPs showed up at my
base of operations in Warren, Pennsylvania, and advised me
that they had orders to take me into custody immediately. I
had been appointed the operations chief of the 53rd Airborne
Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division and had to
report to duty pretty much right then. I just had time to make
a few calls, and by six o’clock that evening, we were on our
way to Pittsburgh, which was the staging area for everyone
that was going to be inducted back into the 101st. We got to
Pittsburgh at midnight, and by six o’clock the next morning,
we were on our way to Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky.

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 I was stuck with a lumber business that I had no way to
continue operating, and as my rather odd luck had it, I got a
call in my first week at Breckenridge that solved my problem
for me. One of my neighbors in Pennsylvania, another mill
owner, had suffered a catastrophic fire, and lost his whole
mill. He called me up and said that he want to buy my
operation—lumber, equipment, lock, stock, and barrel—and
would offer me a fixed price. I agreed, and he came down to
see me at Camp Breckenridge and brought a cashier’s check
with him, and he bought my lumber business. I was a
millionaire, however briefly—the money didn’t last long, as I
hadn’t yet acquired the habit of thrift and I spent most of it on
good food, beautiful women, and the good life in general.
When the Korean War finally ended, I decided to go back
to California, and by 1954, I had started up a tool-and-die
business and was progressing very well. My partners and I
had a few patents to our credit, and we came to show some of
our innovations at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium. That meant we
needed a pretty model to display our product. Our inquiries
bore unexpected fruit. I was fortunate enough to meet the
beautiful, vivacious Dolores, a most attractive woman, who
unfortunately was not at all anxious to settle down. She was
busy having fun; she had just been crowned Miss Hermosa
Beach, and consequently it would be some time before she
and I talked about marriage or raising a family. But I was
willing to wait. She was worth it.
In the meantime, the engineering department of the
Pontiac Motor Company in Detroit had put together a special
prototype car, which was four feet longer than the standard
Pontiac convertible. I had befriended one of Pontiac’s chief
engineers back in World War II, and he let me acquire that
beautiful car, and what a time I had in it! I loved driving
through Beverly Hills and Hollywood in that wonderful
machine. One fine afternoon I ran into Clark Gable, who was
cruising down Sunset Boulevard in his Cadillac convertible,
and we pulled alongside each other, got to talking and decided
to go have a drink together at the Brown Derby. We had a long
and treasured friendship that lasted until Clark passed away.
I met Dolores in 1954, and a year of whirlwind romance
followed. We were finally married on February 26, 1955. I may
regret a few things I’ve done, but that isn’t one of them.

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 Eventually I migrated into construction, which was
booming at the time and very exciting. My associates and I
decided to specialize in tilt-up construction, so we took on
several major construction projects throughout Los Angeles
and various other parts of the country.
One of the larger projects that we undertook was the
training pool for what would be the 1984 Olympics. The
training facility was located in Long Beach, California, and we
put it up in 1973. The city was good to work with, though
unfortunately there were serious problems with the
community, an all-black neighborhood, which I’ll get to a bit
later.
The big challenge in constructing the training facility was
the setting of 140-foot beams, eight of them that spanned the
roof. Unfortunately, while we were doing the third beam, the
crane footing gave way and the crane tipped over and did a
considerable amount of damage to the airfloor, a six-inch gap
above the base concrete to let the air circulate to dry out the
floor.
When the pool was finally constructed it was in a large
building with cathedral windows that were 27 feet high. The
wall panels were 60 feet high, and there were beautiful light
panels embedded in the walls all through the structure of the
building. When the building was completed, I turned it over to
the city of Long Beach on the second of July, and advised
them that they should have good security at the building. We
had had the property completely fenced in, with some very
capable guard dogs. We found it was the only way we could
keep the locals from stealing all the lumber and other
construction supplies. But when I turned that beautiful
building over to the city, they completely disregarded my
warning, and the very night we took down the fences and
pulled out the dogs, the neighborhood stormed into the
building, destroyed the airfloor and the beautiful cathedral
windows. They did $150,000 worth of damage to the windows
alone. The next day the city called me and asked me to come
back in and reconstruct it. I refused. I said I would not do any
more construction there. In fact, I decided that would be the
end of my construction efforts.
I had made a fair amount of money in construction, and
began casting about for something else to do with myself. I

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had done a little demolition work by then, too, and had
worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad in downtown Los
Angeles, cleaning cars and doing miscellaneous chores, and as
I progressed from the business of cleaning up the railroads, I
became involved with a very dear friend by the name of Hollis
Higginson. Hollis had a contract with the railroads down there
to do various things, including picking up the rubbish. He
used oil tankers to pick up the refuse oil from the different
stations that the railroad had around the country. I became
more and more involved in railroad demolition, and Hollis
and I were able to do some major demolition of railroad
properties in the downtown Los Angeles area. As a matter of
fact, the desks that stand in my office today were salvaged
from the first railroad building that was built in the 1850s,
prior to the bridge being built across the Los Angeles River.
Because of my strong interest in demolition, we were able
to take on a series of projects that tremendously helped the
company. One of the most successful projects was the
demolition of a Nike missile site in Buena Park, in northern
Orange County. The missile site was an extremely large piece
of property, with several silos that had been designed and
manufactured to launch missiles in any direction in the event
that the United States might be attacked by a foreign
government. There was a band of copper—four strands of
heavy-duty metal—that ran around the entire facility
underground, and when we started looking into the plans, we
were able to pinpoint the location of the copper and pull it out
with a tractor. We were able to recover several hundred tons
of copper scrap, and this of course bolstered our finances
tremendously. There was also an extreme fuel shortage at the
time, and the missile base had ten 10,000-gallon tanks to fuel
its generators in case of a nuclear catastrophe. That amounted
to 100,000 gallons of diesel fuel when diesel fuel was almost
impossible to get.
I didn’t know quite how to move 100,000 gallons of diesel
fuel, so I called my friend John Hancock, who was in the oil
business. John listened to the problem, and finally he said,
“Well, George, the solution’s very simple. Dig out the first
tank, we’ll come down with one of our tankers and pump out
the 10,000 gallons of fuel, you move the tank over to your
facility, unload it, we’ll do it 10 times and unload the entire

21
100,000 gallons of fuel.” Well, we did exactly that. And of
course all of our equipment was diesel-operated, and with
diesel running $3 a gallon, we saved a lot of money.
After that we assisted in the demolition of the Bethlehem
Steel plant in Huntington Park, and availed ourselves of a lot
of the equipment that was reasonably old but still operational.
That equipment further improved our financial status.
Perhaps one of the most significant demolition jobs that
we were involved in was the final disposition of all of the
tooling assets of the Concorde project.
Contrary to popular belief, although the Concorde was
known as a joint venture between the French and the British,
the entire frame and the entire technical structure were
manufactured by Thompson-Rand-Woolridge in Anaheim.
Little did I know when we bid on the project how much the
Concorde components would be worth. When the final
Concorde was flown, some of the components were put up for
sale in Great Britain, and the nose cone alone was sold for
$900,000. We were scrapping the components that were still
under construction in Anaheim, but we had a half a dozen
nose cones that were completely finished, and other
components that would have had very high value. But we
didn’t avail ourselves of any of that; we scrapped it all out. The
real value for us was the metals used in the production of the
Concorde. There were several tons of valuable and expensive
material left over, and we were able to do a joint venture with
another firm to salvage the materials, and consequently we
made a lot of money on the deal.
I had developed a certain fascination with the scrap-metal
business by virtue of the fact that my demolition jobs
generated quite a bit of scrap and whenever Hollis and I went
to sell our scrap to existing scrap-metal operations, none of
them received us with any great particular warmth nor put out
the welcome mat. We realized that we had a lot to learn about
the scrap metal business.
Now, I had accumulated a fair amount of money in
construction; I sold a collection of mobile home parks that we
had acquired, and received a considerable amount of money.
The buyer was the motel magnate Scott King, who had
recently sold his motel operations to Holiday Inn and was
looking for something else to do with himself. I ended up with

22
somewhere close to a million dollars, and I began looking into
a career in scrap.

23
 Three

After the Long Beach fiasco, I thought that my funds

would be sufficient to go into the scrap metal business, but I
had no idea how I was going to accomplish this. One day I
picked up the Wall Street Journal, and my eye fell on an ad
with the headline, “Scrap metal business for sale.” It turned
out to be an existing scrapyard—auto dismantling, really—on
Lemon Street in the city of Anaheim, in fragrant Orange
County. I met with the owner of the business, a man by the
name of Leo Gogerty. Leo was quite upbeat about his business
and was pretty gung ho. He didn’t seem to think there were
any lingering problems with the yard; he told me he was only
selling because he wanted to retire and spend more time with
his family.
I was a little naïve and I didn’t have any reason to
disbelieve anything he was telling me. As it turned out a little
later, Leo was on the verge of being indicted for receiving a
large amount of stolen property—a truckload of stolen copper,

24
to be specific—and the FBI had traced the missing load of
copper to Leo’s operation. Leo had bought the copper and
scrapped it out and tried to dispose of it. But none of this was
disclosed to me, and so I blindly stepped into the situation
and signed the deal, and paid Leo his asking price in cash.
A couple of days later I was sitting at the desk in my new
office on Lemon Street, and a couple of real nice guys from the
FBI walked in and asked, “Are you the new owner?”
“Why, yes,” I said, “I’m the new owner.”
“Well, we have a warrant for your arrest,” they told me,
“and you are involved in complicity with the former owner,
Leo Gogerty.”
I said, “No, that’s not the case. I never knew Leo.”
Fortunately I had kept all the paperwork very carefully,
including the ad in the Wall Street Journal. I showed those
fellows that I had just stepped into the business and bought it,
not knowing anything about the thefts.
I found my two new FBI acquaintances very decent, very
reasonable, and eventually we were able to work out a
solution. Although they withheld my business license and
permit with the city of Anaheim for a short period of time
while the paperwork was straightened out, the license was
finally issued. The mayor of Anaheim at that time, Bill Thom,
was a very decent man who served from 1976 to 1978. He
worked exceedingly well with the Latino population, even
forming a Latino civil rights group in 1978 called Los Amigos.
He is credited for his farsightedness in his outreach and
support of Latinos, and for helping to bridge the gap between
the police and the Latino community after a melee in Little
People’s Park in Anaheim in 1978. He was never fully
recognized as an ambassador for the city, and I liked him
because he helped me get my auto dismantling license
reestablished. Thom’s assistance to us was really invaluable,
and his work was strikingly different from the work of other
politicians I met and had to work with later.
As of the year 1974, I was officially in the scrap metal
business. I called my new venture Orange County Steel
Salvage, after my new home.
In 1976, as OCSS was taking over our demolition/salvage
jobs—including that Nike missile site—I got the chance to
move operations a short distance away to a larger property on

25
little Frontera Road, near Glassell Street right where it turns
into Kraemer Boulevard in Anaheim, just alongside the 91
Freeway. At that time, the freeway was not yet completed. It
was, however, under construction, and one of the lanes was
open partway and then you had to take some surface roads to
get to Riverside County. Even so, anyone could see the
potential in the place. I was sure it would be a fine place to
raise a family—which, by that time, I was well into doing.

26
 Four

By the time Adams Steel came to be, I had settled down

and married Dolores, who I maintain to this day is the single
most important reason our four kids turned out so smart. I
like to talk about what I call the four aces of Adams Steel—
George, Michael, Terry and Wendy, in order of birth but not
necessarily in order of importance in the development of the
company—but Dolores was and remains the fifth ace, still
alive and still in good health as I write this. And she was the
main reason why those kids were so damn talented, and so
damn lucky.
To begin with, we lived in Whittier, near Rio Hondo
College. The college was a fairly new school at the time, and
they offered all kinds of classes for learners of all ages. In
addition to that, we had access to the wonderful Whittier High
School, from which all four children were fortunate enough to
graduate. We had a good lower-grade school in the area, too,
only two blocks from our home. The long and short of the

27
matter was that Dolores was determined at a very early age to
get these kids the hell out of the house as soon as she could so
she could pursue her own interests in life. Dolores was never
content to sit at home; she loved to travel and have a good
time and was intent on living a rich, full life. But in order to
get there, she felt she had to give these kids every educational
opportunity that they could get.
She was constantly transporting the kids from one class
to another, from the Rio Hondo grade school to Whittier High
School to Rio Hondo College and so forth, for the entire
period of time that the kids were going to school, from the
first to the twelfth grade. The children didn’t get in more than
minimal trouble, and their mother ruled the four aces with an
iron hand. I, of course, was busy working, trying to make a
living, trying to support these monsters, and it kept me very
busy. I have to give Dolores most of the credit for raising these
kids and making them so damn brilliant that they were able to
take over and build Adams Steel into the billion-dollar scrap
empire it is today.
My role as a provider for this family was one of working
nights and days, mostly seven days a week, and our primary
activities as a family were scouting—I don’t think we missed
an outing in fifteen years, and all three boys became Eagle
Scouts—and hunting as a family down in Mexico. I don’t recall
Dolores and myself ever taking a separate vacation. We always
traveled with the children, and consequently I considered us a
close, well-knit family. We all got along quite well and none of
the kids were smart alecks or sassy to their mother. They
never would dare raise their voice to her, and they had a lot of
respect for each other.
All the boys were involved in wrestling. I insisted. I
wanted to make sure they were not afraid of bodily contact
and not afraid to fight if they had to. George Jr., the eldest,
took up boxing for a while, too, and proved himself a
formidable scrapper.
And then there was Wendy, the lone daughter. She was
always at a bit of a disadvantage because her brothers were
always wrestling and fooling around, so she decided to
become involved in martial arts. Thanks to years of training
and a lifetime of defending herself against three take-no-
prisoners brothers, Wendy ended up winning a state tae kwon

28
do championship. Wendy was a very determined, strong-
willed person, which served her well when she finished college
at the top of her class and ended up as a junior partner
working for Deloit, Haskell, and Sells in New York City.
By the time the four aces began graduating from college,
Orange County Steel was making a little bit of money, and
George decided to celebrate his scholastic achievements with a
trip down the Amazon River. He and a couple of buddies fixed
up an old Volkswagen and wended their way down to Mexico
and South America, and ended up down the Amazon as they
had wanted. They had an unforgettable year as world
travelers, finally working their way back to the United States
as crewmen on a cattle boat with a little bit of money in their
pockets. George walked into my office one day and said,
“Guess what, Dad—I’m gonna go to work for the company!”
I wasn’t really quite prepared for that. I’d hoped that
George, being a clever young man and terribly good with
animals, would become a veterinarian or something of that
kind, so that he wouldn’t have to work as I had worked all my
life. But as it turned out, he seemed to be cut out for the
business.

29
 Five

George’s first adventure in the scrap-metal business was

running a landfill recovery operation in Brea Olinda. George
had a old Dodge pickup truck, and he ran around and had a
crew up there, and we built some conveyors and started
salvaging all the material that was available, including stoves,
refrigerators, aluminum and anything else of value. We had a
container up there for aluminum, and unfortunately we didn’t
realize at the time that we were stepping on the toes of some
of the people that actually worked for the county, doing their
own personal salvage work. After the operation would be shut
down for the day, these guys would break into the container
and steal the aluminum. It turned out they felt we were
poaching on their territory, taking the aluminum they had
been salvaging for themselves. They were not trained to
handle any of the equipment—we had built some substantial
conveyors and balers and the other means to recovering as
much salvage as possible—but that didn’t stop them. We

30
finally resolved the situation by hauling all the materials back
to our yard every day.
It was around this same time that George began to really
get a reputation for wearing hats—a reputation that has held
to this day. It began when he was about 12 or 13 years old. I
had always worn a hat, and one Halloween George borrowed
my brand-new Stetson that I’d bought at a considerable price.
Somehow in all the holiday hijinks that night, my hat got
misplaced and we couldn’t find it again. When George grew
up, I never let him forget that he owed me a hat, and when he
started wearing hats himself, he got in the habit of buying me
a new hat every year. He continues to faithfully provide me
with a new chapeau before I’ve even worn the old ones out,
which I appreciate.
A while after that, my son Michael graduated from
college. Michael took a year off, the same as George had, and
go around the world, and when he had got his recreational
period behind him, he was interviewed by the John Deere
Company as an engineer. Michael had graduated as a
mechanical engineer from Cal Poly, and had a real knack for
all aspects of engineering, particularly hydraulics. But
Michael, after the interview at John Deere, decided that he
would rather go to work for Orange County Steel, which soon
became Adams Steel because it was becoming a real family
affair. Michael specialized in hydraulic engineering, and as
nearly everyone in the scrap industry knows, nearly every
piece of major equipment in the industry is hydraulically
operated. Consequently, Michael’s contribution to the Adams
Steel Company was invaluable and irreplaceable. Michael
became a leader in the industry, and to this day is probably
one of the most knowledgeable people in the manufacture and
processing of hydraulic equipment.
I should tell a little story about Michael. He was a very
interesting, quiet young man compared to George, and a very
private person. We took a trip down to Mexico when he was
about 17 years old. He was a very handsome, tall young man,
and he somehow managed to meet some beautiful Mexican
señoritas from a very wealthy family. We were staying at a Del
Rio motel at the time, and the girls would drive by in their
convertible with the top down. As they went by, they would
yell, “Michael! Michael! Come out! We’re gonna go someplace,

31
Michael!” So Michael would run out and jump into the
convertible, the car would roar off, and that would be the last
we saw of him until the wee hours of the morning.
Michael also became something of an adventurer; he flew
some of the fastest airplanes in the world (the MiG-24, MiG-
25, and MiG-29) and climbed some of the tallest mountains.
Oprah Winfrey had him on her show once to show off pictures
he’d taken of the wreck of the Titanic—some of the most
detailed ever captured. He went down there in a two-man
Russian submarine, just for the adventure of it. Someday
Michael will be able to tell his own story, and I suspect it will
be quite interesting.
The next addition to Adams Steel was my son Terry. He
was an excellent student all his life, and when he finished high
school he decided he wanted to go to UC Santa Barbara. The
highlight of that experience was his first and only semester
there. His mother and I went up to visit him in December.
Terry was staying on the tenth floor of his tower dormitory,
and we got there early, so we rode along the lake on campus.
There were several girls and couples lying out on blankets—
stark naked, all of them. We finally got into the dorm, and
more girls were running up and down the hall, some of them
topless, some of them completely naked. Finally we were able
to locate Terry, at which time it occurred to us that maybe we
should get him out of the Playboy College of the Pacific and
send him to a real school.
Terry ended up studying engineering at USC, where he’d
earn a degree as a mechanical engineer. He’d later go back
and get a master’s in business administration. With USC being
a little bit of a fancy college, Terry was a little disappointed
because he didn’t have a nice automobile to ride around in. So
in true do-it-yourself Adams spirit, George and Michael and I
decided to make him a car. We took two Mercedes cars that
had been totally wrecked—one was totally destroyed in front,
the other was totally destroyed in the rear—and my brother
John was able to cut both those cars in two and put them back
together. He welded them up, we worked ourselves silly
getting it upholstered and nicely appointed, and lo and
behold, we had a really nice-looking Mercedes that we
presented to Terry as a graduation present from USC. And it
was, of course, the only car of its kind.

32
 When Terry graduated, he took some time off like his
brothers, but after that he also became involved in the
company, showing his strengths in the management of
technical solutions and environmental issues. Terry became
our lead man in that particular area, including public
relations.
Finally, the last addition to the Adams Steel Company
was Wendy. Wendy graduated highest in her class at USC,
after which she decided to take a trip around the world. She
ended up traveling Europe and deciding that she would take a
train over the Alps into Switzerland. Just as the train was
nearing the top of the mountain, Wendy found she had to visit
the train’s bathroom. She was wearing a pack around her
waist with all of her credentials, money, and everything else,
and as she pulled down her pants, it fell into the toilet. Of
course, the toilet immediately flushed the pack out onto the
train tracks. Luckily, Wendy had the presence of mind to note
the number of the pole the train was passing at the time.
When she finally got down to Switzerland, the Swiss
officials were very nice to her, but they said, “You’re going to
have to be a prisoner now; you can’t go anywhere because you
don’t have any identification.” All of her documents were
gone. But the way I heard the story, a couple of young Swiss
men volunteered to go back up that track and try to locate her
lost property. They were gone most of the day, perhaps longer,
but they finally located the pole that Wendy had identified,
dug around in the snow, found her pack, and got back to the
station. Needless to say she was very excited and very grateful,
and I had nothing but praise for the men who helped her out.
Wendy was able to take the examinations for certification
and passed among the two or three highest in the state. She
then went to work for Deloit, Haskell, and Sells in New York
and was working there when the World Trade Center was first
bombed in 1993. After that, we knew we wanted to get Wendy
back to work for Adams Steel. By this time our company had
grown and had a need for more sophisticated financing. Up to
then, I had prepared most of the financial statements by
myself and with what little help I had in our accounting
department—call it creative financing. But as the company
grew, creative financing ended up having to be certified
financial statements. Wendy was extremely qualified there,

33
and when we finally got her back to work for us, she was able
to set up the proper programs and arrange proper lines of
credit that made the company even more successful than it
was before.

34
 Six

Now I come to how the so-called pissing contest started

with the city of Anaheim.
In 1974, when I first bought the business that became
Orange County Steel and later Adams Steel, I knew very little
if anything about the scrap metal business. I had learned a
great deal about demolition, which seemed to go pretty much
hand-in-hand with a lot of the scrap metal operations because
we had the ability to tear down a lot of good buildings and we
produced a lot of scrap that way. But there’s no substitute for
firsthand experience. Within a week of taking over the scrap
operation on Lemon Street, we had been released by the FBI
when they finally decided that we were not involved with Leo
Gogerty. But right after that, when I had been in business less
than 30 days, the city of Anaheim decided to pull a sting
operation. They brought in some copper with a couple of
undercover detectives, and I started to write the order up, and
of course I followed all the rules. Fortunately I had learned

35
enough already to know that I had to write the vehicle license
number down, so I did. But no sooner had I taken the material
out to the shop and told one of the machine operators to cut it
up and put it in the scrap pile than my erstwhile copper sellers
advised me that I was under arrest for receiving stolen
property, handcuffed me, and proceeded to take me to jail. It
was just another vendor sale to me; the copper and
miscellaneous scrap had been coming in all day long, and I
realized then that this was a sting operation, and they had
tried to trap me because of my lack of experience. I was at a
great disadvantage.
Well, I might have been new to the scrap business, but I
was no stranger to people who played dirty pool. I knew that if
I was going to beat the dirty bastards at their own game, I
would have to have a good, competent attorney, so I enlisted
the aid of Mike McDonald, another old friend. Mike was an
incredibly capable attorney, and specialized in this kind of
trouble. As a result of Mike’s efforts, we were able to find
witnesses in our favor.
The police, of course, had more than a trumped-up charge
about stolen copper. It might give you an idea how low they
will sink to try to intimidate somebody to hear that they
hauled in a couple of prostitutes they had cornered in a drug
charge, and forced these women to confess that they had sold
me other stolen material, which of course was not true. But
Mike’s investigation exonerated us completely, and when it
finally went to trial, after all the witnesses had had their say,
the judge decided there was no basis for the claim. It was a
simple, stupid frame-up concocted by the Anaheim Police
Department. No charges were filed. Needless to say, we didn’t
get off to a good start with the city. But this was only the
beginning.
Over a period of time, Leo was indicted and finally went
to jail, but before the whole thing could be settled, Leo had a
heart attack and died. Then I had to deal with Leo’s widow,
who was very antagonistic and didn’t want to sell me the
property after all. I felt it was very important that we buy the
property outright, but we couldn’t agree on the price. As a
result of that, I decided to move the operation from Lemon
Street down to the present location, where we are today at
3200 Frontera Road.

36
 In the meantime, while we were still operating on Lemon
Street, I had a young man working for me by the name of
Charlie Adams—no relation, but a good man all the same.
Charlie was an auto dismantler and had some experience, and
we got into the business of processing cars. Charlie could
process a total of 15 cars per day. That meant taking the
radiators and the batteries out, doing a few other things that
had to be done, draining the oil out of the engine and/or
pulling the engines out. There was a booming market for cast
iron, which most of the engines of that era were made up of.
However, the only market we had at that time was a company
by the name of Clean Steel, and the man in charge there was
named Harry Faversham. Harry turned out to be a real son of
a bitch, and never became a friend of ours. Over the years,
Harry threatened to put us out of business several times when
he saw that we were growing in strength.
As the business grew, George Jr. was in school, and we
had three children going to college at the same time—George,
Mike, and Terry, and Wendy was soon to follow. I needed a bit
of money to keep these kids in school. One weekend I was
desperately short of cash to make payments at USC and the
other schools that the kids were attending, so I went through
the yard and loaded every container we had with scrap, axles
and car bodies and so forth, and the following Monday we
delivered the parts to Clean Steel. Clean Steel always paid
cash, and you could always count on the money being there.
However, the fact that we were growing in volume gave Harry
Faversham serious concern, and George and I had a luncheon
with him on one of the boats that was docked at the Los
Angeles Harbor—a well-known ship called the Princess
Louise. Harry told us then and there he would make sure that
we never became an important factor in the scrap metal
business. Little did he know that we would become the major
factor in scrap in the Los Angeles area.
One of the problems that we experienced right off the bat
was the fact that the industry itself was full of fractured
programs involving poor scale processing. Just plain cheating
on the scales was a common practice across the industry, and
we were determined that once we moved to our property on
Glassell/Kraemer, we would run a completely honest scale.
Consequently our scales were upgraded, and the city of

37
Anaheim, which still hadn’t forgotten about us, would come in
with their big test trucks and slam on the brakes and pull onto
the scale at any moment they liked. We never had any
problem with the state as far as the scales were concerned,
though. We always were very careful to make sure the scales
were properly set every morning, and we never gave the city
the satisfaction of a dishonest reading.
As we gained volume in the scrap business, more and
more vendors kept bringing scrap into our facility because it
was a good location with easy access to everybody. As a result
of that, our business grew quite rapidly. The man that owned
the property at the time was a gentleman by the name of
Frank Wade. Frank was in the sand and gravel business for a
number of years and he had made a lot of money, and he was
also a hunter, which was an asset to me because I had always
been a hunting man myself. So Frank and I had a lot in
common and got along handsomely, and Frank agreed to sell
us the property on Frontera Road. Unfortunately, Frank got
killed in a very serious accident. One morning he was crossing
the sidewalk with his dog, and was run over by a lady who
claimed she didn’t see him, and he was killed instantly. After
that we had the problem of dealing with his daughter, who
was very antagonistic toward me. We went back and forth
over a long period of time, and finally were able to complete a
transaction on the entire property here.
As we sank our teeth into running our scrap-metal
operation here in Anaheim, our business increased in volume
month by month in spite of the fact that we were now being
harassed by every city, county, state and federal agency you
could think of, agencies I hadn’t known existed. It seemed like
every local politician suddenly had a crusade against
recycling, but was willing to make it go away in exchange for a
nominal—but whopping—campaign donation. Every politician
in the world suddenly had his hand in my pocket. Suddenly
Orange County wasn’t so fragrant anymore.

38
 Seven

In March of 1977, a campaign was initiated by the Orange

County Register, and reporter Joe Cordero carried it forward.
The campaign involved extensive allegations about the way a
$1.8 million county-dump salvage contract awarded to Orange
County Steel Salvage was handled, and about campaign
contributions provided to Phillip Anthony in his successful
quest for a Board of Supervisors seat. The series of articles
attempted to tie together the contract, awarded in December
1976, with the general election held the previous November
and the contributions we made during that campaign.
The paper wove together a scenario, using a series of
articles written by Cordero, in which a grand-jury
investigation was going to uncover bidding irregularities that
led to the contract award. The articles also alleged that the
campaign contributions tied to yours truly were linked to
Ralph Dietrich, and that he had personally asked me to solicit
money for the Anthony political bid.

39
 According to the newspaper, the grand jury heard
testimony from Max Stone, a local businessman of
questionable ethics who never actually became a partner with
Orange County Steel Salvage—he never came up with the
money he’d need to invest in our landfill operations—but who
had Cordero’s ear. Max said that I directly told him that
Dietrich himself suggested the contributions, first in the form
of a loan and then in the form of a direct contribution. Adams
Steel had business decisions before the board, so the
implication was clear—this was a pay-to-play request. The
contribution, allegedly $35,000 for the campaign in the form
of a loan on Anthony’s home, was then changed to a direct
request for a $35,000 cash contribution, which Stone says he
refused. Cordero then reported that I made two $2,500
contributions under business names, and seven weeks after
the election I was awarded the contract to salvage the three
county dumps at Olinda, Santiago Canyon, and Prima
Deschecha. This followed the prior year’s award for salvage at
the Coyote Canyon dump.
In addition, the Register began reporting about the
Frontera Avenue site’s lack of adequate licensing operations.
Beginning in February 1977, the paper began coverage of the
city’s questioning of our licensing and zoning. By March 2,
1977, the paper was reporting that the city was ordering us to
close down after city inspectors served us with four citations
for alleged violations of zoning, building and safety codes.
The city of Anaheim still hadn’t given up on us, either.
They somehow had the impression that we were involved in
some nefarious operation other than the scrap-metal
business. It wasn’t true, of course; we had our hands full just
operating the business, but in an effort to further implicate us
in some chicanery, the city of Anaheim parked a surveillance
van, loaded with sound-detection equipment and every kind
of monitor and microphone imaginable, on the street outside
the scrapyard one evening. I looked out the window and saw
the van out there, and I was immediately suspicious, so I went
out there and rapped on the door. They wouldn’t open up, of
course. Now, I am not exactly the world’s most subtle man—in
fact, I like to think of myself as a proud barbarian. So I just
happened to be carrying a big, heavy sledgehammer in my
hand, and I rapped on the door and I said, “I’ll bust this door

40
in if you guys don’t answer the door.” They finally opened the
door, and they were caught listening to our phone
conversations. So after they were busted, that van was pulled
off of the property. I never did figure out what they thought
they were going to hear; they never seemed terribly interested
in scrap transactions they hadn’t arranged themselves.
In 1986, a few years after we really got rolling on Frontera
Road, an Embassy Suites Hotel was built next door to us. The
city promptly rented a room up on the tenth floor, and they
stationed three detectives in there to spy on us, looking
through binoculars and eavesdropping on listening devices.
One of my best buddies happened to be visiting one day, a
man named Ron McGargle, who wrestled as the Masked
Marvel in the days of Gorgeous George. I told Ron that the city
was up in that room up there, spying on us, and so he said,
“Let’s go up and see those sons of bitches.”
And so we walked over to the hotel, took the elevator up
to the tenth floor, and rapped on the door. No reply. We
rapped a little louder. Finally, Ron, who was a great big guy
and meaner than a junkyard dog, called, “Open this door, you
sons of bitches, or we’ll kick the door in!” So they opened the
door, and of course they got busted again.
The next step in the Anaheim offensive was international
in scope. I had a motorhome that I had equipped to go
hunting with the family in Mexico. With all that
eavesdropping, it came as no surprise that the city knew about
our occasional vacations. They enlisted the aid of a couple of
very corrupt border control agents in San Diego, and they
flagged us on the TEX computer, a computer system in Texas
that holds all of the records for people the federal government
is looking for. When we came across the border, my family
was harassed. My wife and I were forced to go into separate
rooms, and the children, George Jr. and the others, were
forced into separate rooms while they tore the bus apart
looking for God knows what. Of course we had no
contraband—no drugs, no whatever else they were looking for.
But that didn’t stop them. After that we couldn’t cross the
border without getting a nasty surprise.
Finally, after several years of harassment by the city,
President Reagan was elected, and I was invited to the White
House for a meeting with him because we had raised quite a

41
bit of money for him. By that time I had some very dear
friends that were very important in the Border Patrol, and the
general manager of the Border Patrol out of San Diego and
Nogales was a very close personal friend of mine, so I enlisted
his aid and as a result of the investigation that we conducted,
we were able to get into the TEX computer. The director of the
Border Patrol, Adolph Saenz, issued a report on the whole
affair that clearly implicated the city of Anaheim, and of
course when we got back we sued the city for it, and despite
some thoroughly incompetent work by my attorney at the
time, we still won an award from the city of Anaheim, some
lousy $9,000. I’ve included Dolph’s report at the end of this
chapter.
After the lawsuit with the city was completed and the
money was paid, we pursued the
two Border Patrol agents that had gotten us into this mess. We
blew their cover by putting their names in the public record,
and they were dismissed from their cushy jobs in Orange
County and sent to some other duty in Chicago, and that was
the end of the Border Patrol incident. But it goes to show you
how far a bunch of crooked politicians will go to try to get us
out of business. It took me some time to find out what
they were really after. They wanted our property. We were at
the gateway to the city; one city official actually asked me,
“George, how could you put this scrap-metal yard in the
gateway to this beautiful city?”
Of course, “beautiful city” depended on your point of
view. You could go up and down any boulevard in Anaheim at
the time and pick up any number of prostitutes, and that was
just one of the ways that crime in Orange County was wide
open, even before half the county government ended up in jail.
But beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.
We continued to have serious problems with the city of
Anaheim. It was obvious that they wanted this property, and
they did not want a scrap metal operation to be located where
ours was. And then there was the matter of Orange County’s
paper of record, the Orange County Register. It was not much
of a paper.
I was gladdened recently to see that the company that
owns the Register finally collapsed and went into bankruptcy.
I can’t claim to be sorry to see it go, having suffered 20 years

42
of persecution at its hands now. Unfortunately, as is the case
in most bankruptcies, the owners were probably able to
insulate themselves with a considerable amount of money,
and most likely the only people that were really hurt in the
downfall of the Register were the investors and the average
employees.
Being in the salvage business, for some reason or other,
always seemed to raise a stench of corruption in the eyes of
the average newspaperman; somehow the business is
considered less than reputable. The Register employed a
series of muckrakers, so-called reporters, headed by a creep
by the name of Joe Cordero. Joe took up a personal crusade
against my business for reasons I never fully understood. I
couldn’t make a move—applying for a permit, filing
paperwork, anything on the public record—without the
Register jumping down my throat. And there were many
moves to be made.
At the time that I got into the salvage business in Orange
County, the county was just going into a major growth cycle
and the 91 freeway was not yet complete, and consequently
the freeway system was not operational. The location for our
business on Glassell-Kraemer and along the proposed route of
the 91 freeway was a nice parcel of land, 40-some-odd acres in
total. I wasn’t smart enough at the time to realize that
recycling was about the last thing the city had in mind for that
spot.
The salvage industry had a reputation for scavenging and
got no respect whatsoever from the general public. It wasn’t
until the county of Orange started amassing large piles of
trash in alleyways that the city finally became aware that
recycling was probably more important than anybody
realized.
At the time of this writing, I have no pleasant memories
of the city where I do business. I received no assistance in any
way, shape or form through 20 years of prosecution and
persecution. Although the city boasted that they had spent
$600,000 in pursuing Adams Steel, I wish to state that as a
practical matter, we probably spent much more than
$600,000 in defending ourselves. It wasn’t until we took our
case to court that we finally got some relief.

43
 It is hard to imagine that no one in Orange County
politics had the foresight to realize the necessity of recycling
like what we conducted at the four landfills. We spent an
incredible amount of money building conveyor systems and
recovery systems and developing these systems that were
necessary to recover all of the material, but we faced
tremendous resistance from the people that operated the
landfills, employees of the county of Orange, and the
relationship was never on a good footing because the
employees of the county of Orange thought that we were
cutting into their private plans to scavenge what they could
and sell it for a profit to some “junkyard”—their word for our
business.

44
The first page of Dolph’s report.

45
The second page of Dolph’s report.

46
 Eight

Then there was the matter of Cecil Hicks, a district

attorney. Lately I’ve begun to wonder how people like him
could have ever gotten into office. I was quite involved in
political fundraising programs at that time, as all of the local
politicians had their hands in my pocket, and so I attended
many of the functions. I met Cecil there—or, rather, I saw
Cecil there. I’m not sure you can be said to meet a man when
he’s unconscious on his feet. Cecil was a man of fairly small
stature, and I never saw him at any fundraiser when he wasn’t
drunk. Every time I saw Cecil at one of these fundraisers, he
had one deputy on each side, holding him erect so he wouldn’t
fall down on his face.
I never saw any improvement in Cecil all the years that he
was the district attorney. When I was called in front of a grand
jury to testify in yet another trumped-up prosecution, Cecil
appointed one of his deputies to do the questioning. The day
before, I had made arrangements to organize all my records

47
and books and so forth, with the intent of taking them to the
grand jury meeting and answering any questions about my
bookkeeping procedures. I carefully stacked all the books and
the records that I was going to take on my desk the night
before the meeting. Interestingly enough, when I got to work
the next day, just prior to going to the grand jury interview, I
had a suspiciously clean desk. The records were gone. I
couldn’t believe that anybody would have broken into my
office and stolen all my books and records, since they had no
value to anyone who wasn’t a lawyer or a bookkeeper, but I
had no choice but to go to the meeting without them. When I
went into the grand jury room, lo and behold, there in front of
me was the stack of all my books and records.
It turned out that good old Cecil, perhaps in conjunction
with the sheriff, Brad Gates, who was no particular friend of
mine, had broken into my office and stolen all my records.
Now they were stacked in front of the grand jury foreman.
When I saw the books, I became very angry, and I stood up
and said that the grand jury was a farce, that they had broken
into my office and stolen all my records. The grand jury
chairman stood up and demanded that I no longer address the
jury, saying that I had no right to speak, and I said, “If I don’t
have any right to speak, I’m not going to stay here.”
Finally everyone got talked down, and the questioning
began, and it was obvious to me that Cecil’s chosen deputy
had not even a foggy idea what he was there for. He fumbled
and thumbed through some of the records, trying to come up
with some questions, and the simple fact is that the whole
grand jury investigation was nothing but a farce. They had, in
the meantime, interviewed Max Stone, the two-bit jerk from
Cherry Hill Auto Wrecking who had tried to become involved
with us and the processing of the contracts at the landfill.
Fortunately for me, Max and his associates were a bunch of
cheap bastards and never came up with any money, and so
consequently I didn’t include them in any of my business
dealings. I did all of the processing and contract work for the
County of Orange strictly on my own, which made the
deputy’s job that much harder.
As it turned out, the basis for the investigation was those
contracts, alleged to be worth $1.8 million, though this was all
fiction. There was no value based on the contracts whatsoever,

48
and to my knowledge there was never anyone else looking to
do the contract work. This was a program that I had instigated
in discussions with Ralph Dietrich and some of the other
supervisors. I agreed to put in some equipment, do some
recycling, and so forth, but we received resistance right off the
bat. We had an aluminum container up there to recover the
better-quality material, and every night the container would
be broken into. The landfill was being operated by a man
named Don Poer, who lived just a few blocks from our
recycling center in Anaheim, right across the Santa Ana River.
Don was very distressed about the fact that we were involved
in the landfill recovery, and when we got a portable conveyor
system built, with diesel power equipment plants that would
run the electric motor, Don went out of his way to change the
dumping procedure on a daily basis. We would set up the
conveyors at some logical spot to do the sorting, and Don
would immediately order the dumping to begin in another
position, several hundred yards away from where we were
operating, knowing full well that we could not easily move the
conveyors. It was petty bullying, mostly.
The value of the materials that we were recovering varied
from washing machines to refrigerators and products of that
time, bed frames and various other miscellaneous pieces of
equipment. Although the scrap had some value, they were
bulky items and fairly hard to handle. This required some
lifting equipment at the landfill to load the containers, and
this met with considerable resistance because every time we
moved our equipment around, it seemed we were always in
the path of some of Don’s dumping trucks and so forth. The
bottom line was that Don Poer was against the whole
program. After we got settled in and started doing some
recycling, trying to recover material, Don went to the Board of
Supervisors and stated that we weren’t paying our employees
time and a half on Saturdays. Saturday was the best day for
recovery because that was the day when most people would
bring in washing machines and refrigerators and other
materials for dumping. But as a result of the added cost of
paying time and a half for Saturdays, it became completely
unprofitable because there was not enough value recovered
from the scrap.

49
 Please keep in mind that the value of this type of scrap at
the time was about $30 to $35 a ton, tops. As a result, we
made every effort to convince the people that came into the
landfill, especially on Saturday, to take their scrap
refrigerators and stoves and other items directly to our main
yard. So that started to make an impact, and gradually we
were able to get more and more material delivered there.
Although we didn’t pay very much money for the product, we
still paid more than the landfill, which paid nothing, and we
saved ourselves the cost of going to the landfill ourselves in
the bargain. Consequently, we started shifting the material
away from the landfill to receiving it at the Orange County
Steel operation, which was convenient to the freeway.
After the chairman of the grand jury went back and forth
with the assistant district attorney that had been appointed to
interview the whole case, the chairman realized that they were
getting nowhere and had no basis for the investigation
whatsoever, and apparently the whole thing was a farce. He
asked me if I wanted my books and records back, and I told
him no, it wasn’t necessary, they could keep them. I could
easily duplicate the books and records because we had good
record-keeping in-house.
You must remember that at this time the grand jury’s
objective was to get an indictment against me for some alleged
crime that I had committed somewhere along the line, either
in the contract negotiations or whatever the case might be,
and after the investigation, the chairman of the jury decided
there was no reason to pursue it any further and there would
not be an indictment handed down.
That wasn’t quite the end of things with Cecil Hicks,
though. My son George by this time had gone through law
school, graduated successfully in 1984, and taken the bar
exam. He passed it the first time, which indicates the intense
study he put into the test, despite working at the shop every
day, being involved in the landfill operations, managing the
loading and the conveyor systems’ movement and everything
else. And because George was among the new inductees to the
bar, Cecil Hicks was elected to give George the blessing or
curse of the district attorney’s office.
Cecil Hicks interviewed George and rode him hard,
demeaning him in every way that he could, because Cecil

50
knew that he was my son and he also knew that I had nothing
but contempt for him; I made that obvious every time I faced
him when he was drunk. George got through the experience,
but it was not a pleasant day for him. If I was upset about it, I
had nothing on Dolores.
We attended a fundraiser shortly after George’s
crucifixion by Cecil Hicks. Dolores stormed right up to Cecil
Hicks and grabbed him by the necktie, under his chin, and
hoisted him up and she tilted his head back, way back, called
him a few pet names and told him that he was a son of a bitch
for abusing our son like he did. I knew we were digging
ourselves in deep with that, but I couldn’t help being proud of
Dolores for doing it. I am a hunting man, as I’ve said before,
and I know a few things about bears and their cubs—and
Dolores could give them lessons.
Needless to say, the exchange did not improve our
relationship with the district attorney’s office. And it was only
the beginning of our adventures in California politics.

51
 Nine

I knew early on that the main objective for Orange

County Steel Salvage, or Adams Steel, as it was then called,
had to be getting our own shredding operation. That’s where
the money was. I believed that the market in Orange County
was strong enough to support a local steel-shredding
operation, so we started putting out feelers in that direction in
1978 and 1979. The state of California at the time had a
program whereby a small business could borrow up to
$500,000 from the Small Business Administration, and if the
state got involved and approved the program, you could boost
it up to $5 million. The program was new when we got
involved, and so I and a few of the engineers that worked with
me were asked to write it all up. We turned in a proposal over
200 pages long, and we were able to get approval for the $5
million we needed to install our own shredding operation.
When the CPCFA approval finally came down from Jesse
Unruh in February 1980, and the check became available, my

52
son George flew up to Sacramento to pick it up. If you ever
want to see someone truly happy, hand him a check for $5
million. Of course, our work had only begun. Now we had to
build a shredding operation, and where were we going to get
the technology to do it? New equipment was very expensive,
far in excess of the $5 million that was available to us, so we
had to go to local banks for more loans.
After much back-and-forth, we located a 74-inch
shredding mill in Pennsylvania that was being taken out of
service, and it suited our requirements. A man by the name of
John Thomas, a truly remarkable demolition expert who had
worked with me on several jobs in the past, went back there to
dismantle the operation and arrange to ship it out to
California. Every load of this equipment was an overweight
load and had to be specially routed in such a way that it would
get here without collapsing a bridge or getting stuck
somewhere in the middle of the country. We finally located a
man in our area named Jim Stewart who specialized in
hauling overweight loads and routing and so forth. Within two
weeks, we were able to move the entire mill into our Anaheim
nerve center, where the foundation was already poured and
waiting as of January 1980. And how that happened was a
story in and of itself.
At the time that I leased the Glassell-Kraemer property
from Frank Wade the property consisted of a parcel
approximately seven acres in size. Frank had allowed a lot of
miscellaneous waste material to be dumped into a hole on the
site after he had removed all the sand and gravel. That
reduced the site’s value because it required a considerable
amount of fill, and the property was really not usable.
However, it did have a scale and about an acre we could use to
start our scrap metal operation.
The foundation for the first mill was laid on top of the
rubbish fill that had covered the entire area. The natural soil
was 33 feet down, and we decided that we would remove only
the top 15 feet and lay the foundation on top of the rubbish.
My first objective was to figure out how to fill the
property without further contaminating it, and also whether
we would have to remove the materials that had been dumped
in there, including tractor tires and a variety of other things.
As it turned out, we couldn’t do any such thing. I finally came

53
up with a plan to bring in crushed concrete, fill the site, and
level it off as we went so that we would have more and more
property available to us. As we started using the property and
started bringing in material, we began bringing in extra cash,
too—getting paid to dump waste concrete into the site.
The foundation was an eight-foot-thick slab of concrete,
heavily reinforced with 110-pound rails crossed over, and we
inserted a three-inch pipe at each end of the foundation so
that we could adjust the slab if it tilted from the weight of the
foundation made of concrete. We could pump concrete into
the corner pipes that we had laid in the foundation and could
adjust any tilting that might occur. This saved us a
tremendous amount of money as far as excavation of the
material was concerned. As it turned out, the foundation was
very stable, even though it was placed on landfill rubbish.
The adjoining 35-acre property was owned by the county
of Orange, and when the county put that property up for sale,
we tried to buy it. There were other people bidding on the
property that wanted it for construction, storage, and so forth,
and so we had quite a battle on our hands, and we paid much
more than we thought the property was worth at the time.
However, I felt it was critical, if we were ever going to expand
our business to any size, that we have the entire property, all
40 acres, one mile in length along the 91 freeway, from
Glassell-Kraemer all the way down to the Burlington Northern
Santa Fe railroad tracks. I didn’t realize at the time what the
best use of the property would be, but I knew that it was
important that we try to control our new home. Even though it
later became difficult to hang onto the site, between a lawsuit
over our shredder waste and pressure from state and local
governments, we stuck to our guns.
To bring this 40-acre parcel up to a level we could use, we
needed several hundred thousand cubic yards of concrete fill,
rubble, dirt, rock and so forth to fill the property. This process
took a matter of three and a half to four years to complete, and
finally we had a really good-looking parcel that was flat and
usable. However, keep in mind that the fill rested on top of
waste materials that were not compacted well at all.
Nevertheless, we knew that we had a valuable piece of
property on our hands. As the demand became more

54
pronounced, we began to realize the value of the property and
the other, higher uses for it.
It turned out that the railroads were having difficulty
finding suitable properties on which to store their railcars and
do their demolition and other things that the railroads have to
do. Consequently, we were able to structure a program with
the Burlington Northern railway to bring in the line off the
main line onto our property, and so I decided that we would
build the property up and try to satisfy the railroad’s
requirements. In addition to this, to generate additional cash
flow, I was also operating a landfill in Corona, which enabled
us to buy a piece of property that would eventually save us
from a financial crisis we didn’t even know we had yet.
For the next two years, I was extremely busy in running
the landfill operations and building the railroad spurs with the
landfill money. By this time, George Jr. and the rest of the
Adams gang were pretty well indoctrinated in the business,
and had plans to move forward and expand the business that
didn’t necessarily involve the use of my time or the railroad’s,
so I continued to build the railroad spurs. As of this writing,
we have a total of 22 rail spurs out there, which probably
equates to 22 to 25 miles of rail on the property, all of it
covered by 18 inches of concrete with complete facilities for
getting off all the surface water. The railroad track has been a
very good investment, a steady source of cash for Adams Steel.
The money was very welcome; the railroads paid right on
time, and used part of the property to store lumber and other
valuable materials. We were using probably 25 of the entire
40 acres for the rail spur activity when things got going. For
the first railbed we excavated approximately five to ten feet,
depending on the condition of what we found below grade
there. We had the largest compacting system that we could get
on the property. We would compact the railbed for an
extended period of time, and the vibration would settle the
concrete that was in place and also the other materials, and
then we’d break up the concrete that we’d excavated out of the
roadbed so it would compact much better, and thus the
roadbed was built. After the material was in place, we put in
approximately two feet of rock supplied by the railroad and
provided by its engineers.

55
 When the Adams shredding operation was finally
installed in 1982, we still lacked a few major components. One
of them was the infeed conveyor system that’s required to
bring the material into the shredder hopper, and it was an
amazing stroke of luck that we were able to find that. At that
time, the Olympics were being planned in Los Angeles, and
the ramps for the 747s were being replaced at Los Angeles
International Airport. These ramps were something like a
hundred feet long and very sturdily built, and when I took a
look at that, I realized that if we could put some pulleys at
each end and put a belt connecting over that, we could get our
own ramp, which would otherwise cost us several million
dollars on the open market. I was faced with another tough
move, so I enlisted the help of Jim Stewart, and under the
cover of night, we were able to finally get the equipment down
here. After a few weeks of work, we had our infeed system
operating at a relatively low cost.
We did several big demolition jobs at the airport around
that time. The next big problem we faced was getting up to our
tower, which was almost 80 feet high and controlled the
feeding equipment and the shredding operation. We were
bidding on a program to do some work at the Firestone
building in Los Angeles, which was being demolished, and lo
and behold, I discovered that the stairway system to one of
their towers was just perfect for our needs. We carefully
dismantled the stairways, which consisted of several sections
and landings, and brought those down to Adams Steel. By this
time our erection people were very adept at working with
scrap and miscellaneous components, and we were able to put
the stairway system up to the top of the tower. Finally, we had
a complete, functioning shredding operation, and from there
on it was just a question of building the ancillary equipment
involved in the separation of the fluff and the other material
we retrieved from the scrap process.
By 1996, we were planning to develop the entire property,
which at this time was still pretty much vacant. I had acquired
my engineering license and also had a demolition license as
well as my general building contract license, so I was qualified
to develop the property. But in an undertaking this great, all
problems are major problems, and I found I needed some very
important civil-engineering programs. For example, a 48-inch

56
high-pressure gas line ran across the entire east end of our
property, at a depth of approximately 20 feet below grade. In
addition to that, there was a open channel—concreted but
open at the top—that collected all the water flow from the 91
freeway and would finally end up flowing across the end of our
property, down into the Santa Ana River. This had to be dealt
with, which required some expert engineering assistance from
some of the local firms. The first thing we had to do was to
cover the open concrete culvert that would carry a heavy-duty
engine and railcars over the site. We had to cover several
hundred feet of the concrete channel with a heavy-duty
concrete overlay, and then bring in compaction to fill the site.
Because of the size of the gas line, we had to put a four-
foot-thick overlay of concrete over it. It’s a form of slurry that
turns into concrete but has great bearing capability. We also
required 15,000 yards of fill to cover the channel as well as the
gas line and bring it all up to grade. We expended several
months on the fill.
Once we had the concrete in place over the pipe, we had
to bring the fill in and compact it. The engineering firm
believed that we had to have at least 98% compaction, which
is very difficult to get, and it took a lot of working the soil and
making sure that it was watered properly. Then, of course, the
grade had to match the grade of the Burlington Northern
main line that connected to the spur for our facility, so
consequently the grades had to be set very, very carefully.
The next step was to design the switch system and the
spur that would come off the main line. It was not possible to
shut down the main rail line for any period of time, so we had
to work in between the freight trains and the passenger trains
that passed over this system. The railroad engineers had
designed a system of rails, connected with the ties,
approximately 150 feet long, which would connect to the main
line and also bring the spur into our property without
interference. The entire rail section was fabricated on top of
the fill that we had just engineered, and everything being on
the same grade and compacted to the maximum, the plan was
to construct the entire section of rail that would go into place,
including the switching equipment, and then lift it in by a
series of forklifts spread out across the length of the spur.
Then we would walk the spur into place with the rail ties

57
already on it, and the railroad engineers would disconnect the
connector, and the connectors that we had fabricated would
match the existing connection and consequently it was just a
matter of walking the old rail section off to the east and
walking the new section in from the west side and putting it in
place. This took a lot of careful planning, but fortunately it
was well-engineered and the plan went off without a hitch
before the next freight train came along, which was
approximately an hour and a half later.
Keep in mind that we’re still in the early 1990s, and the
property had not been developed at this point in time. One of
the things that we had to accomplish next was to put in the
sewer along the road fronting the property. This was quite a
undertaking, again because of the quality of the fill that we
had to go through. Finally the sewer connection was made,
and that sewer today is being used by the hotel next door as
well as by the Adams Steel facilities.
The adjoining property was repossessed by the county of
Orange once, but a few years later there was a reversal in its
value and it went on the market again, and this time we won
the bidding once and for all.

58
 Ten

In June of 1978, we started the application for the

financial assistance we needed, which involved increasing the
SBA loan guarantee from $500,000 to $5 million with help
from the state of California. The man in charge of the
financing program was Jesse Unruh—then the state treasurer
and both a capable administrator and a canny politician. Jess
was very helpful in getting the application started. However,
the process was hardly simple. Jess asked us to write the
program and describe in detail how the program would work
in light of the fact that the state of California had not done a
$5 million guarantee for anyone up to that point. So in an
effort to try to move the process along, we agreed to do all of
the engineering and evolve the details of how the controls
would be set up for the financing authority. One of the
requirements that Jess outlined was that we should have a
public company in order to have the credibility that we needed
to get this kind of money. In order to satisfy that criterion, I

59
inquired in the different trade magazines and finally was able
to find a company in San Francisco that was publicly traded,
in good standing, with no outstanding debt, and we were able
to buy 60 percent control of that company. It worked out very
nicely; the company was called WCS International. We
initially decided that we would simplify the name and just call
it West Coast Steel, but the name went back and forth in
several different incarnations before we finally settled on just
plain WCS International.
The process of getting the paperwork done and getting
the applications approved took the better part of a year.
Finally, when we received the funds, we were in a position to
start our first mill. We bought used equipment and fixed it up
in our welding shop, getting replacement parts where we
needed them, and soon had the mill running very well by early
1982.
At this time, my work was basically completed, and the
Adams gang was busy building the business, buying new
plants and expanding the operation. However, another
problem soon reared its ugly head—all these endeavors were
costing a lot of money, and spending like a drunken sailor,
even when it’s necessary, is not a good long-term business
strategy. We soon ran short of funds. Fortunately, I had
developed some private friendships with people that had their
own funds available, and as a result of this we were able to
borrow enough money to keep the operation going.
In the meantime, we had accumulated a huge pile of
shredder waste that we hadn’t removed, and when we finally
got approval to move part of that shredder waste to the CRIT
landfill in Arizona and another part to our operations in
Mexico, we were finally able to clean up the stockpile that had
accumulated. It was a very expensive operation. We found
ourselves approximately $3 million short, with all resources
stretched to their breaking point. We were negotiating some
new lines of financing with Farmer’s Bank of Long Beach at
the time, and they had opened up a new branch locally here in
Anaheim. Some of my private contacts were willing to lend
money at a prohibitively high 14 percent, but we entered
negotiations anyway. We still had our usual expenses to make,
plus the cost of dealing with the shredder waste and repaying
the SBA loan.

60
 I was finally able to borrow approximately $2 million in
private capital. In the interim, my very best friend and
provider of funds up to that point, Al Borchard, got in a
terrible car accident on his way to Mexico on a hunting trip.
His wife was killed with him in the accident, and while I
missed his friendship more than anything else, his death did
nothing to improve the financial condition of Adams Steel.
Finally the loans were arranged through a carefully
crafted program, and every dollar that we borrowed from this
group of investors was carefully documented. Finally we came
to a point where we had to liquidate some properties that we
had, and fortunately we had made some good buys and I was
still filling certain landfill sites that were still making money.
Because of all of these efforts, the property values were way in
excess of the $2 million we owed, and we finally got that
particular mess straightened out.

61
 Eleven

The new mill was in operation approximately 60 days

after the first foundations were laid, and it was terrifically
exciting to see the mill in operation with a fully operational
conveyor and all the related components, including the access
to the tower, which we had salvaged in part from taking down
the Firestone stairways from the old mill.
The next issue to arise was our dealings with the Bank of
Boston. In 1983, the Bank of Boston had lent us a
considerable amount of money to supply some product for a
mill that was going to be operating in Arizona, near one of the
copper mines, and so as a result of that we looked into the
possibility of getting the order and getting it directly to the
mill. In the process of negotiating this contract, our old
archenemy Harry Faversham appeared at the mill and tried to
work around us. He promised the mill faster delivery at a
reduced price, even though he couldn’t deliver. When we
found out about it, my son George was incensed. He flew his

62
plane to Phoenix and talked directly to the mine people, and
convinced them that Harry was not able to meet his
commitment. They finally reinstated the order to our
company, which at that time was called Orange County Steel
Salvage.
On his way out of Phoenix, George had electrical
problems on the airplane; the alternator malfunctioned, and
he lost contact with the tower. He knew he had to get out of
there as fast as he could, so he flew to a small airport outside
of Phoenix and landed in Barstow, California. Unfortunately,
he was not able to have the plane repaired, so he flew out of
Orange County in a million-dollar airplane and come back on
a $50,00 Greyhound bus.
However, the order was being booked through another
scrapyard in Phoenix that had done previous business with
the copper mine. We thought we had a good relationship with
the gentleman who booked that order, as we had done some
business with him in the past. We received a small part of the
payment from the mill on the scrap sale, but then when the
balance of the payment was due, we didn’t receive it. We
called this gentleman in Phoenix and he kept stonewalling us
and said that he hadn’t received the payment and so forth, so
again my son George contacted the mill and they assured us
that they had paid the amount in full.
In the meantime, the Bank of Boston was hammering us
to repay the loan we had taken out to provide the materials for
this particular order. I decided to go to Phoenix and find out
why we hadn’t been paid, so I took a couple of my friends with
me who had some experience in collections. Well, I say that,
but most of the time they were really professional wrestlers.
One of the gentlemen that was with me was a man that we
knew only as Mr. T, and his associate was a gentleman that we
called Five-By-Five. He was an incredible strongman and he
wasn’t very tall, but he was the widest man that I had ever
seen, and he took two seats on the airplane to Phoenix and
back. When we got to the gentleman’s office in Phoenix, he
was there and we asked to see him. He kept stammering and
sending messages through his secretaries, saying that he was
busy. We waited about an hour before we found out that he
had slipped out the back door. So we talked to the secretary
and demanded to know where he was, and she told us he was

63
out on another appointment, which did not sit at all well with
us. We corralled another employee after that and persuaded
him to tell us where the boss lived. And then we went over to
the man’s house, which was a very interesting experience. He
had just bought a brand-new condominium and paid cash for
it, and later the young secretary admitted that he had used our
money to pay off the condo. When we got to his condo facility,
we found a locked, gated premises. There was no way that we
could get in, and trying to sweet-talk guards doesn’t get you
very far when you’ve got Mr. T and Five-by-Five behind you.
Finally we skirted the entire property and came in through a
back door. Some janitors and gardeners had left the back gate
open, and so we made our way to the apartment number we’d
been given and rang the doorbell. As soon as the man opened
the door, Five-By-Five grabbed him by the arm and pulled
him down the step and announced, “We’re gonna go for a little
walk.”
So Mr. T and I let Five-By-Five take our friend for a little
walk around the block, and when he come back, why, the
gentleman had decided that he would go to his bank with us
and try to persuade his bank manager to lend him enough
money to pay us off. So we went to the bank, and the banker
agreed to lend this gentleman the money, and we came away
successfully with a cashier’s check, issued by the bank. In the
meantime, of course, the Bank of Boston had put tremendous
pressure on us to try to get payment, but we finally paid them
off in their turn.
As you can see from these experiences, we were learning
new techniques every day and I found the bottom line was
that you have to be very careful who you deal with. On the
other hand, I have to give the scrap industry a high mark—the
money was always good, as a rule, and most of the scrap metal
companies we dealt with might hammer us on price, but they
were basically reputable folks. I think they were overcoming
most of their problems because we had gone out of our way in
our own operation to make sure that we had the scales
certified properly. Our efforts to improve the quality of the
industry overall proved fruitful, and the whole scrap-metal
industry over the next few years got in line; most of the scales
were certified, and you could finally get an honest scale weight
for the money that was paid.

64
 I started out financing my business through Bank of
America, and applied for a $5,000 loan when I was first
starting out. The bank, of course, turned me down, refused to
assist me in any way, and as a result of that I became
acquainted with another small local bank, called American
Commerce National Bank. And that’s a tale of complete
deceit—corruption, crooked bankers, crooked attorneys,
dishonest politicians, crooked former government employees,
and dishonest judges. I had only a small transaction going
with American Commerce National Bank, but that transaction
developed into litigation. Although I never met the president
of the company, he stated in court that he personally had
negotiated the small loan with me, as a matter of $15,000, and
on a guarantee, as a matter of fact, not even a direct loan. This
was, of course, a lie. The only man I ever dealt with at the
bank was a man by the name of Bill Phipps, who later had the
great good fortune of winning a California Lotto jackpot of
some $15 million, so he left the bank in quite a hurry.
American Commerce National Bank sued me for the
recovery of their funds, and my position was that they had
refused to release the documents that had been a part of the
contract of the sale. When we went to court on it, I ran afoul of
an attorney named Gerald Gardner, who happened to own the
bank. He was a tall, fairly decent-looking man, and he paraded
back and forth in front of the judge and I could see the judge
was attracted to him—she couldn’t take her eyes off him.
Gardner was also personal friends with my archenemy, Joe
Cordero, the Register reporter, so Cordero was hip-deep in
the story.
I lost that bit of litigation, owing to the fact that my
lawyer was completely incompetent and couldn’t even find Bill
Phipps. But it wasn’t long before the truth of the matter
became evident. A series of investigative articles appeared in
the Los Angeles Times, and the bank trustees took control of
the bank and seized the bank’s assets. Gardner lost his bank
and found himself facing a jail sentence.
A few years, later one of my stockholders in WCS
International, a man by the name of Phil Schnorbach, came by
my office and said, “George, I want you to go take a little trip
with me.” I agreed, and we went down to an office in Anaheim
and he introduced me to a man that said his name was

65
Gardner, who turned out to be the same man that had dealt
me such a beating in court.
Gardner admitted to us that he had lied in court, that he
had never met me before, and yet he had a chuckle about the
whole thing. He says he looked upon the whole affair as a big
joke, and he laughed about it and he said, “It’s really tough
playing with the big boys, isn’t it, George?” Phil is still living
and has told me that he would swear to an affidavit that this is
a true story. The matter is closed now, but I just want to point
out that dealing with bankers can be very dangerous, as I
mentioned earlier.
My chief financial officer and I decided around that time
that we would go to New York and hit up our contacts for
funding. Because WCS now was a publicly traded company,
we would try to arrange enough money to solve our financial
problems once and for all. The trip to New York was
reasonably successful, although we realized it would take a
considerable amount of time and a lot more trips east to work
with the market-maker that we had selected. The company
that suited our purposes was a company called Sherwood
Securities Corporation. It was not a big trading company, but
substantial enough to handle our program, and so when all of
the paperwork was finally complete, the underwriting took
shape and it looked as though we were going to actually get
about $17 million. By this time all of our financial statements
had been audited by top-notch auditing companies, so our
credibility was rock-solid.
By September of 1986, we had finally gotten all the
documentation and paperwork ready for the underwriting
firm, and so my financial officer and I made what we hoped
would be our final trip to New York City to finish up. In the
process, it was agreed that we would change the name from
WCS International to Adams International Metals
Corporation, and that was reflected on the front page of the
Sherwood Securities Corporation document, which was filed
the day we arrived in New York.
We had planned on staying in New York over the
weekend, because the so-called red herring was being filed on
Friday, and on Monday the final document would be filed and
the funds would be available very shortly thereafter.
Tragically, this was not to be the case. A gentleman named Mr.

66
Schwartz happened to be in charge of the Sherwood Securities
Company. He was a young man in his early forties, and he
decided to go jogging in Central Park Sunday morning while
my officer and I were having breakfast at our hotel in New
York. A short while later, we got the bad news: Mr. Schwartz
had had a fatal heart attack while jogging in the park. It was a
disaster.
Of course, on Monday we were at the office of Sherwood
Securities. Everything was in a state of chaos; there was no
one there prepared to move forward with any of their
programs in light of the fact that Mr. Schwartz had been the
main instigator in the whole program. After staying over a
couple more days in New York, we began to realize that it was
going to be impossible to get the financial program going
again, so we would have to get back to California and try to
work out our next move. As a result, we again had to go to our
friends and try to raise private capital to fill the breach. Our
sales were skyrocketing, which took more money for inventory
and so forth—the business was there and we wanted to take
advantage of doing as much business as we possibly could.
I’ve found out the hard way that borrowing money when
you’re in the scrap business, starting out, is not an easy thing
to do. Everybody looks at you like you’re a criminal, and the
scrap industry had an extremely bad reputation here in
Orange County because most of the scrap yards were really
unsightly-looking, and most of the owners by and large had
not had any pride in their operations. The scrap metal yards
looked just like what they were called—junkyards. Finally I
had resolved that we would have a first-class operation in
every respect, and it was a lot of work, but I think everyone
will agree that we succeeded handsomely.

67
 Twelve

The next step was bringing over the electrical power for
our new facility. We were still operating at this time with the
old shredder, and the power on the property was adequate to
handle the old shredder, but not the new shredder, which
would have eight or nine thousand horsepower in the main
motor. The power lines were on the north side of the 91
freeway. We had to bring a line across the freeway, and of
course the engineers from the electrical department of the city
of Anaheim were very helpful because they saw that Adams
Steel might become a major user of the city’s electricity. An
arrangement was made with Caltrans, and at two o’clock one
Sunday morning, all of a sudden the freeway traffic was
rerouted. No one knew why; it was just simply done. We
brought the power lines over from the existing terminals on
the north side of the freeway to our terminals on the south
side, and the traffic was allowed to flow again after the
electrical connection was made.

68
 The next major obstacle that we faced in developing this
piece of property was the removal of the electrical power
system that had been supplying the old shredder, and also the
heavy-duty telephone lines that ran across the freeway and
were anchored on the north side of the freeway again. We
tried to find a contractor that would take these wires down,
and we could not find anybody to do it, so we decided we’d
have to do it ourselves. After some negotiation, the California
Highway Patrol agreed to control the traffic flow through the
area while we risked life and limb. We carefully rigged the
system for coiling up the wires once they were cut down and
pulled across the freeway, and everything went reasonably
well until we got to the last wire. Unfortunately, the
attachment that we had made to hold the wire in place until it
could be coiled and removed broke loose and the wire was
released, falling onto the 91 freeway. As the wire fell, it hit a
passing pickup truck and caught the ladders loaded on its roof
just as the truck was going by. It raked the ladders right off the
fasteners and dumped them onto the freeway. What happened
next was a comedy of errors. Another construction truck was
following the truck that had lost the ladders, and these
gentlemen stopped their truck, jumped out of the truck,
picked up the ladders that were scattered on the freeway and
took off like a bunch of gangbusters. The gentleman that lost
the ladders to begin with drove off, not knowing what had
happened in all the excitement. A few hours later, he came
back and saw that we were working on the site, and he came
over and very politely asked if we knew anything about the
wire that had broken loose and stripped the ladders off his
truck. We immediately admitted that we did, and we were
willing to make any reparations necessary and so forth. And
he said, “Well, my truck wasn’t damaged, but I would really
like to have you replace the ladders.” I think it cost something
like $800, and we agreed right then and there, and as we
happened to have the cash on us, we peeled out the eight
hundred, he signed a little memorandum to the effect that he
was satisfied with the settlement, and he took off. We never
saw the gentleman again, and counted ourselves lucky that no
one was hurt.
It wasn’t until the year 2002 that all 22 rail spurs were
finally in place, and all the concrete was laid down. This was

69
not the end of the development of the property, because new
flood-control laws prohibited us from dumping our water into
the Santa Ana River without treating it, so consequently we
had to lay a complete 16-inch line around the perimeter of the
property with access to the pipe in various locations to gather
all of the surface water that would fall on the property. This
was a major undertaking; we had to build a substantial
storage tank for the water as the settling basin. I think it was
somewhere around 130,000 gallons, and it took a
considerable amount of time to put in the filtering plant to
process the water. Then we had to overlay the entire property
with cement, 72,000 cubic yards of concrete laid down.

70
 Thirteen

While all this development was going on, we were busy

buying scrapyards and growing the company and doing
everything we possibly could to make money. The next
program in which I was personally was involved was the
development of the super mill that we planned to install on
the property in March 2004. The location for the mill had
been carefully selected, adjacent to the foundation of the first
mill that we put in. However, we had to partially remove the
first mill in order to make room for it.
Finally the site was completely excavated and the fill was
brought in to set the mill foundations on, completely separate
from the motor foundations. At this point, we found that the
power that had been provided for the first mill was totally
inadequate, and the new mill required an awful lot of water
that was not available on the site. The nearest water was on
the north side of the freeway like everything else. So we had to
bring in a major water line, and that required tunneling a pipe

71
underneath the freeway, and when the city engineers laid out
the location of the pipe, they missed the engineering
connection by some 200 feet, which meant that we had to run
another lateral pipe to connect to the existing water line. One
comedy of errors after another, but we just took it in stride
and kept going. It didn’t make any difference; if there was an
obstacle, you just had to surmount it and carry on with the
work.
After the soil was finally removed, then the compaction
process began. We felt we had to have at least 95%
compaction for the mill site. The foundations for the mill had
to be very substantial, so we brought the foundations up from
the level that we excavated down to the natural soil, requiring
quite a bit more concrete for the motor foundations. Finally
the mill foundation was laid and the equipment was installed.
By this time we had electricity coming in sufficient to let
us operate with a motor of any size between 7,000 and 10,000
horsepower. The work involved in setting up the new mill was
quite different from what we’d done for the old mill. In order
to get approval for our safety regulations and so forth, we
agreed that we would have to excavate down to the old bed of
the Santa Ana River. The depth of the rubbish at that time was
33 feet, so we had to excavate an area of 100 by 100 feet by 33
feet deep, which equated to 12,200 cubic yards or roughly
1200 truckloads of excavated material that had to go to a
landfill. Of course, the cost of exporting this to the landfill was
extremely high, but it was absolutely necessary. It took us
approximately 60 days to approve the excavation and get
everything in place to start setting forms and foundation for
the new mill. While this was going on, we made every effort to
keep the old mill operational so that we could continue with
the scrap production and to help defray the heavy costs of
installing the new mill.
In the meantime, the Adams gang was busy in acquiring
new scrapyards, and had previously bought a property in
Bakersfield, which had an existing mill on it, in December
1996. We were always acquiring any scrapyards that came on
the market, from Bakersfield to Palm Springs, to help raise
money to improve the Anaheim site.
The Bakersfield operation was a good example of our
engineering prowess. When we bought the Bakersfield

72
operation in 1996, the mill was operating and was producing
about the same amount of material as we were producing here
in Anaheim. However, there were major unsolved water
problems. In addition to that, we found a way of making some
additional money from the local economy, which was heavily
agricultural. The state Agriculture Department had been
hammered by the farmers’ use of toxic chemicals for crop
control and pest control, and the local agencies had
determined that the water runoff from the fields was
hazardous and would have to be treated. We knew an
opportunity to make more money when we saw it, so we
decided to work with the Agriculture Department. We set up a
program where we installed six 30,000-gallon vertical tanks
and connected them all together in such a way that the waste
water from the farms could be dumped into the tanks and go
through a recycling and settling process. The water was then
used to cool down the steel that was being manufactured at
the mill, so we had to run a four-inch pipeline from one
extreme corner of the property up to where the mill was,
several hundred yards away. The water program made a
considerable amount of money for the Bakersfield operation
and provided a very valuable service to the local farmers, at a
charge of only 4 to 6 cents per gallon.
I have included some pictures here of the tank setup. We
had to have access to the tops of the tanks, and consequently
the installation was a hazardous one, working on top of these
tanks with the cranes that we had available. After the start of
construction we had to lay cement slabs down, and all the
other piping and plumbing that had to go into the operation
was quite an undertaking. All the valves were oversized, and
the pipes had to be oversized as well to carry the volume of
water that was coming into the facility. However, we were very
careful and there were no accidents. The superstructure and
catwalks were all installed and the operation was up and
running in approximately 60 days.
At the same time that we financed our new mill on our
main site, we were able to make arrangements to install a new
mill at the Bakersfield site. In light of this, I was able to
develop the tooling on our site here in Anaheim for all of the
positioning and anchoring of the bolts and all the other
technical components that had to be done, including the

73
forms that were required for the motorizer, which was quite a
considerable block of solid concrete, heavily reinforced to
handle the vibration of the motor. After the Anaheim
foundations were complete, we sent the form work and the
technical data required to set the new mill in Bakersfield,
which saved us a considerable amount of time and money.
The new mill was in operation approximately 60 to 70
days after the first foundations were laid, and it was
terrifically exciting to see everything in place and all the pieces
working as we had envisioned. The new mill began operating
in 2004.

74
 Fourteen

Because of all the harassment here at Adams Steel, we

decided in the early 1990s that we would look at other
markets, and I went down to Mexico to see if we could get an
operation of some kind going there. There were some steel
mills down there that were generating shredder waste, and so
I went down to see whether it was possible to do some
business. We were already buying some of their material and
having a few problems in getting it across the border.
The whole Adams family had long been in the habit of
traveling to Mexico regularly to camp and hunt and enjoy
ourselves. It was in Mexico that we first got interested in
falconry. The kids learned to build cages to trap peregrine
falcons and various kinds of hawks. We would drive around
the country, and when we saw a falcon or an eagle on a pole
somewhere, we’d throw out a trap with a couple of live doves
in a cage. We’d keep on driving, and then we’d backtrack and
keep a low profile so that we wouldn’t be seen. Invariably, the

75
bird would swoop down on the trap and get his claws trapped
in there, and then we would go down with a canvas cover and
cover him so he wouldn’t claw our eyes out, and put the
jessups on him and take pictures. Some of those birds had
wingspans of eight or nine feet—truly majestic animals, and
we always released them unharmed.
Meanwhile, Mexico had been having scrap-disposal
problems of its own—particularly an ejido, or agricultural
cooperative, called Emiliano Zapata, near Mexicali. There was
an old quarry in the area that became a dumping ground for
shredder trash and miscellaneous industrial waste beginning
in the late 1980s.
In the process of getting acquainted with the business
side of Mexico, I got a room at the La Cerna Hotel and decided
that I would stay until I was able to work something out. In
the process, I met a young man by the name of Francisco
Aguilar. He was quite a wheeler-dealer and had a very nice
ranch and hacienda in San Felipe, and so we spent some time
getting acquainted. Francisco introduced me to the brothers
Flavio and Cesar Sandoval, who turned out to be involved in
some government programming and quite conversant with
how the Mexican government operated.
The long and the short of it was that we started looking
into the possibility of cleaning up the shredder waste for the
steel mill there. The steel mill was already moving some of its
shredder waste to a potential landfill, and the shredder waste
was being picked over by a group of people in the ejido, and
whatever they salvaged they shared. The property looked like
it had great potential, and the pit had been excavated for sand
and gravel to a depth of approximately 100 feet and close to
half a mile in circumference. Flavio told me at first to forget
the idea of putting a non-ferrous operation in Emiliano
Zapata—too many problems with the ejido, too many
environmental issues. I didn’t listen, of course. Finally, after
two years of negotiations and with the help of Cesar and
Flavio, we were able to sign a temporary lease to start
operating there, and decided we would build a recycling
facility there. It finally got to the point where we had the
property pretty well tied up, and then brought in water and
electricity—at the time, the nearest sources were seven miles
away.

76
 Michael designed and built a state-of-the-art metal
recycling plant in Anaheim for a firm we ran called Omega
Industries, then had it dismantled and shipped to Mexicali.
We had the whole thing reassembled and up and running by
November 1996.
The landfill operation in Mexico turned out to be a very
good investment, and although I had to invest all of the
resources that I had into the deal, we finally got it done over
the next year and we have had a solid relationship with the
Mexican people for 20 years now. They have been totally
aboveboard with us in their dealings, and it’s been a very
rewarding experience. We now have a fleet of trucks operating
in Mexico and also handle all of the shredder waste from the
mill in addition to taking in all of the waste materials
generated by the maquiladora factories of Mexico. The landfill
operation is a very high-standard operation. The pits are
completely lined and contrary to what you might think of the
lackadaisical methods of doing business in Mexico, our
operations are nothing of the kind. We designed the process of
putting shredder waste in there in such a manner that it would
not create a long-term problem for us or for the Mexican
government, and as a result, the Mexican government had
nothing but praise for us. When we finally opened up the
company, we named it ADSA, for Adams and Sandoval, and
we had the governor of the state out and various other
dignitaries and the whole operation was very well-received.
In 1998, Cesar decided to open an industrial landfill.
Omega was running low on trash to process. We ended up
transferring much of Omega’s equipment to ADSA
construction as we began working on the first cell. Because of
our limited resources on the project, Cesar decided to make
the first cell only half its originally proposed size, and ADSA
began receiving industrial waste only two months in. We sent
trash from Anaheim to Mexicali for two years, from 2000 to
2002, until it became more affordable to landfill the Anaheim
and Bakersfield waste nearer the Los Angeles area. We
installed a portable car crusher in February 2007 and found
ourselves shipping a lot of cars into Anaheim as a result. As of
June 2010, we’re expanding the operation in Mexicali, buying
10 acres west of the airport there, and the fleet of trucks are
taking in more and more industrial waste. The operation has

77
grown steadily, and I couldn’t be prouder. Of course, Mike has
his own view of the project:

By the time the Mexico project came along, the

engineering department (me) was already well-established
as being able to do anything. That may or may not have been
true, but just because we can do something doesn’t mean we
should. So once again I have to recite the engineering motto:
“We, the unwilling, led by the unqualified, have been doing
the unbelievable for so long with so little, we now attempt the
impossible with nothing.”
This was the case with the Mexico plant. Even though
our Mexican partners in the project were very
knowledgeable about how to get things done for the plant
and we could not have done it without them, we were, in fact,
still trying to build a plant in Mexico. We had to start with a
piece of dry, hot, dusty desert that was in the middle of
nowhere and build a non-ferrous recovery plant. We already
knew how to design the plant, but it was not practical to
build it in Mexico, so we had to build it here in our shop and
then take it apart and ship it to the new location where it was
to be reassembled. Sounds easy enough, but getting
equipment across the border was always a challenge that led
to delays and extra cost. Things that were easy to do in the
States proved to be more difficult in Mexico.
Getting the cement trucks and workers out to the site to
lay down the foundation and getting the power company to
bring in electricity to power the plant were just two of the
issues we had to deal with. Another one was the heat. The
temperature in Mexicali during the day in August was
blistering. I remember getting into my jeep one day to go
back to the hotel, only to find that my mirrors had melted off
the windshield.
We had to use generators for months during the
construction phase of the project, so we were very happy to
hear the plant was finally going to get its own power. The
power company brought out the new transformer and
installed it way up on a pole. The only problem was that they
never anchored it down, and when the wind blew, the poles
would shake and the transformer started to fall off. This was
just one of many phone calls I got from the plant telling me

78
that something was wrong and asking me when I could come
down and fix it. Many a lost weekend was spent driving
down to the plant to fix whatever had gone awry.
Somewhere along the line we hired Gary Adams, and he
proved to be the man we needed to not only operate the plant
but maintain it as well. Gary has saved me from having to go
down to the plant anymore, and even though I have fond
memories of the time I spent there, I do not miss it. Gary
ended up marrying one of the beautiful Sandoval sisters and
settling down. Gary is not related to our particular Adams
family, but we treat Gary like a member of our clan as well
as a member of the Sandoval family.

At a recent ISRI convention, I purchased a book from a

young gentleman that had been in the scrap business in the
Asian market—the book was titled Starting from Scrap. I read
the book with much interest, but I was extremely disappointed
at his description of the problems that he encountered doing
business in Mexico. I can safely say that we have had nothing
but success in that country, and congenial success at that.
Sims-Adams, the current incarnation of Adams Steel, will
continue to buy scrap operations in Mexico. We now have
scrapyards located in Tijuana and other cities along the
border, and are considering some movement toward the
inland scrap markets in Mexico. The country has been good to
us, and we intend to be good to it.
As I was setting up operations in Mexico, Terry was
finding similar success in Canada. We had tried to get some
work in the United States on the recovery of lithium products
from lithium batteries manufactured by the U.S. government
during World War II. These batteries were becoming a
liability, with huge stockpiles of batteries that weighed some
2,000 pounds each in various sizes and shapes. The
processing was quite extensive and required a great deal of
engineering ingenuity. Terry, being a graduate of USC’s school
of engineering, was completely confident in handling this
project, and as a result of his dealings in Canada, he was able
to get a go-ahead from the city council of Trail, British
Columbia, Canada.
The lithium-battery process has been extensive, and the
company has done quite well in handling these batteries. My

79
only involvement in the operation was the technology to get
this handled; when we sat down to look at how to do this, we
figured out that a thousand-ton press would be required to
shear these batteries up in three segments. As a self-appointed
engineer with experience in heavy machinery, I took it upon
myself to develop the press, which required taking an existing
machine, turning it upside down and adding the tooling that
was required for shearing the batteries. Although the initial
tests were difficult to say the least, the federal government in
the meantime had asked for three applicants to consider
processing the batteries, and of the three applicants we were
the only ones that survived the testing procedure. Although
we had some close calls, we did the testing here in Anaheim
on the first battery, and due to the lack of knowledge required
in testing, we built a safety cage around the battery, a
framework of one-inch-thick solid steel, about 12 feet by 12
feet and 8 feet high. As luck would have it, the battery blew up
during the test, and the cage withstood the force of the
explosion, though we ended up with a round enclosure instead
of a square one. We learned a lot about the process of
handling the batteries from that, and consequently, when the
government in Trail asked us to go forward, we were able to
process these batteries.
It was a highly technical engineering process, although I
was not involved in anything except the manufacture or
rebuilding of the thousand-ton press. Terry and Michael
engineered it all as a hands-free operation, all remotely
controlled from a tower several hundred feet away from the
danger zone. The process involved freezing the batteries in
liquid nitrogen for some 24 hours, then placing them on an
automatic conveyor belt by remote-controlled crane and
moving them under the press. The press would shear the
product, and the lithium residue would fall into a liquid and
dissolve, and of course we had a process set up for recovering
the liquid lithium, converting the lithium hydroxide.
Terry expanded his operations and knowledge of lithium,
and we ended up doing a major project in Columbus, Ohio,
buying the entire surplus supply of lithium that had been
stored in the military archives across the country. All this
material was subsequently moved into a large warehouse in
Columbus, Ohio, some 200,000 square feet in size, filled to

80
capacity. Our plant in Columbus was staffed with some
extremely knowledgeable people; our chief engineer had her
doctorate in this type of chemistry and was able to process the
entire shipment of lithium into lithium hydroxide. Terry
opened up an office in China and was able to move the lithium
product into China, Russia and South America, as well as
various other places. One of Terry’s customers in China made
cell phones, and workers there assembled several hundred
lithium batteries per day.
Because of the nature of the product involved, Terry
selected the name of Toxco for the Canadian operation. He
also expanded the operation by getting connected with some
very capable high-tech people with government contracts. The
operation finally revolved around a sizable facility in Oak
Ridge, Tennessee, doing hazardous-waste work for the
government. Terry was able to get a hazardous-waste approval
permit, and we’re still one of the few companies in the United
States today that is licensed to handle hazardous waste. Oak
Ridge is a very substantial facility, with large craneways and a
rail spur and several major buildings for processing hazardous
waste, storing lead and dealing with anything else we
recovered from the freight cars that were used to transport the
remains of atomic-missile bases from New Mexico to
Tennessee. Each railcar was lined with six inches of lead, top,
bottom, and sides, which, as you may imagine, amounted to
quite a bit.
Finally, the operation was fairly well-organized, and
Terry’s next effort was to establish a high-tech company in
Philadelphia to handle high-tech and dangerous products,
staffed with skilled scientists.
While Terry’s operations were being bulwarked into self-
sufficiency, the political misfits in Orange County did us a
great service by forcing us to find other markets, and our out-
of-state investments remain very successful and profitable.

81
 Fifteen

While Terry’s operations were developing, my son

Michael was working like a beaver manufacturing all the
products that were required—all the tooling, the specialty
equipment, and so forth. Michael had the remarkable ability
to design almost anything, and so, working with our Mexican
welding crews in Anaheim, veterans of the Mexican ship-
building industry, he really went places. Michael’s drawing kit
was a piece of chalk and a concrete slab, and yet they were
able to provide some incredible machines—presses and
conveyors of all types, whatever Terry and George needed.
George, at this time, was extremely busy in expanding the
operations into other areas, including the Bakersfield
operation in 1996, with its mill and outbuildings and so forth.
George finally built Bakersfield up to be the equal of our main
facility in Anaheim. I didn’t really have any choice in this; it
was George’s call and backed by Terry and Michael and
Wendy. I was against it at the time. I thought we were

82
expanding too fast and needed more time to get all our other
problems behind us, but they went ahead with the Bakersfield
deal, and it turned out to be a very good investment. Now we
have other scrapyards up and down the state too numerous to
mention, which I suppose only proves that I should listen to
my children more often.
The next area of expansion for Adams Steel was
downtown Los Angeles. We were able to buy a firm called
Mid-Cities, located on 15th Street right off Alameda, in Los
Angeles in late 1997. Unfortunately, the roads in this area had
been neglected for years, and it was a hard site to access. We
ran into a major problem there because the site was not
draining properly, and we had to do some major work in
taking care of the outflow of water. The city and the state had
implemented a program requiring that all water be either
disposed of on-property or by some other method, and as a
result of that we couldn’t simply empty the water into the
gutter, which had been the practice for years for all the
companies facing any of the streets in Los Angeles. We
developed a unique process to solve the problem. We were
finally able to entrench a major operation, 700 feet long, and
lay in some 4-foot and 5-foot diameter pipe, perforated, and
embed it in sand at the proper depth with a receptor for
draining all the water on the property into the receptor before
it finally trickled down into the tombs and dispersed into the
sand. This system was quite expensive, somewhere in the
range of $100,000, but it adequately handled all the water
and solved all the problems. These days it seems like water is
a problem everywhere, and every industry will soon have to
take care of its water problem by some means similar to what
I have described. I was pleased that we’d found the solution,
and could now get back to the serious business of expanding
Adams Steel.

83
 Sixteen

I am continually amazed at how so-called “intelligent”

people will feed off the paranoia generated by toxic waste and
abandon every effort to logically analyze a problem, look for a
solution, or try to keep in business a company that is
performing a valuable service.
A case in point: Orange County saw fit to establish a
major dump site immediately adjacent to the Santa Ana River
to a depth of 35 feet, way below the water level of the river.
Our brilliant local politicians made this genius decision, and
yet, when Orange County Steel Salvage moved onto the
property, all past sins were forgotten and we were suddenly
the culprits. That’s politics for you.
I am also amazed at the variety of ways politicians find to
make running a business just that much harder. The history of
Adams Steel is full of them.
While we were working on expanding our business during
the 1970s and early 1980s, we became interested in ways to

84
dispose of the large amounts of shredder waste—or “fluff” as it
was called—we were generating. We got involved with a group
of people that had interests in heavy engineering and were
developing a process for dealing with solid waste. We finally
found ourselves associated with a big Los Angeles company
that had on the drawing board a very promising theoretical
means of converting solid waste to energy, mostly via
combustion—they were going to burn the waste to fire steam
boilers and in turn to power electric power plants.
As we got deeper and deeper into this very promising
area, we invested a considerable amount of money in the
program. We got along quite well with the city of Los Angeles,
right up until the city government was on the brink of issuing
a permit for us to set up operations. Then the mayor at the
time, Tom Bradley, finally got around to reading an
investigative report that suggested having a conversion plant
in his city might involve the deaths of one or two people per
100,000 per year, mostly from respiratory illnesses associated
with air pollution. And so of course the measure was defeated,
and all the money we’d invested in the matter was lost. Some
of the people involved in this high-tech engineering project
became incensed at the failure of their program, and one
engineer went on a shooting rampage that killed all three of
his partners and got him life in prison, all because of city
politics. That’s politics in a nutshell for you—and if you ask
me, a nutshell is where it usually belongs.
The process of heat conversion to energy and the use of
the shredder waste is still a viable idea, but tragically, the
political system is so incompetent and incapable of
understanding any of the high technologies involved in it that
we’ve had to give up on the matter for now.
By 1984, we had accumulated a fairly large pile of
shredder waste and had no place to get rid of it. No landfill
would take the stuff, and we couldn’t just let it stay on our
property. We continued to do battle with the state and the
federal government, trying to resolve the problem, to no avail.
By 1995, we were almost ready to give up and tell the state to
take over the business, but when we made the offer, they
refused to accept it.
In the meantime our shredder was in place and operating,
and we had fairly well used up all the funds that we had

85
received from the CPCFA financing authority. I finally had to
go to private friends for money to raise enough funds to finally
haul the shredder waste pile to a landfill that would accept it.
It wasn’t until 1998 that we finally got that monkey off our
backs.
At that point, we were able to move forward and start
some acquisitions to expand our operation. The shredder was
going quite well and sales were increasing rapidly, but all the
money was being used to expand the business and acquire
more scrapyards.
Unfortunately, I still had not learned the bitter lesson of
having the very best attorneys represent me. Most attorneys
are completely incompetent in any case involving money—
which describes almost all legal cases.
One problem that we encountered all along was a sad
example of poor political planning. You may have heard some
discussion of PCBs—polychlorinated biphenyls—a chemical
that became a cause célèbre some years ago. No one really
knew what the PCB problem was, and everybody was afraid of
it. Monsanto Chemical Company took over manufacturing
PCBs from Swann Chemical Company in 1929. These
chemicals were mostly used in transformers and capacitors.
Over the years, even before I got into the scrap business,
whenever we had some polychlorinated biphenyl around or a
transformer that needed cleaning up or repairing or
scrapping, we’d recover the oil in 5-gallon cans for our own
use. It was a fairly clear liquid, and we used that oil for
washing down automotive parts and washing heavy grease off
our hands. It was terrific stuff. Everybody that I knew in the
business would use the oil to wash down heavy grease and
wash off with soap and water. And all this time, I never
noticed anybody that suffered any ill effects from the PCBs,
but in the 1960s they were determined to be a persistent
environmental pollutant, and there was a great to-do over
them whenever a facility like mine turned out to have a lot of
PCBs lying around. That shredder waste pile we couldn’t get
rid of turned out to be full of them, which was the main reason
we couldn’t get rid of it in anything like a hurry.
As our business grew, we found ourselves being
bombarded by negative remarks every place we went. The
news media were absolutely devastating to us and never said a

86
kind word. The Register was worst, of course, both because it
was the local paper and because its reporters totally despised
our business and sided with the opposition in every case they
could, especially where PCBs were concerned. And even
though we made every effort to run a good, clean business, it
was impossible to get a straight answer from anyone political
on what we were supposed to do with these killer chemicals.
They simply didn’t know how to deal with the PCBs, and so we
ping-ponged back and forth from bad to worse and finally
moved most of our operations out of California.
In reviewing my thousands of newspaper clippings, I
found only one article out of 250 articles written about our
company and recycling that was halfway positive. It was an
editorial whose author argued that if the politicians knew
what they were doing, they’d have enough sense to leave us
alone and let us run our business and let us sort things out,
but of course that never happened. Everyone was making too
much hay from our troubles.
The fiercest political opponent of my personal
acquaintance was a man by the name of Irv Pickler, who was
on the Anaheim City Council when the matter of PCBs first
came up. When Irv ran for reelection, he had a brochure
drawn up showing three drums with “Hazardous Materials”
written on them, and plumes of smoke spiraling out of the
drums and a banner reading, “I will put this company out of
business if it’s the last thing I do!” It didn’t happen, and he
didn’t get very far in politics, but he made quite a bit of noise
for a while.
Finally, on August 24, 1995, the city council on a split vote
agreed to give us an 18-year permit to operate the business
here in Anaheim, and after much controversy a 3-2 vote
allowed us to keep the business operating. The council
members approved our permit just before they unanimously
approved a sweeping redevelopment plan that would guide
future commercial and industrial development in our part of
Anaheim. It was a nasty fight, but we survived.
I would like to pay tribute at this time to the
councilmembers that supported us: Bob Zemel, Lou Lopez,
and Frank Fieldhouse. Lopez said at the meeting, “I can’t see
any reason not to give them what they want. We’ve got a noose
around them, everything possible to keep them under control.

87
Either let them do business or buy them out.” My sentiments
exactly.
But as they say, time flies when you’re having fun. It
wasn’t long before the 18-year permit to operate the yard was
coming due again, and we decided to move early on the new
permit processing so that we would not get into a corner. We
applied to the council again for a new permit, and resolution
number PC2009-123 was finally implemented by the city
council of Anaheim, allowing us to continue operations as of
the spring of 2010.
The worst of the media crowd was Joe Cordero, of course.
Thanks to his pals at American Commerce National Bank, Joe
made sure that no matter how necessary the recycling
industry might be in rescuing civilization from its own
garbage, the Register would never have a kind word to say
about us.

88
 Seventeen

I’d like to digress a bit from the business of Orange

County Steel and Adams Steel to recognize a few friends and
loved ones who have contributed to its success. Perhaps the
closest to my heart, in an odd way, was the cartoonist Bill
Mauldin.
I knew Bill from the war; we had several get-togethers,
and he reported on the activity of our combat division, and of
course I had a lot of strong memories of that period. When I
heard that Bill had been hospitalized in the nearby city of
Orange in 2002, I went down and had a nice visit with him,
although he had lost a lot of his ability to respond due to a
stroke and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. But the meeting
was important to me because I’d always treasured one of his
cartoons featuring Willie and Joe, a couple of regular U.S.
Army dogfaces who were real heroes to every man who served
in the war. In this particular cartoon, Joe said to Willie, “Joe,
get down! Get down! They’re shooting at us!” And Willie says,

89
“I can’t, Joe! I can’t! I can’t get down any lower!” And Joe
says, “Why not?” And Willie says, “My buttons are in the
way!”
That cartoon meant a lot to me, because I’d been in that
very situation myself. I got hammered by machine-gun fire
once during my tour in Europe, and I found myself lying on
the ground with a couple of bullets in my left leg, unable to get
up and walk. I was the point man for my division, the first
man out to make contact with the enemy, which is an
excellent way to get yourself shot, and so I had. And as I was
lying there in the mud at Hilbeck in Germany, of course I
thought about Willie and Joe, and even after I left the service,
it stuck with me that somebody else had understood that so
well. It’s not everyone who does. So Bill meant a lot to me, and
I hope my visit meant a lot to him. He died just a few months
later. Bill has since been awarded a U.S. postage stamp
featuring his image, along with Willie and Joe.
As far as people that have made the difference in our
survival, I need to talk about our consultant—I think that’s
probably a good name for what he does. His name is Phil
Anthony. Phil has been with our company since the beginning,
through thick and thin, and served as an Orange County
supervisor during the reign of the famously corrupt Ralph
Dietrich. Fortunately, Phil was able to avoid the pitfalls of
Orange County politics and emerged as a great help to our
Orange County Steel and Adams Steel companies. Without
Phil’s involvement, we probably would still be fighting City
Hall.
You can say we buy our way into local politics; you can
say anything you want to, but the simple fact is that if you’re
in business, you have to pay politicians, and there’s no two
ways about it. You just have to play the game and deal with
them. Phil was able to manage most of our direction in this
and make sure that at the very least we paid the right
politicians. Phil has a wonderful background in legislation,
and consequently I give him great credit for being able to steer
the Adams companies in the right direction. Phil to this day is
an asset to Adams Steel and now Sims-Adams. You can call
him a consultant, but actually Phil is a politician—he has to be
both. And surprisingly, he’s an honest one. Yet Phil has a way
with words in dealing with politics that I have never had and

90
never want to have, and has tutored my son George in his
methods. I’m grateful for it; my own style of dealing with
political opposition has been charitably described as an iron
boot. It’s a good thing Phil’s around.
I met another of my good friends during a trip to England
in the 1970s. I had a hobby of dealing in gold and silver and
jewelry at the time; I had taken some courses in gemology and
understood quite a bit about it after I got out of the service. As
a result of that, I got involved in some processing of silver and
buying jewelry. I had a partner by the name of George
Kootgins. Kootgins was a remarkable young man, a product of
the Hitler Youth, which did so much damage at the end of
World War II. Kootgins was flamboyant and outgoing and
knew quite a bit about the jewelry business, so we formed a
sort of partnership on the side. Finally we got to the point
where we were buying considerable quantities of diamonds
and selling them wholesale.
At one point, we sent a check to one of the diamond
buyers in Belgium, and in the transmission of the funds, the
Bank of London made a mistake and instead of transmitting
$37,000, they sent $237,000. The Belgium buyer cut a check
payable to our company for the surplus, and sent the check
back. Kootgins decided that this was an opportunity he
couldn’t afford to pass up, so he took the money, put it in his
personal account without telling me, and suddenly offered to
buy me out. I agreed, and between the extra $200,000 and
half a million in diamond credits Kootgins had out, he bought
out my share of the business, skipped town at midnight,
crossed the border into Canada and hopped on a flight back to
Germany.
It wasn’t long before the Bank of London came looking
for their missing $200,000, and a couple of gentlemen from
Scotland Yard showed up at my house one evening. I showed
them all the paperwork, and when we figured out what
Kootgins had done—and more importantly, that I had never
so much as touched the tainted money—I was asked to come
to London to testify to all this. We got an invitation from the
Queen, no less, to appear at Scotland Yard and testify in their
attempt to round up Kootgins and three other conspirators.
When Dolores and I were checking in at our hotel in
London, we met a young man who happened to be at the desk

91
at the same time, and he introduced himself as Edison Miller.
Of course, the name Edison Miller didn’t mean much to me
then, but there had been some discussion in the papers about
Colonel Edison Miller being a recently released prisoner of
war who had been in Hanoi with John McCain. As we talked,
Edison suggested that perhaps we might go to the bar and
have a drink, and a very pleasant evening followed. We
became close friends, and the three of us spent the next
several days all over London, having a fabulous time. Ed
seemed to be a good guy, but I had no knowledge of his talents
or abilities beyond those conversations.
When we came back to the States, we got more involved
in the political scene, and the next thing I knew Governor
Jerry Brown appointed Edison Miller as a supervisor here in
Orange County. As it turned out, Ed was quite supportive of
the rubbish recovery systems and the fact that we were
recovering waste material in the landfills, and he was quite
helpful. He served on the board of supervisors through 1980
and was a real boon to our business.
But perhaps the greatest friends this company could have
were my own family. I think a recent anecdote sums it up best.
The scrap metal business really dried up in the early spring of
2010 because so many firms went out of business in the
recession. They closed down and stopped manufacturing
scrap, so consequently scrap became very scarce and very
difficult to acquire.
Well, a few of our salespeople that worked for Adams
Steel got together and wrote a comedy skit to amuse the
troops around here. It was a scrap-themed Star Wars parody.
The skit starts out with the sales folks asking my son George,
“George, haven’t you conquered enough? You have control
over all the scrap metal on the planet Earth. What else do you
want?”
George says, “Scrap exists in this galaxy, in any galaxy,
and I must control it. I don’t understand why you don’t get it.”
So George calls a meeting of all of the key people at Adams
Steel—or at least of all his siblings, which is essentially the
same thing. Mike and Terry and Wendy all get together with
George, and George says, “Well, Mike, what should we do? We
need scrap badly.”

92
 And Mike says, “Well, George, how the hell do I know? I
only build things around here!”
So George turns around to Terry and he says, “Terry,
what should we do? We’re desperately short of scrap.”
So Terry says, “Well, George, how the hell do I know? I
only buy scrapyards. I don’t buy scrap.”
And so finally George turns to Wendy and says, “Wendy,
we’re in desperate circumstances. What should we do?”
And Wendy says, “Listen, you idiots, how many times do I
have to tell you that you need to seek higher ground? Galaxies
far, far away, suppliers you would never dream of working
with, and geez, Terry, I told you, too! I gave you the plan. It is
your responsibility to execute it. I am not going to do
everything for you.”
Terry says, “Well, I’m sorry, Wendy, I guess we didn’t
take you seriously enough. How do we find these suppliers?”
Wendy says, “That is not my problem. You figure it out. I
plan, I plan, I plan, you execute.”
I don’t think I’d ever heard them get quite as big a laugh
as they did with that parody—just because everyone who saw
it knew that the Adams siblings would never actually squabble
like that. Our family has always been in perfect harmony with
each other, and got along well. Perhaps that’s the greatest
secret of our success—that our family has always been in
harmony.

93
 Eighteen

From the 1970s forward, we were constantly involved

with the Orange County Board of Supervisors by virtue of the
fact that we were operating county contracts and recovering
waste from four landfills, and in that time the supervisors
really paid very little attention to our recycling. What we were
doing was a very minor thing. The principal supervisor we
dealt with was a man by the name of Ralph Dietrich, who later
got into serious trouble and was one of the supervisors that
finally was indicted and faced jail time.
The county of Orange was growing very rapidly during
this time, and the Board of Supervisors acquired a reputation
for being unable to say no to any developer that came along
with a reasonable program, because the developers were
financing the supervisors’ elections. This lack of oversight
created a lot of problems later with haphazard development
and traffic problems, but foresight was not among the gifts of
the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

94
 By 1990, the county of Orange had earned a reputation
for being the most corrupt county in the entire United States—
even more corrupt than Cook County and Chicago, Illinois,
which is really saying something. The Board of Supervisors,
almost without exception, had very little will, ability or
knowledge of how to run a county of this size. They relied on
people they hired to administer the investments for the city
without having any ability to direct these people or any solid
direction to give them. As a result of that, the board hired a
gentleman by the name of Robert Citron, who invested vast
amounts of money in different schemes that were presented
by large Wall Street brokers. When federal interest rates rose,
those investments turned out to be basically worthless. (For
more on this matter, please refer to Thomas Rogers’s Agents
Orange.) Finally, on December 6, 1994, the county of Orange
was forced to file bankruptcy. Yet the day before the filing,
supervisor Tom Riley wrote a letter to Citron complimenting
him on his great ability in investing and the fact that he had
made millions for the county of Orange, when this was not
true.
Everybody on the board tried to dodge the bullet and
avoid blame. Independently and collectively, they hired
several dozen different self-proclaimed professionals in
money management and so forth, and the board ended up
spending several million dollars more with nothing to show
for it before they finally got someone that could restabilize the
county, and by this time of course the Board of Supervisors
was turning over as fast as their constituents could vote them
out of office.
By 1994 I had been in the scrap metal business in Orange
County for 20 years. I had attended literally hundreds of
fundraisers for everybody from congressmen to senators to
local councilmen to sheriffs. I have heard every conceivable
excuse that any politician could imagine, and every
conceivable campaign promise.
“I promise that when I’m elected you’ll get a tax cut. I’ll
also balance the budget.” “When I become President, the
Russians will know we mean business.” “I guarantee that
everyone who wants to work will have a job.” “I will give you
less government, not more government.” “My goal is to see
that all the people get medical care at a price they can afford.”

95
“Let’s make no mistake about this, I am for the farmer.” “My
first priority will be to see that everyone gets decent housing
at reasonable interest rates.” “I intend to take strong measures
to ensure that every worker in this country shares in the fruits
of his labor.” “Cutting red tape is my first concern. My first
concern is to cut red tape and to encourage business to make
profits so we will have a strong economy and compete with
overseas imports.” “I will not appoint anyone to public office
for political reasons.” “My vice president will be in on all my
decisions.” “I will work closely with Congress and keep them
advised about every foreign-policy decision I make.” “My door
will always be open at all times. My staff will be kept to a
minimum and my door will be open to the cabinet members at
all times.” “The sick and the elderly will have someone in the
White House who cares about them.” “I intend to take the
high road in this campaign and not deal in personalities.” “I
will never lie to you.” That’s a good one, isn’t it?
“The only reason I have sought this office is that I believe
the country needs leadership.” “This is the best kosher
frankfurter I’ve ever tasted.” “I would say with a few
exceptions that the media has treated me fairly.” “I intend to
rebuild every American city in this country.” “Anyone in my
administration who commits an impropriety will be
immediately dismissed.” “My first act in office will be to fund
self-sufficient energy.”
“No one will go hungry as long as I am President.” “For
the small businessman all the way—make no mistake about
this, I am for the small businessman.” “I will see to it that
women are treated as equals with men in job opportunities,
pay, and respect.” “I have spoken to the people and I have
listened to what they have to say.” “This is the best chicken
gumbo I have ever tasted.” “I can’t do the job without your
prayers. I can’t do the job unless you elect Joe Smith, a
congressman from this district.” “Make no mistake about this,
I am for the American Indian.” “It doesn’t matter to me
personally whether I win or lose, but it does matter to this
great country of ours.” “I know what it’s like to be poor.” “My
remarks were misconstrued by the press, and I have no
intention of offending anyone.” “Make no mistake about this, I
am for the coal miner.” “If I am elected, I will listen to the best
minds in this country.” “This is the best enchilada I’ve ever

96
tasted.” After a while, you start to wonder if political reporters
keep news stories in their offices with the details blanked out
and just fill in the names of people, places, and promotional
foods.
Of course you hear all of this from the current
administration. It seems every time I turn on the television I
hear about how this administration is going to take care of all
of the people in this country. I’ve heard it before, and I am not
convinced.

97
 Nineteen

The next challenge we encountered was shipping scrap

out of the Los Angeles area. As our business grew in volume,
we became a threat to some of the existing scrap operations.
Because we were centrally located, we were able to stop a
great deal of the scrap flow from the inner counties of
California to the port of Los Angeles, and once our first
shredder was in operation, we had to have a market. While we
were getting the mill up and running, George and some of his
colleagues were looking into options at the port. We
developed our own port loading facility, which we operated for
a couple of years as we slowly became a greater and greater
threat to our competitors. We particularly ran afoul of the
Hugo Neu-Proeler company, which controlled quite a bit of
the scrap shipping out of the port, and there were quite a few
legal battles even as we were trying to get things off the
ground.

98
 Although we had negotiated a shipping site at the port of
Los Angeles, we had to figure out a way to load the ships as
cheaply and expeditiously as we could. Some time later we’d
come up with what’s now called the container program—
loading containers with 20 tons or so of scrap each and
shipping them out in units like that. But our first real crack at
solving the problem and loading the scrap onto ships involved
a little engineering.
I had some slightly fuzzy memories of a device that I had
seen on the Bessamer Railroad in Pennsylvania that could
take a entire carload of coal, rotate it and dump it into a chute
so that trucks could carry the coal away from the rail site.
(This was when most American homes used coal or oil for
heating, and coal was a big consumer product.) I remembered
spending quite some time watching this device work, and
wanted to try my hand at re-creating it, only moving scrap
instead of coal. I got all the engineering brains I could find
together—George, Terry, Mike, and a few others—and we all
soon got involved in designing a piece of equipment that we
called the Ro-Con Loading Device—short for “rotating
container”. The machine would take a container of scrap,
loaded on a truck at our yard or any other. The Ro-Con was
designed so that it could adapt to the same pickup points that
the big crane would use on the waterfront. After that it was a
simple matter of rigging the rotating container to the cranes,
and it would move the trucks under the craneway and pick up
the entire load and put it over the ship and dump it in the
hole. They say the best inventions are simple ones, and this
one was gorgeous in its simplicity. It was truly a masterful
piece of engineering, and we were able to load the ships very
expeditiously. We ended up building three rotating-container
devices, and the first one took 45 to 60 days to build, but after
that it worked flawlessly and we were the envy of the loading
crews down at the harbor.
Not too long after we really got the Ro-Con going great
guns, we were asked to cease and desist. Another company
professed to have a patent on the rotating container, which
was news to us, but that’s the problem with simple
inventions—sometimes someone else thought of it first. As it
turned out, the question was rendered moot by not long after
because we had developed other means of loading scrap,

99
including a process called the pan loader that was very
efficient and that we still use today. By now the patents on the
Ro-Con, if there really were any, have long since expired,
though I’ve often thought the process could be used again for
ship loading, with other applications as well.
The site that we had been allowed to use at the Los
Angeles Harbor up to this point was on a relatively short lease
and, and unfortunately for us, the city of Los Angeles
announced in 1985 that they wanted to reclaim the site.
Although the Ro-Con project had been a great learning
experience for us, we knew that ultimately our main objective
would be to get our own ship-loading facility going. During
the period in which we controlled the port, we loaded a total
of twenty ships, and we wanted to keep going.
Being forced out of our site, however, put us in a
precarious position where our only outlet for our scrap was
through Proeler. They had the shredding operation and
controlled the exportation of scrap and ship-loading at the Los
Angeles facility. We had to pay Proeler something in the range
of five dollars a ton to ship scrap, which was quite a high price.
I think Proeler’s main concern was the fact that we were
expanding quite rapidly, buying other companies, and we had
acquired the operation in Bakersfield and had another
shredding operation going there, so they saw us as a serious
threat to the growth of their business. They couldn’t really
stop us as matters stood, so they settled for impairing our cash
flow. That five dollars a ton was a lot of money, especially if
you consider loading 10,000 to 30,000 tons of scrap per day,
but it was better than nothing.

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 Twenty

At the time we were exploring shipping options, we still

had not solved the problem of moving all of our shredder
waste to a hazardous landfill. Between the shipping costs and
the legal fees from the PCB issue, Proeler finally decided this
might be a good time to force us out of business. They filed
suit on February 22, 1988 to drive us into bankruptcy.
Proeler had a bank of attorneys that were highly paid and
very efficient in their efforts to eliminate us. Over the course
of the next two years, while this thing was in litigation, the
Proeler people spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal
defense trying to prosecute us and tried to force Chapter 11
proceedings. When the suit finally came down to the wire and
Proeler’s attorneys asked for financial relief out of the
proceeds of the bankruptcy, the judge declined to give them
any consideration whatsoever and told them that they were
not entitled to any compensation of any kind.

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 The day before this matter was to go to court for
disposition, John Neu called me and offered a settlement. He
said, “Perhaps we should settle this thing before we go any
further,” and he offered a paltry $100,000 to make the matter
disappear. I told him what I thought of his pitiful sum, and
hung up.
Over the next several hours, John Neu kept calling
repeatedly, and finally he raised the ante to $300,000, but I
still refused to accept the settlement. Finally, at 2:00 in the
morning, which would have been 5:00 a.m. New York time—
apparently he stayed up most of the night—he finally called
me again and said, “Well, what would it take to settle it?” I
should have told him $10 million, but I wasn’t smart enough
to see how desperate he was. We settled the account for
$400,000, and the following day, the $400,000 was in our
hands via a certified check.
However, the problem was far from solved. Although we
had settled the one issue and we had received the $400,000
check from John Neu, the fact that they had forced the
company into bankruptcy proceedings opened the door for
another ugly situation to develop. The judge appointed a
trustee to take over the assets of Adams Steel and Adams
International Metals—a law firm by the name of Sumeyer,
Koopitz, Baumann, and Rothman. These people were
notorious for their expertise in the liquidation of companies.
They weren’t in the business of solving any problems for the
benefit of creditors; they were out to line their pockets with
the proceeds of liquidation.
The man that actually handled the details for the law firm
was a man by the name of Arnold Koopitz. In all fairness to
Arnold, I must say he was a brilliant operator and skillfully
steered the court in the direction that he wanted. At this time,
we were operating as WCS International, which was a public
company, and so Koopitz decided to try to get control of the
stock. Over the period of liquidation, Arnold was able to gain
control of 60% of the stock of Adams International Metals,
while the family retained only 40%. That was not good news.
In order to forestall the inevitable, I came up with a plan
that the judge finally agreed to accept. In order to balance out
the share of the company that the Adams family actually
controlled, I managed to raise another $200,000, and I told

102
the judge that we would buy 2 million shares of stock at 10
cents a share and put this money into the company for
operating capital. The judge was pleased. Arnold was livid.
It was a mad scramble for us to pull money together and
inject the cash into the financing of WCS International, but we
issued a large block of stock, payable to the family, so that
Koopitz did not have the stock options to put the company
into liquidation mode.
Finally we were able to get a satisfactory judgment
handed down, and the Hugo Neu-Proeler Company was
forced to admit their involvement in trying to put our
company out of business. John Neu agreed to negotiate a
settlement with me on February 10, 1989.
The stock program was our last chance to save the
company. I had studied extensively in all of the SEC manuals
that were available to us, and I knew we could survive the
problems that we had if we could raise the additional funds.
So the stock purchase agreement stated that the company was
in need of additional funds to satisfy presently due and past-
due debts. The company had been unsuccessful in obtaining
such additional funds through a public offering of the
company’s common stock, loans from certain financial
institutions and loans or the sale of equity to private third
parties.
This offer was presented to the judge along with our
cashier’s check of $200,000 to purchase the 2 million shares
of stock at 10 cents a share. The judge, I felt, was somewhat
sympathetic to our cause, and so Arnold Koopitz went home
an unhappy man on January 20, 1989.
Over the next few months, we held meetings with the
creditors of Adams Steel and Adams International Metals, and
as a result of the relationships that we had developed, all of
the creditors were finally paid off in full, and the final decree
for the Chapter 11 proceeding was handed down June 22,
1990.

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 Twenty-One

Even though that particular litigation nightmare was

over, we had not solved the problem of removing the second
shredder-waste pile. Over the years we had negotiated with
the state of Arizona to take some of our waste, and shipped
several thousand tons of waste to the CRIT landfill there from
our first waste pile, but that window soon closed.
At this point, the company was essentially back in
business, with most of the litigation behind us, except for the
$25 million lawsuit from the state of California, among other
parties. We knew that this problem would not go away entirely
until we were able to remove the whole shredder-waste pile.
That meant even more money. During the course of the
bankruptcy proceedings, Arnold Koopitz had estimated that
the cost of removing the shredder waste would be in excess of
$50 million. He had highballed the number, of course, but
various other companies had put the price at $30 million. Still
not chump change.

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 I was always interested in real estate, and what money I
was able to set aside over a period of time I invested in land. I
had a piece of property in my portfolio that we’d been using as
a landfill, and also to generate capital for Orange County Steel
Salvage. In addition to that, we had a property that that had
been sold to a group that wanted to build a racetrack in the
city of Norco—a project that eventually fell through, but the
money was still there. All of a sudden everything came
together, and we were able to raise the capital that we needed
to move the shredder waste pile. I had borrowed some $2
million from private lenders prior to this whole fiasco, though,
and this money also had to be repaid. Fortunately, when it all
came together and we were able to sell all the properties at a
great financial advantage, we finally paid off all of the bank
and private debt we had. We raised something over $4 million
to pay everyone off, and we were finally free and clear.
As a matter of interest, as I reviewed the support
documents for this book, I went through hundreds and
hundreds of pages of litigation, and boiling down to its
simplest possible form for my readers has been quite a
challenge. My best and simplest advice is to stay away from
attorneys as much and as long as possible. After over 340
pages of litigation from all the lawsuits filed against us, the
bankruptcy filing and everything else, we had dealings with a
total of 12 law firms and approximately 48 attorneys, causing
a really large jam-up in the legal process. From this
experience I have learned a valuable lesson—if you’re settling
a matter in court, one way or another you’ve already lost.
By the time the Sims-Adams merger was proposed in
early 2007, Adams Steel had located and acquired somewhere
in the neighborhood of 40 different locations, and we were
still struggling to find the proper facility for shipping all of our
scrap, although by then we had made our peace with the Hugo
Neu-Proeler and were using their facility to ship scrap out.
Some of the steel was being shipped to different steel mills,
some to Fontana and also to other mills up north in Idaho and
places like that, so that did take some of the pressure off of us.
In addition, the shipping-container program developed, and
we were able to ship quite a bit of scrap by container—a total
of 40,000 containers, in fact. But at the same time, we were
still heavily indebted to the Hugo Neu-Proeler operation for

105
handling all of our scrap, which was a very tenuous situation
by virtue of the volume that we were developing and the fact
that we had no other way to move it. If we didn’t move our
scrap with Proeler, they could cut us off and we’d have no
market outlet whatsoever.
Our next major engineering accomplishment occurred in
2005. Although we had made an uneasy peace with the
Proeler company on shipping our scrap through the Port of
Los Angeles facility, there was still a great deal of pressure and
difficulty in working out the details of shipping large volumes
of scrap. By 2004, our sales volume had reached the amazing
level of $163 million, and by 2005 we hit $241 million, and we
shipped 975,000 tons of scrap. Consequently, we were in a
real bind to try to solve our shipping problems. The answer, of
course, developed with the container programs.
As containers from China became available in large
quantities, our engineering department got together and
decided on a solution. Mike had hired other young graduate
engineers, and our engineering department had expanded
considerably and was very competent by this point, capable of
handling almost any engineering challenge. Over a period of a
few months Mike and his crew developed a container-loading
program, beginning in 2005. In fact, they developed several
container-loading programs. The typical conveyor that most
scrapyards were using was a simple belt-type conveyor that
could be backed into the container to load it, but this is a
haphazard and inaccurate way to load. It’s difficult to
maintain consistent weight. Finally the engineering
department figured out how to pre-load what we call the sled,
which would be pushed into the container, and then a ram
would come forward and push the contents of the container
into the container itself. This was a great advantage because it
packed in the scrap while causing very little damage to the
container—the container industry was complaining at the time
that a lot of the containers were being damaged by
mishandling. Consequently, the new type of loader offered a
big advantage over the earlier types.
Finally the company was able to develop an all-hydraulic
loader consisting of two 20-foot rams so that we could load a
40-foot container with ease in a matter of minutes. The
hydraulic cylinders were approximately 6 inches in diameter

106
and were put in end-to-end because it was very difficult to get
a 40-foot hydraulic ram in a hurry that would solve the
problem. We didn’t want to wait for the manufacturers to
catch up with us, so we put a pair of cylinders in. The first
cylinder would engage and push the scrap 20 feet into the
container, and the second cylinder would engage immediately
and push it in the rest of the way. We were able to load
containers quite rapidly like that.
By 2005, we had manufactured a total of 12 container-
loading machines. Michael engineered the whole program,
and a bit later the Al-Jon company was able to manufacture
several of these loaders for us based on Michael’s designs. By
the year 2006, we had loaded 14,000 containers in one month
through all of our different scrap operations, and in another
month we’d shipped a total of 280,000 tons of scrap by
container.

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 Twenty-Two

In light of all of the business we were doing in 2006—$50

million a month—you might wonder why we had an interest in
a merger with the Australian firm Sims when it was proposed
to us. The fact was that Sims controlled most of the port of Los
Angeles, and we hadn’t yet gotten a toehold in Long Beach.
We knew our shipping costs would only go up, and we wanted
to forestall another disaster. By June 2007, we had been in
negotiations with the Sims companies for some period of time,
and negotiations were coming together quite well. It was an
interesting fact that neither company needed any influx of
capital. Adams Steel was flush with capital at the time, and
Sims was doing equally well; the big advantage was pooling
the working assets of the yards to increase our total volume.
This turned out to be a very good move for us. The months of
August and September 2007 were quite high in sales,
sufficient to push us over the $1 billion level—a high-water
mark for our company.

108
 At the time of the initial merger with Sims, we began
moving fast, and we had an opportunity to acquire the Long
Beach port facility. Wendy was involved in arranging the
financing for the matter, and George Jr. was able to take
control of the facilities, so we soon had control of both ports,
as far as loading ships was concerned. This gave us a great
advantage, not to mention that the Port of Long Beach was a
very fine facility.
All this came about because Mitsui, the largest
shareholder in Sims, owned some of the facility at the port of
Long Beach, which was determined to be a conflict of interest.
Mitsui opted to sell the facility, and the joint venture of Sims-
Adams stepped forward to arrange the financing, and the
acquisition price was substantial, but it became a great asset
to the Sims-Adams operation. The container program was
coming on quite strong during this period, and every small
scrapyard was able to order shipping containers in and send
them out full, a simple matter of calling in containers and
having them picked up and delivered to the harbor. As a result
of this method, everybody was soon busy loading containers,
and this went on for the next year or so, until finally the
container program dried up a little as shipping from China
declined. But a slightly smaller success is still a success.
I was quite happy about the whole affair, although I had
no part to play in it. By this point, I had no involvement with
the Sims-Adams operation, and I still have no influence
whatsoever with the company. I consider myself as retired as
I’m going to get.
The transition went quite smoothly, and as we took
charge of the operations at the port of Los Angeles, where the
shredding operation was ongoing, Jeff Neu was the operating
manager for Sims. With the joint venture between Sims and
Adams, the operation ended up being consolidated with
Adams Steel. Unfortunately the operation was losing money at
the time, and George wanted to make some changes in
management and operational costs. He was very determined
to get on top of the cost process, and as a result he and Jeff
Neu had a misunderstanding. Jeff still felt that he was in
charge of running the yard, while I supported George’s
method of operation, which had made the company quite a bit
of money in the past. As a result of this disagreement, George

109
saw fit to fire Jeff. And while it shouldn’t have made a whit of
difference to anyone involved, by firing Jeff we made an
enemy of him.
During peaceful periods, when our company wasn’t in
conflict with his family’s firm, Jeff Neu often came with my
family to the Colorado River in Parker, Arizona, where we had
a small recreational operation going, and Jeff would go
waterskiing with us. It seemed as though there was a very nice
relationship developing, a strong friendship. Jeff was always
made welcome and stayed in our house many times, and it
seemed like we would continue to be good friends for a long
time.
Unfortunately, when Jeff was summarily discharged from
the position of manager in the harbor, he saw fit to file a
request for an investigation with the Los Angeles district
attorney’s office. The next thing we knew, we had
investigators showing up with warrants at the port, and also at
the executive Sims-Adams scrap export yard on Terminal
Island, with more warrants for an investigation involving
hazardous waste. Investigators from the California
Department of Toxic Substance Control also showed up at the
port in September 2008, apparently because we didn’t have
enough going on already.
It seems to me that, in light of the fact that we had made a
lot of money for Hugo Neu-Proeler over the years by
marketing our material through their facilities, there should
be some common sense and compassion for us there. I’ve
been forced to conclude, at last, that the Proeler group is
totally lacking in any indication of fair play, and prefers to
browbeat all their customers and suppliers and friends and try
to dominate their markets, becoming as close to a monopoly
as they can get. Fortunately, John Neu saw fit to sell most of
his Sims stock to another company shortly after Jeff was fired.
At this writing, this operation, the criminal investigation
has not been settled. However, there has been a lot of work
done on it, and we have received clearance from the South
Coast Air Quality Management District indicating our
compliance with all metal-shredding regulations, both at
Terminal Island and also in Anaheim, and as a result there is
no indication at this time that there’ll be any further activity in
that area. The SCAQMD has verified that all our shredding

110
facilities are in full compliance, that hazardous materials were
not being handled improperly, and in general that the
mysterious “disgruntled employee” who kicked the whole
thing off might just have been inaccurate in his claims.
Although I played no part in the merger and acquisition
with Sims, I was still coming into the office every day and am
in a position to observe the operations going forward. The
most interesting thing that I have observed is the fact that the
people of the Sims group are extremely well-trained and
extremely well-oriented toward the business at hand. Our new
partners are very straightforward and make quite an
impressive group; the merger went forward with few problems
and was extremely well-received by all parties. In general,
everyone behaved like professionals. It is clear to me that the
scrap business has come a long way from junkyards, and I
can’t say it’s an unpleasant prospect.

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 Twenty-Three

By the beginning of 2004, the new mill was complete and

in operation, and our sales were increasing dramatically. By
2005, we were doing a quarter of a billion dollars in business,
and by 2006 we were doing something in the range of $400
million in sales. We reached our first major objective in
shipping over a million tons of scrap in 2006, a breakthrough
to celebrate. The atmosphere at Adams Steel was electric.
When the Sims joint venture came together, it gave us the
access we needed to the Port of Los Angeles, and we were no
longer beholden to Hugo Neu-Proeler or paying their
exorbitant rates. That gave us tremendous freedom, and with
freedom comes opportunity.
The production volume for the year 2006 exceeded $370
million in revenue, and equated to a total of 1.05 million tons
of scrap shipped. After 10 months into fiscal 2007, we had
reached a total volume of $921 million in sales, equating to

112
1.67 million tons of scrap shipped. It was obvious that we were
going to exceed the $1 billion sales volume, and at this point
in time the joint venture with Sims and Adams began coming
together. July and August brought us up to $350 million in
sales, putting us way over the total $1 billion mark. We ended
up with $1.3 billion in sales for the year and shipped a total of
2.2 million metric tons of scrap.
The Sims merger gave us the opportunity to acquire the
Long Beach facility as well. Wendy was involved in arranging
the financing for it, and George Jr. was able to take control of
the facilities. We soon had control of both the port of Los
Angeles and the port of Long Beach, and could load ships in
either place once Mitsui divested itself of its port interests.
The company then opted to get into the market in Las
Vegas. We found another shredder there, and the opportunity
was irresistible. The negotiations went quite well—after all, we
were a major player now. It seemed like a very good move,
and I was quite happy about it, although I had no particular
part to play.
The Silver Dollar Mill was extremely well-located right off
the I-15 freeway and had great visibility and easy access. As
our interests developed in the Vegas area, we acquired other
scrapyards, and as of this writing we are negotiating for a new
scrapyard facility located in the middle of Las Vegas, as close
to the downtown area as possible.
I must observe here that it takes a lot more than business
acumen to run a successful scrap business. Scrap is a unique
industry, and one of our company’s greatest advantages from
its very inception was the fact that the Adams clan were all
engineering-oriented. George and Mike and Terry and I all
have considerable engineering ability. Terry graduated from
USC’s engineering school, Michael from Cal Poly, and George
from the school of hard knocks even before he got his law
degree. Because of our collective interest in engineering, we
were constantly looking for ways to upgrade and recover as
much material as we could. Because we had been so badly
battered by the different agencies in the matter of our
shredder-waste pile, we worked to recover every bit of
material we could from that shredder waste, and as a result,
we got into some extremely high-tech situations. The whole

113
matter was written up in an article in Recycling International,
which you’ll find in an appendix to this book.
The high visibility of our main operation, right off the 91
freeway in Orange County, has made us the envy of every
recycling operation in the country. Naturally, it drew some
attention when we decided to enclose our shredder. The state
had maintained for some time that all shredding operations
should be enclosed to contain the noise and fluff they
generated. We finally decided it might be a good idea, and we
ended up enclosing approximately 5 acres of floor space and
roof coverage.
Putting up this huge building was a major operation, of
course, because we had to do the installation while the mills
were still running. There was no stopping, no shutting the
operation down, and we are grateful to J&W Builders, a local
firm headquartered a few miles from Adams Steel in Brea, for
their flexibility and ingenuity. These people were remarkable
in everything they did. The J&W engineers, working with
Michael and Terry, were able to get all the heavy structural
components in place without any serious mishap, without so
much as a hiccup in the running of the mill, which today
stands in a huge steel structure bigger than many aircraft
hangars.
However, we found that enclosing the entire structure like
we did significantly increased the noise of the running mill.
We’re still working on that problem, but the building is
already paying off. It’s a nearly flat-roofed building with just
enough pitch to get the water off, and you can imagine how
much sun it gets—the warm sunshine that used to grow
oranges is still there, after all, even though the orange groves
are gone. We were able to arrange tax credits with the city of
Anaheim in exchange for installing a complete solar-panel
system on the roof, linked directly into the city electrical grid.
The extra income is welcome, and of course it’s always good to
have more ammunition against the benighted souls who insist
on calling recycling a dirty business.

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 Twenty-Four

The European scrap industry was much better organized

than we were here in the United States for quite a while, to say
nothing of scrap operations elsewhere in the world. But we’re
catching up nicely now through the ISRI program, of which
George Jr. was lately the chairman. ISRI is a very successful,
well-organized, well-run operation. When we became involved
in the BIR, or Bureau of International Recycling, we met a
completely different group of people and found that they were
even more knowledgeable than we had suspected. For
example, they had been recycling rubber tires in Italy for the
last 15 years, and very successfully making crumb rubber and
removing all the steel from the tires and so forth. We spent
two weeks of last year in Dubai, and more time in Turkey and
Istanbul, just learning. Turkey, of course, is very important to
us because Sims International and SA Recycling furnish most
of the scrap that is purchased there.

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 The whole experience of building this business has
convinced me of the value of having the best possible
attorneys on my side. Before I became heavily involved in
Orange County Steel, I had met an attorney by the name of
Ned Spurgeon, who was the dean of the law school in Salt
Lake City and was with the law firm Hastings, Janowski, and
Walker. It was the same firm Gene Autry used to beat
Anaheim into submission when the city tried to force him to
build a ten-story parking lot on his property, and Spurgeon
and his firm were invaluable in ending the hostility we faced
from the city of Anaheim.
In 2003, we found we faced yet another requirement if we
wanted to stay in business—we had to build a legal
department. The office staff was overloaded with the many
legal ramifications of the rapid growth that we were enjoying.
We decided that we would establish our own in-house
counsel. We had the opportunity at that point to hire our first
attorney, Daniel Navabpour, who is still working for us and
doing an excellent job in dealing with the vast number of
institutions that have a dog in the scrap-metal fight, including
more than two dozen different public and private agencies.
Daniel handed me a list recently of the agencies most scrap-
metal businesses have to deal with, overburdened as they are
by miscellaneous and mostly worthless rules and regulations.
The list was eye-popping:

Internal Revenue Service—income tax, payroll tax, ERISA,

pensions and benefits
State Board of Equalization—sales tax
County Assessors Offices—real and personal property tax
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—labor
Department of Labor
City planning commissions—zoning issues
Air Quality Management District
Department of Toxic Substances Control
California Department of Industrial Relations
Division of Workers Compensation
Various unions
Private interest groups—Baykeepers, etc.
Personal injury attorneys
Workers’ compensation attorneys

116
 California Secretary of State
Department of Motor Vehicles
Port Authorities—Long Beach and Los Angeles
Local police and sheriffs
CAL/OSHA
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Environmental Protection Agency
California Industrial Waste Management Board
California Attorney General
United States Patent and Trademark Office

Dan is a product of the New York City district attorney’s

office and has done a great job in steering our legal maze in
the right direction. We have since added another attorney to
our staff, and along with my son George—himself also an
attorney—we are now able to manage the bulk of our
miscellaneous legal work. As a backup to our own in-house
lawyers, we use Hastings, Janofsky, and Walker to do our
heavy hitting in legal matters.

117
 Twenty-Five
by David Williams

In 1980, I was forced to start over at the ripe old age of 25

after growing up working in the family scrap business for 10
years. My father had lost the business to bankruptcy after four
generations in the scrap trade. I had a house payment, a paid-
off car, and $3,000 in my bank account. After working for the
new owners for a year, I decided working for someone else
wasn’t in my genes. At the behest of Joe Rose, my scrap
godfather and the man behind Luria Brothers in Los Angeles,
I started my own scrap-iron brokerage company in a small
bedroom of my San Diego house. One of the companies Joe
reintroduced me to was at the time called Orange County Steel
Salvage, located in Anaheim, California. George Adams Jr.,
who had been a customer of mine in my San Diego business,
seemed to hit it off perfectly with me. He had the same
interests and ambitions as I did: scrap, money, and women. I

118
started selling him all my customers’ shreddable scrap and
buying back a lot of his shredded scrap. Needless to say, we
did a lot of business.
After a couple of years of this had gone on, George and I
were trading over 10,000 tons of steel scrap between us every
month. So George had this great idea to join forces. He said,
“Come up here, live in my house, I will give you an office and a
phone and we can do more business together.” (I thought—
good overhead reduction!) So in 1983, I made the big move to
Orange County and left my hometown of 28 years. Coming
into a new family-run company was a little scary at first
because I didn’t know all the players. But after hanging out
with all of them, I was quite impressed with the amount of
talent the kids had and how well George Sr. had put the
facility together. Senior had each kid get a good education in
different areas. Junior became an attorney, Michael and Terry
were mechanical engineers, and Wendy an accountant—all
perfect tools for success in the business world.
The best part was that Senior pretty much left the
decisions up to George Jr., and I always felt like I was part of
what was going on. I had found another scrap family. Senior
provided the environment and the tools, and George Jr. and I
made the deals. We were a great team.
In 1984, I had been busy chasing George’s secretarial
pool, and had finally caught the best one, the only one that
could handle me, Teri. We were handling over 30,000 tons of
iron a month between us, so I told George that if he could
figure out how to load all this scrap, I could sell it overseas, as
I had done in my own family business before. George assigned
the arduous task to his two brilliant brothers, Terry and Mike.
By the time 1985 rolled around, we were loading oceangoing
vessels with 25,000 tons of scrap using their Ro-Con design
and selling it to Asia. We were in the big leagues now, with the
likes of Hugo Neu and National Metal and Steel. Also that
year, I married my sweetheart, Teri. All was good.
Then George and I decided to take a shot at the non-
ferrous business. With an old broken-down forklift, a few
beat-up steel boxes, and a rolloff truck, we opened
International Metals Recycling. I had run my family’s non-
ferrous business before, but was uncomfortable with the
general practice of stealing weight to make a profit while

119
giving the customer the illusion of a higher price. George
Adams impressed me a lot at the time when he told me, “We
will only buy an honest weight at a fair price. If we can’t make
an honest profit, we can shut it down.” I knew then that this
was a guy I could work with for a long time.
We continued to prosper until 1987, when the state of
California declared shredder waste “hazardous.” George had
started collecting the material in the yard because they
couldn’t take it to the dump. In June 1987, he had to file
Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect himself. My first thought
was, “Shit! I have to go through this again?” I told George that
I wanted out of our non-ferrous partnership. Either he’d buy
me out or I’d buy him out.
George was glad to take his half and run because he had
bigger fish to fry. Also at that time, I had to end my sales
agreement on my iron business with Adams Steel and
establish a new one with Hiuka America (a large exporter at
the time). As the years went by, the battle got fiercer for
George. Hugo Neu and Hiuka, the giants in the steel business,
were trying to take him over and everyone wanted a piece of
him. I saw then what a fighter he was. He was determined to
never quit. I did whatever it took to stand by him and help
him with that battle, because I was proud to champion the
cause for the little guy in the business. We weren’t afraid of
Goliath; we liked the challenge.
One of George’s most brilliant moves came in 1989, when
during the bankruptcy, he figured out that I could buy the
property with what was called at the time a “relief from stay” if
the owner foreclosed. I had been successful the past couple of
years thanks to a rogue trader named Hanamaka from
Sumotomo Trading, who drove the copper market to record
highs by trying to corner the market. So I came in and bought
all the property our two businesses were sitting on for a cool
$1 million. With that one swift move the bankruptcy was over
because that was the only asset left. The dogs had lost their
bite.
Now George had the arduous task of rebuilding his
business and getting rid of over 50,000 tons of hazardous
shredder waste, which took nine years to ship to an HW
landfill at a preposterous rate. The years went by swiftly and I
did whatever it took to keep George alive by advancing him

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money from my line of credit, which I had grown to over $5
million thanks to Hanamaka. In 1992, George made friends
with one of the dogs—Hugo Neu—and sold his soul to the
devil for a $5-a-ton commission on all his sales, at which point
I lost one of my largest iron customers. We continued to build
our strength by buying all the property to the east and west of
us (17 acres), and in 1997 eventually buying the feeder yards
from Hiuka’s bankruptcy (thus taking teeth from another of
the dogs that had tried to eat George). This effectively ended
the iron business that had started me on the road to
entrepreneurship many years ago. Between spending all that
money on feeder yards, working on shredder-waste removal,
and having Hanamaka get busted for illegal trading, the
copper market crashed and my money was getting tight. I
could no longer support George’s and my growth together. I
was running out of money as the copper market had been
eating shit for two years. And I didn’t have the income from
the iron biz, so I had to shed assets, one of which was the
largest—the 16 acres east of our yard. With Hugo’s money,
George bought me out and we divided all the remaining
property to just accommodate what we occupied at the time.
In 2000, George and I agreed to build up the non-ferrous
business at all the feeder yards he had bought by entering into
a 10-year exclusive purchase agreement. Together we built
each yard, one by one, into significant players in the scrap
market. I provided support for the non-ferrous side in the way
of money advances, training, marketing, and yard layout, and
George took care of the iron side. The yards flourished and the
rest is continuing history. It’s been a great relationship with
the Adams family that hopefully will never die, thanks to the
support of each and every one of them, even “Ma” Adams,
whom I love dearly to this day.
Looking back, I thank God for George Sr.’s vision and for
providing me with the perfect environment: a great facility, a
great location, and the best people in the biz, allowing me to
flourish as I have.

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 Twenty-Six
by Kaycee Fink

Women in Leadership and SA Recycling

Are we, in America and beyond, better off with women in

business leadership positions or not? Do women contribute in
leadership positions? Would television be as watchable
without Oprah, Bones or The View? Would politics suffer
without different points of view, or is the same old thing the
best way to go, year after year?
Women are a crucial and important part of life and
society, in America and around the globe-life, as well as being
givers and carriers of life. Mark Twain said of women in an
1868 speech: “What, Sir, would the people of the earth be
without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.”
But while today, 72 million women participate in the
American workforce, and their contributions to our economy

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are significant (estimated at $3 trillion plus) and they will
soon be 47% of the total labor force, the growing number of
women at work hasn’t translated into greater influence or
visibility. In most industries, men still hold the highest-
paying, most prestigious, and most influential positions.
Our society is undergoing significant social, cultural and
business changes. America is a melting pot of people who
bring with them new ideas, perspectives and methods.
Inclusion, diversity, and choice are words that not long ago
were considered foreign to business leaders but are now part
of our everyday vocabulary. Women in society have forced
business leaders to include them as equals in the workforce or
exclude them at some peril. Consider some of the prominent
current and former leaders in today’s world: talk-show queen
Oprah Winfrey, former First Lady Barbara Bush, cosmetics
magnate Mary Kay Ash, and former Sutro & Company Senior
Vice President Linda Chandler. They are all unique
contributors to the fabric of today’s society and shapers of
people’s core values.
Oprah once said that “the goal of my show is to use
television to transform people's lives, to make viewers see
themselves differently and to bring happiness and a sense of
fulfillment into every home.” She rose from hosting AM
Chicago to the influential status of billionaire, capable of
gifting her show’s audience with trips to exotic locations such
as Australia. Former First Lady Barbara Bush recently stated
at a college commencement: “Somewhere out in this audience
may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps,
and preside over the White House as the President's spouse. I
wish him well!”
The stereotypical view of women in the workplace,
including as homemakers, was confined for years to jobs (not
careers) such as nursing, teaching, and clerical work. Few
industry outsiders would include scrap recycling on this
list. Even the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau
has observed that emerging green-collar jobs are
“overwhelmingly nontraditional to women”. This is an
unfortunate, shortsighted view, considering that women fill
prominent positions at the Institute of Scrap Recycling
Industries—President Robin Wiener and Sherry Pursch, Vice
President of Human Resources. Several prominent companies

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in scrap recycling are certified as Women’s Business
Enterprises, and women fill vital leadership positions
throughout the industry. The truth is that women have been,
and will continue to be, an integral part of the recycling
business. In fact, a woman’s place as leader is an established,
proud tradition at SA Recycling.
Women have come to shine in our company. Nationwide,
females have an embarrassingly small presence in production
environments, with women holding only 29% of all
manufacturing-sector positions. At SA Recycling, women
hold more than a third of General Manager positions, more
than half of Regional General Manager positions, and have
strong representation at the Director, Vice President, and
Executive levels. Women also constitute a healthy percentage
of employees in what might be termed nontraditional jobs,
including management positions in logistics, procurement,
and safety.
Title and position, however, do not tell the entire story of
women in our company. Nationally, women earn only 83% of
the income earned by their male peers. SA Recycling’s female
employees, however, enjoy a workplace where their
achievements are equitably rewarded. At SA Recycling, the
benefits of performance do not have a sex.
The prominence of women in our organization hasn’t
been due to “gender politics” or ideals of social engineering.
Neither has the promotion of women into leadership positions
been at the expense of qualified men. Rather, SA Recycling,
like the scrap-metal industry as a whole, is an innovative
company where merit is recognized, talent is encouraged,
opportunities are made available, and high performance is the
expected norm. It is in any world-class organization’s best
interest to find the right people, put them in the right
positions, and give them the right tools to do what they do
best. SA Recycling strives not only to be world-class, but to be
in a class by itself.
There are many paths to professional success in our
industry and company. Many scrap-recycling companies are
entrepreneurial, family-run organizations where management
comes to know their customers as close friends. Employees
often became part of an extended family, and more than a few
people in the industry have spent their entire careers with

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their corporate kin, learning the trade from inside out.
Recycling becomes not only a job, but an important part of
employees’ work and non-work lives.
Some people in scrap recycling started as vendors or as
“peddlers”, collecting materials for sale to companies such as
ours, and through their own drive and ambition developed
themselves into welcomed assets by learning the business
firsthand. The lessons they learned on one side of the
business made them valued associates on the other side.
Still others started off in unrelated industries, and mastered
valuable business skills a still-growing company like SA
Recycling needs to move ahead and stay competitive in a
global economy. Joining our organization has been the next
step in their professional development.
Finally, forward-thinking companies like ours strive to
nurture homegrown talent, hone employees’ skills, and
promote growth opportunities for ambitious employees.
SA Recycling’s women leaders have come to us by all four
of these routes. We are fortunate to have many managers
who know our corporate clan as intimately as they do their
own families. They know our customers and business
partners just as well as they do their own neighbors. Several
of our female leaders matured in our company, and for some
SA Recycling has been their first and only work home. Other
successful women in our company started in family-owned
competitors acquired by SA Recycling. They, too, brought a
personal understanding of, and personable approach to,
recycling operations—an approach that continues to influence
us.
Our leaders include women who started as customers and
learned our trade from the bottom up. Their unique
perspective on the industry’s people and processes continues
to be invaluable.
SA Recycling also aggressively recruits talent with fresh
approaches and different experiences from outside our
industry. Among these employees are women who have
brought us new ideas on safe work practices, technological
innovation, and business efficiency.
But SA Recycling, and our female associates especially,
have benefited most from our ambitious Manager in Training
(MIT) program.

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 MIT has challenged us to assess employees both by what
they contribute to our organization today and by what they
can contribute tomorrow. The program helps to develop
management-level knowledge in employees, who are then
prepared to move forward into more influential and fulfilling
positions in our company. MIT graduates are schooled in SA
Recycling’s core values, and they obtain new technical skills in
people, process, and financial management. Recent graduates
have included associates who came from non-management
positions in Administration and Information Technology, and
women have been prominent among the graduating classes.
In the short time since the program’s inception, several female
MIT graduates have already entered the General Manager
ranks. Other graduates are now “managers in waiting”, ready
to move ahead as opportunity and their aspirations allow. But
all, both managers and managers-to-be, have benefited from
their newly discovered appreciation of our organization’s
complexity.
Our current and up-and-coming generations of female
leaders are our best marketing tool to attract and retain the
next generation of potential leaders. Whether a woman
worked her way up the scrap recycling ladder, came to us from
another industry, or was tutored to advance from within our
company, that woman is the best possible advertising for SA
Recycling as a place where all employees, male and female
alike, can achieve.
Our women leaders also prove that in our company
integrity, enterprise, and hard work outweigh all other
personal attributes. Pedigree and diploma count for nothing
unless one performs. That gives hope to employees at all
levels of the organization that rewards and advancement are
based on merit alone.
Finally, the accomplishments of our female MIT
graduates inspire other women to reach beyond their current
job duties and set goals for their own development and
advancement. The program has allowed our female associates
to establish self-supporting mentor groups to share ideas and
encourage one another to advance. It has also served as
reminder to all employees to focus on their and our company’s
future.

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 Regardless of our past success, SA Recycling cannot rest
on its laurels. Our company’s attainments, including those of
our female associates, are small steps in creating and
maintaining a workplace that honors every person’s
contribution. We are committed to finding, developing, and
keeping talented employees, regardless of gender. Our and
our employees’ futures depend on it.
Any modern business entity must embrace diversity in its
workforce and positions of decision-making; anything less
invites financial disaster and the unwanted intrusion of the
federal government in business decisions. SA Recycling
knows the future is uncharted territory which demands every
human resource to explore. We are confident that everyone at
SA is ready for any challenge, including inclusion, and know
our female and male leaders will keep everyone on the most
successful path.

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 Twenty-Seven
By George Adams and Claudine Hanani

We were shoved into our legal battle with the city of

Anaheim unexpectedly. We really didn’t see it coming, and I
still wonder if it was worth more than $4.2 million to win. We
fought tooth and nail from 1984 to 2004. It is clear to me that
if we were not sitting on top of one of the most valuable pieces
of land in Anaheim—strategic in its location and perfect in its
size—we would never have gone through this. Up until we
found ourselves at the entrance to the legal maze, being
shoved from behind, we had no idea what kind of onslaught
we would eventually endure.
From the beginning of our operation, a
disproportionately large volume of our recyclable goods came
in to us in the form of home appliances. Unlike many of the
other Los Angeles-based shredders, we had always received a
good portion of these goods, and taking them in and
processing them represented a solid revenue stream for us. In

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the mid-1980s, we estimated that roughly half of our business
came from recycling appliances. However, room air
conditioners and microwave ovens manufactured prior to
1978 contain capacitors, which hold PCBs. Although the
manufacture of PCBs was banned outright in 1976, they were
still permitted until 1979 and were still in circulation for years
after that.
The Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 was the first
stab at legislating the manufacturing, processing, use and
disposal of PCBs. Only asbestos and PCBs were singled out in
the Act. The Environmental Protection Agency began to
regulate PCBs more closely and legislative changes and
rulings were refined over several years. As these changes were
coming over the horizon, the Department of Toxic Substances
Control (DTSC) discovered PCBs in our fluff pile and we
began to realize that our issues were going to grow. The
discovery of PCBS in the shredder fluff expanded the
regulatory agency’s involvement beyond the state of California
and drew in federal regulators.
We didn’t fully foresee how much of a watershed the year
1992 would be for Adams Steel. We expected to finally end the
bankruptcy forced on us by Hugo Neu-Proeler, which had
been difficult. We were relieved to be ending the matter of
Hugo Neu-Proeler, and we were addressing the disposal of
fluff from the 40,000-ton pile and an additional 10,000 cubic
yards of contaminated soil.
Although the discovery of PCBs meant that we could,
going forward, separate out the waste and begin to generate
by-products that were free of PCBs, we were left with the
quandary of disposing of the waste we had. We followed the
customary protocol of every industry at the time and began
disposing of the impacted material at local hazardous-waste
landfills. We really had no reason to consider any other course
of action; we were well in line with what every other disposer
would have done and was doing. The regulations were fluid in
those days—the federal requirements for waste were that it
should contain no more than 50 parts per million (ppm) of
PCBs, while California had enacted much more stringent
limits of no more than 20 ppm. Ironically, the 91 freeway,
which abuts our property, had readings along its outer edge of
150 ppm. The regulatory bodies were still very much in the

129
process of making sense of how to handle these long-
established contaminants and figuring out what was going to
make sense. Varying groups were lobbying every conceivable
regulatory position, and there was no clear way of knowing
how it would all play out.
We continued disposing at local landfills until they
refused our waste, and we were forced to begin shipping the
waste to Arizona, until we were turned around by the FBI and
agents of the EPA in a surprise move. We were, in many ways,
at the mercy of changing public opinion and evolving
regulations.
The City’s scrutiny then kicked into an unexpected legal
battle. It soon became clear that this legal action was the
beginning of the city’s final push to stop us in our tracks and
remove us from our property. Then-Mayor Tom Daley once
boasted that the city spent $600,000 trying to put us out of
business, but he was never very forthcoming on exactly how
he spent that money. It’s highly unusual for a city to so
precisely target a company for investigation and spend that
much money trying to close it down. We believe that the value
and location of our property led to their scrutiny and eventual
scheme to remove us.
We also did not expect that we would eventually incur
dump fees of $2,322,731 and freight costs of $1,609,488, and
fines with Department of Toxic Substances Control of
$330,000. These costs totaled $4,262,219 and extended from
May 1984 until the last of the shredder pile was buried on May
31, 1998.
Tom Daly and Irv Pickler were themselves investigated in
early 1998 amid allegations of breaches of state and city
campaign-contribution laws during their 1996 runs for the
city council. The complaints charged that they accepted
donations in excess of the limits and failed to report and
itemize them properly. Two members of the five-member city
council hired a special prosecutor, Ravi Mehta, who himself
was eventually fired by the council for excessive billing.
Unfortunately, Mehta was fired before he was able to
complete his investigation and the charges against Daly and
Pickler were eventually dropped.
We believe there is little doubt that the city officials were
motivated to pursue legal action against us for reasons that

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extended well beyond mere community service or public
protection from prospective toxic contamination. In fact, we
think it was clearly a means to an end—and that end probably
included taking our 40 acres. Between our location at the
juncture of three freeways (California routes 55, 91, and 57),
our rail-line access, and our ideal size for a large-scale
industrial operation, our property was highly desirable in a
county that was, at the time, running out of industrial sites to
develop.
However, although Daley and his cronies were tightly
focused on removing us, there were also a good number of fair
arbiters on the City Council who ultimately helped us to
prevail and protected us from our threatened demise. Bob
Zemel, Frank Fieldhouse, and Lou Lopez supported us, and
their votes meant everything. Without their support at critical
junctures, we might have well been unable to save ourselves.
The city’s plan would be worked through a law firm, and a
relentless, if misguided, lead attorney. This legal team would
drag in several agencies to add girth and weight to their plan.
The law firm of Jones, Day, Revis, and Pogue (JDRP) led the
charge with Marsha Croninger at their head. The plan of
attack included naming us and the Department of Health
Services, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, and other
agencies as defendants. Many of these agencies were really
unwitting participants.
It is interesting to note that the Department of Health
Services was actually quite supportive of Adams Steel and
largely rebutted the claims brought forth by the city. They
recognized that a ready resolution for the shredder waste was
not easily at hand. The Regional Water Board was also very
supportive, in spite of the city’s suggestion that we were
responsible for ill-defined contamination. We received several
reports from the Board that backed us up, showing clearly that
the shredder waste pile was never a threat to surface water or
groundwater in spite of the presence of PCBs. We also had
support from the California Occupational Health and Safety
Administration, which maintained that the shredder pile was
of no significant threat to any of our employees. It is also
noteworthy that we developed our operation on property that
was formerly a landfill developed 20 feet below the level of the
Santa Ana River, which runs adjacent to our facility. That

131
landfill accepted all sorts of household waste without
discrimination, including any toxic contaminants that people
felt like dumping there, and those contaminants could easily
leach into the river. The real impact of this former operation
has never been quantified.
In a 1992 internal memo, Gerard Thibault of the
California Regional Water Quality Control Board, Santa Ana
Region, stated that he believed that the city had been trying to
close us down for the past several years. The memo also notes
that the city was trying to get the water-quality board involved
with the shredder pile and recommended that members avoid
being brought into the situation unless there was clear
evidence of an impact on groundwater or surface water.
Throughout the memo, Thibault asserts that there is no
evidence of any threat to water quality and repeatedly refuses
to authorize any enforcement action. The memo discusses
Croninger’s request to have the Board take actions similar to
those already under supervision by the DTSC; the Board
refused to jump in because doing so would be duplicative and
unnecessary because of the low threat the pile posed to water
quality. This was just one of many instances when the
attorneys, on the city’s behalf, tried to come at us from any
and all angles, in defiance of all reason.
Under oversight from the state Department of Toxic
Substances Control, we began removing the stockpiled waste
and disposing of it at the Kettleman City landfill. Their
eventual refusal to take our waste anymore led us to begin the
search for a landfill that would accept it. We eventually took
up shipping our materials to Mexico and Arizona.
Arizona accepted our waste at the CRIT Landfill primarily
because Arizona didn’t follow the strict guidelines that
California environmental regulations imposed on industry.
The California waste extraction test, at that time, was typically
20 to 100 times more stringent than either the EPA’s test or
the state of Arizona’s toxicity test. Arizona differed completely
in their opinion of hazardous waste and was aligned more
closely with federal standards. A letter from then-governor
Bruce Babbitt a the time stipulated that our waste posed no
problem. This all went rather smoothly until a caravan of our
trucks was stopped at the border going into Arizona.

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 In 1983, changes in the state of California’s system of
toxicity testing altered the way that our shredder byproduct
would be tested. The state at first mandated the use of TCLP
testing, which used acetic acid, and then switched to the TTLC
and STLC methods (the WET method), which were essentially
the same method but used a different acid and digested for a
longer time. The WET method was generally agreed to be
much more aggressive in extracting trace elements from
waste. California’s adoption of more stringent toxicity
standards was not well-received by industry, and we
recognized that it might be prudent to sit through some of the
inevitable legislative wrangling. We began to stockpile our
fluff in anticipation of legislative changes that we hoped would
be beneficial to us. In the span of 14 years we had been able to
produce 420,000 tons of PCB-impacted waste. We shipped
380,000 tons of it to approved hazardous-waste landfills for
disposal. The remaining 40,000 tons were cleaned on-site.
By the time the looked-for legislative changes appeared
on the horizon, the Department of Toxic Substances Control
(DTSC) discovered PCBs in the fluff pile, and we realized our
troubles were going to grow. The discovery of PCBs changed
the scope of our work from involving just the state of
California to drawing in federal regulators.
Once we uncovered the source of the PCBs, we were faced
with separating out the waste and generating PCB-free
byproducts. Left with the quandary of disposal, we began
shipping the waste to Arizona until we were turned around by
the FBI and agents of the EPA in a surprise move.
The ensuing legal action by the DTSC stipulated the
following:
• We had 90 days to remove the waste or face penalties
of $25,000 per day.
• The illegal disposal of the waste would be penalized at
$25,000 per day.
• The fine for creating a public nuisance was $2,000 per
day.
• Our total daily fines were $52,000.
Because of the length of time it took us to resolve the
issue, our fines totaled $52 million, which made us feel about
like you’d imagine.

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 We resolved this issue with a Consent Order from the
DTSC that stipulated that we stop generating waste and ship a
portion of the fluff off-site every week. When this wasn’t
enough, we then faced multiple actions at several levels as the
Anaheim City Attorney’s office filed charges against us for
operating without a use permit just as we were removing the
shredder waste as agreed. These charges forced us to file a
writ to appeal the suspension of our permit. Our very
competent emissary, Philip Anthony, worked tirelessly to
address the host of legal maneuvers arrayed against us, and
without his help we would have been much less able to combat
our foes.
Throughout our time in Anaheim, Adams Steel always
took stock of the importance of our role within the
community, and our wrangling with the city’s officials never
changed the ways in which we took responsibility for our
corporate citizenship. We were always very much a part of the
community, and when needs arose within it, we stepped
forward. We helped openly and in quieter ways, because we
were grateful for what we had and because we wanted to the
city to do well and be well. We were bemused and appreciative
when we were recognized by the Anaheim Chamber of
Commerce in 2006 as the city’s Large Business of the Year.
It was ironic that the value of our contribution to the city
long-term was, in balance, so much greater than the negligible
impact of the shredder waste on the land and the community.
The city’s short-term objective of keeping us from devaluing
the city with a “junkyard” lacked perspective and didn’t
accurately tabulate all that we contributed with our operation.
We did, in fact, move forward with the city in every way we
could and contributed to the city’s programs in meaningful
ways throughout the years. We are reassured that we more
than contributed as a responsible corporate sponsor with the
city.
I am reminded of the early days when I began to see the
road ahead and knew that I would be building a leading scrap-
metal recycling conglomerate, known not only across Orange
County, but around the world. I was meeting witih Orange
County Supervisor Ralph Dietrich, who had asked for our
assistance to put together a recycling program. His first words
of advice still ring clear. He said, “George, when you do

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business in Orange County and the City of Anaheim, you are
on a pay-as-you-go plan.” I must admit that, after 40 years,
nothing has changed. The most I can report is that the process
has become a little more refined, but in essence it is the same.
Ralph was right.

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 Final Thoughts

After sifting through all the stories I’ve told in this book, I
am sure my readers will come to the conclusion that I am
something of a barbarian. I readily admit it’s true. I’m not a
conformist. I’m not easily persuaded into accepting somebody
else’s boots in the teeth. I have a tendency to fight back, and to
fight until I win. Consequently, my relationship with the city
of Anaheim and pretty much all politicians has not and will
never be much good, because I can’t muster up enough inner
peace to believe they’re well-intentioned or have any merit
whatsoever. I have no close affinity with any political folk,
although I know many politicians at the local, state, and
federal levels.
I say this because I am very well aware that you can’t fight
city hall and win—at least, not all the time, and not in the long
run. Although most politicians can be bought, some for a
nickel and others for a dime, they still have a certain amount

136
of power that has to be dealt with. My son George is much
more understanding of the principles involved in politics,
helped quite a bit by the fact that he is an attorney. He keeps
trying to teach me that sometimes a soft shoe is better than an
iron boot. Personally, I’ll stick with the iron boot, but I guess
that’s what makes me a barbarian. But at least I’m a proud
one.

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Appendices

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20 years of persecution: This collage of headlines from the
Orange County Register and other papers shows the general
tone of the press we got over the years. They never cut us any
slack, and we never gave up.

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The Legal Battles

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 Adams Steel Newsletter
September 2010

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 Profile of Adams Steel
By Jim Fowler
Recycling International
April 2010

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 with a crew of eight salvaging scrap
H e was 18 years old when he
out of landfills. ‘I’d drive a roll-off
truck to the landfill and we’d pick the
drove the beat-up truck into a scrap cardboard and the steel and aluminum,
yard at the Port of Los Angeles. It was load it in the truck and take it back to
1974 and George Adams, Jr the yard,’ he says. ‘Eventually we had
remembers that ‘the yard was bigger four landfill contracts and were buying
than life’. over the scale from peddlers doing
You can hear the excitement in his about 1000 tons a month with 40
voice as if the experience was employees.’
yesterday. ‘The piles of scrap were so
high; you could feel the vibrations Shredder installed
from the shredder and see the steam As the company grew, Mr Adams
rising from the mill; and a ship was says it was his father’s decision to
being loaded for export,’ he recalls. ‘I install a shredder with the expectation
looked around and thought this yard is to sell the material to local steel mills.
the biggest thing I’ve ever seen - it’s ‘By the time we shredded our first car
huge.’ in 1980, US Steel, Bethlehem Steel
Little did he know that, 33 years and Kaiser Steel had closed and we
later, the same yard would be part of didn’t have any domestic markets, so
SA Recycling, and he would be we needed a dock,’ he explains. ‘The
President of that company - a joint “big guys” tried hard to put us out of
venture created by Sims Metal business by trying to lock us out of
Management, the largest metal markets, so we invented our own bulk
recycler in the world, and California ship loader.’
scrap processor Adams Steel which The company had an off-dock yard
was founded by George Adams, Sr in adjacent to the container terminal. He
1973. continues: ‘We had 20 open-top
Originally called Orange County containers and we would dump scrap
Steel, the small car dismantling yard into them. Then we would drive the
evolved into a scrap processing containers under the crane; the crane
facility doing a few hundred tons of would pick up the container with a
scrap a month. The younger Adams’ special rotator we designed, lower it
first job at the company was working

182
into the ship, rotate it, and dump the exclaims. ‘Our whole life depends on
scrap into the hull and then set the export and, without a dock, throughout
container back on the chassis - the the years we had found ourselves in
system just kept going around in situations where we just couldn’t sell
circles. It was 1985 and this was how our scrap. Domestic markets here are
we were loading ships.’ limited.’
Sims had seven yards in the region,
including one port facility, and
recognised that Adams Steel had a
great infrastructure with 20 yards and
significant on-the-ground, local
expertise.
In 2008, SA Recycling acquired
Pacific Coast Recycling, making it the
largest metal recycler on the West
Coast. Following that acquisition, SA
Material handler at sunset. bought three more yards. Today, the
company operates 40 recycling plants,
Need for a dock including two deep-water port
Adams Steel’s growth continued facilities (Los Angeles and Long
and it was the first California Beach), four shredders and 35 feeder
processor to put in a mega shredder. yards located throughout California,
‘This allowed us to greatly increase Arizona and Nevada. Its largest
our tonnage and sky-rocket our machine is a 9000 HP mega shredder
business,’ says Mr Adams. At the time at its Port of Los Angeles facility
of the joint venture with Sims, the capable of processing up to 350 tons
company was doing 80 000 tons of of material per hour. The Anaheim
ferrous a month, plus non-ferrous, and and Bakersfield mills also run mega
was operating 20 yards as far north as shredders while the Las Vegas
Fresno in California as well as in shredder is a 98-inch mill.
Nevada and Northern Mexico. What Mr. Adams says that SA shreds
was missing was a dock. Mr Adams about 80,000 tons a month and

Dust control in the scrap yard.

2
estimates that 25,000 to 30,000 tons of Great partner
shredder residue is run through SGM ‘On average, the company exports
systems monthly. ‘SA is on the about 2 million tonnes of material
leading edge in developing new each year with a value of more than
methods to recover all possible US$ 500 million,’ reports SA
recyclable materials from Executive Vice President Terry
automobiles, appliances, and Adams. The company’s two port
manufacturing equipment,’ according facilities bulk-load cargo ships with
to Mike Adams, Executive Vice scrap for export to China, Taiwan,
President, Engineering at SA. ‘We South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and
have an industry-first sorting system India. Most of SA’s non-ferrous scrap
designed by SGM Magnetics to is exported to China.
improve our ability to recover ‘One of the great benefits of having
aluminum, brass and other non-ferrous Sims as a partner is their tremendous
materials from the shredded ferrous resources in selling scrap,’ says
material. (See box on SGM Magnetics) George Adams. ‘They have agents in
every country in the world that buy
and sell scrap and that makes them a
great partner. They sell all of SA’s
export scrap and we make the
domestic sales.’ He estimates that
90% of SA’s business is export.
There are occasional domestic
markets, he says, including Tamco in
California and mills in Utah and
Colorado. ‘Sometimes you may sell a
lot of scrap domestically,’ he notes,
‘and sometimes none. Lately it’s been
more none, but that can change in a
The mega shredder at the heartbeat.’
company’s yard in Anaheim, Scrap availability is an on-going
California. problem. He observes: ‘The way
export markets are changing with the
use of containers gives everyone the
potential to be an exporter. It makes it
tough. Buying scrap is always an issue
and there’s a lot less scrap around.’

Gradual upturn
In terms of business outlook, Mr.
Adams begins by saying: ‘I think we
hit bottom last year.’ He believes
business ‘is certainly going to be a
stair-step, going up and down with a
Aerial view of SA Recycling’s gradual upturn over the next couple of
recycling premises in Anaheim. years.’ And he adds: ‘We’ll have the
The roof is covered with solar normal market swings, but over the
next two or three years we’re
panels.
definitely going to see things get
better.’

3
 One of the immediate challenges
facing the company is getting
everyone on the same page. ‘We’re
only two and a half years old,’ Mr.
Adams explains. ‘We’ve brought a lot
of different cultures together. We
spent the first year just trying to put it
together. Now we’re trying to
capitalise on our size and get all of our
brands together under one name such
as getting our trucking together.
We’ve installed ScrapRunner software
to manage our trucks, drivers and
containers as well as SAI’s financial George Adams, President of SA
system. The hardest thing to Recycling and Chair of the
accomplish with a big company is Institute of Scrap Recycling
systems controls. We’re making a lot Industries (ISRI)
of progress and I’m encouraged with
what we’ve accomplished.’

Empowering employees
In his view, SA’s business
philosophy hasn’t changed from that
of Adams Steel. ‘I think we work
really hard and treat our people really
good—we’ve always done that,’ he
says. ‘While some companies micro-
manage their employees, we empower
ours. It’s something in which we
strongly believe.’
He explains: ‘It’s okay to tell me Loading one of SA Recycling’s four
no. I don’t need people to “yes” me; I shredders.
need people who will stand up and
fight for what they believe in and be
passionate about it. Although I get the
final say, I never overrule someone
unless I think it’s going to do damage
to the company.’
As a result, our employees ‘take
ownership of their areas of
responsibility,’ Mr. Adams observes.
‘When you have ownership of an area
and it becomes yours, then you take a
tremendous amount of pride in what
you have. Our employees are
passionate about what they do because
they have tremendous responsibility SA Recycling has installed cutting-
ad are allowed to make major edge machinery for recovering
decisions.’ aluminum, brass, and other non-
ferrous materials from shredder
residue.

4
 believes the process will take a couple
of years. The DuPont team moves
from facility to facility, he notes.

Environmental
considerations
Environmental protection and
controls are another major
consideration for SA. ‘We have
participated in the general industrial
storm water permit programme since
its inception,’ says Mr. Adams.
‘Collecting, handling and treating our
water is a big job that we work on
SA operates 40 recycling plants,
every day. We are continually testing
including two deep-water port
and experimenting to make our storm
facilities in Los Angeles and Long water programme the best in the
Beach in California. industry.’
The company’s environmental
protection best management practices
Safety first also include extensive dust control
SA Recycling wants to keep its procedures such as sprinkler systems
employees safe as well. Earlier this and water trucks to maintain wet
year, the company’s Port of Long material by using recycled water
Beach facility completed 365 days collected at plant facilities.
without an injury or accident; this On the last day of 2009, SA
represents 163,000 man hours, announced the installation of the
including the loading of 16 vessels largest commercial solar electric
with a total of 662,000 tonnes of generating system in Anaheim at the
scrap, according to Moises Figueroa, company’s headquarters. The system
General Manager of the company’s will produce more than 715,000
two port facilities. Processing kilowatts annually, equivalent to the
operations at Long Beach include amount of electricity required to
shearing, torching, railroad car power 120 homes for one year. It is
dismantling, and container and large expected to reduce carbon dioxide
bulk vessel loading. emissions by more than 1 million
‘I am so proud of the SA team that pounds annually
made this huge achievement possible,’ ‘We are proud of the cutting-edge
exclaims Mr. Figueroa. ‘We hold solutions we have implemented,’ says
daily, weekly and monthly safety Terry Adams. ‘It may not generate all
meetings, stressing everyone’s the power we need, but it will
responsibility to work safely. It’s certainly go a long way toward
safety first or it’s not worth doing it.’ lessening our reliance on the power
‘We have a lot of people in our grid, which in turn will free up a
safety department,’ says Mr. Adams, significant amount of electricity for
‘because it’s important to us. We’re other commercial users and
trying to change the safety culture and consumers. As good environmental
have retained DuPont’s safety stewards, we thought it was the right
consulting service to instill the Long thing to do.’
Beach 365-day record in all of our
operations.’ SA began working with
DuPont last July and Mr. Adams

5
Community Responsibility
Doing the right thing is an
important consideration for SA
Recycling. ‘We feel community
responsibility is a vital part of the
company’s civic duty,’ says Mr.
Adams. The company is a major donor
to law enforcement, fire departments
and various non-profit humanitarian
groups such as the YMCA and Boys
and Girls Clubs. The Adams brothers, from left:
A strong participant in local and George, Mike, and Terry Adams.
national legislative areas, SA
managers are involved in leadership
positions in local industry associations
dealing with city, county and state
laws and regulations affecting the
recycling industry. And for the past
two years, George Adams has served
as Chairman of the US Institute of
Scrap Recycling Industries.
Despite the changes, Mr. Adams
still regards SA Recycling as a family
business. He also thinks about the time
when he first saw the scrap
operation—‘bigger than life’—at the
Port of Los Angeles in 1974. ‘When
we did the deal with Sims in 2007, I
went back into that yard and I was that
same little kid again. It was surreal.
From pulling in there with an old junk
truck to owning the facility was a long
road.’
Will there be more acquisitions in
the future? ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘We hope
to continue to grow.’

6
Key role for SGM at SA
Recycling
The non-ferrous separation systems
at each of SA Recycling’s four
shredders were installed by SGM
Magnetics Corp.
SGM SpA, an Italian company
founded in 1954, was purchased by
the Gantry Group in 1993. Under the
direction of President and CEO Didier
Hagelsteen, the company established Bob Melenick, President of SGM
SGM Magnetics Corp. in the USA in Magnetics Corp. in Sarasota,
1995 with Bob Melenick as President. Florida, USA.
Initially, SGHM sold magnets to
American steel mills for handling Anaheim and then Bakersfield.
finished products; and in 2000, it Following the joint venture with Sims
began exploring expansion into the in 2007, SA Recycling also upgraded
scrap market. and expanded SGM systems at its Port
In 2003, SGM formed a relationship of Los Angeles shredder and later at
with Metaltek Development for the shredder acquired in Las Vegas.
research and technology in metals SA’s president George Adams
recovery from auto shredder residue comments: ‘They are a great
(ASR). Mr. Melenick recalls Mr. technology company and have always
Hagelsteen saying in 2005: ‘If we can stood behind their work. We couldn’t
show shredder operators how much ask for a better partner in dealing with
metal they are losing in their fines, the tens of thousands of tons of ASR
and show them how to recover it, that our shredders generate.’
we’ll be a big success.’ Mr. Melenick SA shreds about 80,000 tons a
adds modestly: ‘That has been the month at its four facilities and an
case.’ estimated 25,000 to 30,000 tons of
shredder residue is run through SGM
systems monthly. According to
SGM’s General Manager Ryan
Nijavro, approximately 17% of the
ASR will be recovered non-ferrous
metals—between 4250 and 5100 tons
monthly; and of that 17%, 13-14%
will be Zorba while 3-4% will be
Zurick. In addition, if copper is hand-
picked from the line, it is possible to
get 1500 to 2000 pounds a day from
At SA Recycling, an estimated the larger shredders, Mr. Nijavro
estimates.
25,000 – 30,000 tons of shredder
residue is run through SGM
systems monthly.
The systems described
Mr. Melenick describes the systems
at Anaheim and Port of Los Angeles
Upgraded and expanded in the following way. The non-ferrous
It was in 2004 that SGM began downstream starts with the trammel:
working with Adams Steel installing the cut is made at 1¾ inches and
systems at the company’s shredders in below, and that material goes to a

7
screening machine such as a Vibra- are missed by the eddy currents.
Snap or Shaker. After going over the About 220 tons per hour is being run
screen, the material of ¾ inch and through the Anaheim shredder with
below goes to two 60-inch dynamic about 50 tons being run through the
ferrous separators (DSRP). The DSRP non-ferrous plant, according to Mr.
mechanically liberates the ferrous Nijavro. Although tonnages vary for
metals missed by the big magnetic any number of reasons, not the least of
drums at the end of the shredder; it has which is market conditions, he
a magnetic head pulley to recover the estimates similar tonnages for Port of
ferrous nuggets missed by the original Los Angeles but less for Bakersfield
drums. It also has a floating head and Las Vegas.
pulley beneath to capture those
nuggets into a separate stream while
the magnetic dirt drops into a separate
waste stream. Going over the DSRP
eliminates about 30% of the flow.
The DSRP also liberates
entanglements, lessens the burden
depth going to the eddy current, cleans
out all of the ferrous to provide
another sellable ferrous stream and
cleans out the ferrous dirt which The DSRP mechanically liberates
allows the high frequency eddy the ferrous metals missed by the
currents to work efficiently. The big magnetic drums at the end of
DSRP runs at 150 rounds per minute. the shredder.
The non-ferrous metals then continue
on to three 40-inch high-frequency
eddy currents that run at 3000 rounds Ideas shared
per minute (the industry highest at this SGM provides continuous technical
time). The frequency created by the support for the SA non-ferrous plants
rotation of the rotor repels the pieces and Ashley Day, Vice President of
of aluminum and copper. Material of Metaltek Development, walks through
¾ inch up to 1¼ inches goes to two their yards on a regular basis to ensure
other 60-inch DSRPs and then to three the machines are running properly.
other high-frequency eddy currents. Immense pride is taken in customer
The 1½ to 5-inch material that comes service, says Mr. Melenick.
off the trammel is the centre cut that George and Mike Adams are great
goes over two 80-inch SIS regular people to work with, he adds. ‘We
eddy currents that run at share ideas and work together on
approximately 2500 rpm. Six air testing new ideas and equipment.
sensor separators recover metals such They have helped elevate us to
as stainless steel and copper wires that another level of acceptance.’