AL Capone's propeller is back home in West Vancouver, three days after it was stolen from outside an office in Horseshoe Bay.
The 140-kilogram brass artifact, which once helped propel a boat used for rum running by the famed Chicago gangster, was lifted from a square next to the Troller Pub Aug. 12. Police tracked it to a Vancouver suburb Monday and returned it to the West Vancouver police station.
"I was very pleased," said owner Joe Spears, a marine consultant whose Horseshoe Bay property had been home to the screw for the past decade. "I said a little prayer."
Spears salvaged the propeller in the year 2000 from the remains of a 28-metre historic wooden boat called the Texada.
The vessel had been used by Capone in the prohibition era to run alcohol from Canada to the United States, until authorities seized it off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1936. It eventually made its way to British Columbia for use by the provincial police, before serving as a fish-packing vessel and then finally being bought by a forestry company in the Queen Charlottes.
The aging boat ran aground in the ecologically sensitive Burnaby Narrows in 2000 and was later disassembled in Vancouver.
Spears, at the time a marine lawyer for a company that helped clean up a spill from the wreck, took possession of the propeller, hoping to preserve it, he said, for historical reasons. Spears set it up outside his office with a plant pot in it, but said he was planning to donate it to the National Maritime Centre in North Vancouver if and when the facility was ever built.
Spears arrived at work early Friday to find it gone. "I was sort of shocked," he said. "I was saying: 'God, how brazen can you get?'"
Although the propeller wasn't secured, the thieves still had to show some significant ingenuity to cart it away, said Spears.
"Even getting it into a truck or a van or whatever they used, you don't just throw it," he said.
The operation likely required several people or a piece of machinery, he said, and the culprits managed to pull it off without anyone in the busy neighbourhood spotting them.
Spears alerted West Vancouver police and, knowing it had likely been taken for its value as scrap, phoned around scrap dealers in an effort to locate it.
Police investigators also enlisted the help of the media, and soon a tipster pointed them to the missing prop's whereabouts. The artifact will remain in the WVPD's evidence locker until it can be returned to its home. No arrests have yet been made.
For investigative reasons, police won't say exactly where they found the missing propeller.
