‘They’re gonna put me outta business’: Copper thieves target New Iberia business owner

• Dr. Adel Malahmeh owns nearly 90 businesses across Iberia Parish. Now, he fears he may lose customers due to a ‘surge of robberies’ at his properties.
• According to Malahmeh, nine of his A/C unit condensers have been stolen over the last month.

BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:

One New Iberia businessman says his A/C units and the copper within them are disappearing.

“They’re gonna put me outta business,” said Dr. Adel Malahmeh. At 23, Malahmeh immigrated to New Iberia from the Middle East. “I came in on an officer exchange program; I was in El Paso, Fort Bliss.”

According to Malahmeh, he owns nearly 90 buildings across Iberia Parish, as well as in some surrounding parishes. But lately his businesses have been the target of a very specific crime.

“This one was stolen first, then the second one got stolen, and now we have no air conditioning for the patients.” According to Malahmeh, people have been stealing his A/C condenser units, and breaking into them.

Why?

“Somebody is making money off of that copper,” he said. Often sold for scrap metal or on the black market, copper is fairly valuable to people who are looking to make some fast cash. “They don’t steal the whole thing,” said Frank Barber, Malahmeh’s attorney, “they just take the core of it which is full of copper.”

He tells me that the people stealing copper from his client are leaving behind tens of thousands of dollars in damages.“It was all set up too; they stole the unit, now he has to invest another $12,000, and [he has to] find somebody to do it too!”

“They leave the pipes with moisture now, full of water, moisture,” said Malahmeh, “[which] means that we have to replace the whole system, inside and outside.” In total…Malahmeh estimates that he’s lost nine separate A/C unit condensers. “If we replace it with a new unit, it’s gonna happen again…so I don’t know what to do.”

According to New Iberia Police, an incident report was filed, but Barber believes more could be done to stop this recurring issue. “The people that are buying [the copper], they’re not doing anything, that I know of, to work with law enforcement to try and slow down this practice.”

Malahmeh just hopes that the robberies will come to an end, sooner than later.

“How can I provide the customers, the patients, with air and cooling inside?”

“Are you afraid about losing customers?”

“Definitely, definitely. They’re not gonna come in that heat.”