"SHANE SMITH:" "— This week on "Vice"" "America's cities are picked apart for scrap..." "MAN: — I know what I'm doing wrong." "I'm going in and taking stuff that's not mine." "SMITH: and then we see the real cost of America's drone wars." "Move that camera, eh?" "Ooh." "[Shouts]" "♪" "[Cheering]" "Oh!" "DAVID CHOE:" "Not only are the people scrapping buildings for the scraps." "They're scrapping the scrapyards." "ALVI:" "This place is known as the University of Jihad." "♪" "Manufacturing in the United States has been on a steady decline for the last few decades, and as a result, the cities that were once home to these industries are falling into a state of extreme urban decay." "The situation has gotten so bad in some of America's old industrial cities, that there's a cultural phenomenon happening where some of the people left behind are literally stripping the infrastructure from old schools, houses, hospitals, and factories" "for their raw materials." "They're called scrappers, and we sent David Choe for a closer look at this growing underground business." "♪" "CHOE, VOICE-OVER:" "This 3.5-million-square-foot" "Packard Automotive Plant, which has sat completely abandoned for over 20 years, was once considered the most modern automobile-manufacturing facility in the world." "Since 2000, America has lost a net total of about 70,000 manufacturing plants." "CHOE:" "Hey, what's up, man?" "Hey, dude." "Hi." "I'm Dave." "Dez." "This whole thing that you just took apart is one of these bridges up here?" "Yeah." "And you dismantle the whole thing?" "Yep." "In Detroit, young people mostly make their money how?" "Probably robbing..." "Right." "selling drugs." "Everybody is trying to get money in all kind of different ways, but this is the way you're only hurting yourself instead of hurting other people." "As far as with drugs or carjacking somebody for their car just to get a dollar..." "Right." "they don't have to do all that." "This way of living, you can make as much money as you want to do what you need to do." "If I had to pay a $1,000 bill," "I can come here and make $1,000 to pay that bill." "Well, there's two ways to look at it." "One is, yeah, you're not killing anyone." "You're not robbing anyone." "You're not selling drugs, and it's hard work, and" "Hard work is always appreciated within yourself." "Right, but what you're doing is" "It's making the city look abandoned and shut down, which that attracts, then, a criminal element." "What do you think about that?" "All we go for is abandoned stuff." "Don't nobody care about it." "The city don't care about it." "Right." "Now, you got scrappers that's scrapping them houses." "Yeah." "Could never do that because I like to see the houses..." "Right." "looking nice and put-together." "That's a neighborhood." "They can be renovated." "Right." "What did you do before you were scrapping?" "I worked at the pawn shop." "You worked at the pawn shop?" "7 years." "So what happened?" "How come you stopped working at the pawn shop?" "Well, they went out of business." "CHOE, VOICE-OVER:" "In a town where even the pawn shops are going out of business, scrapping off the old infrastructure of our once-huge manufacturing base is one of the only ways left to survive." "Everywhere we went in Detroit, the old factories, the old hospitals, even the old churches and schools were hollowed out and scrapped." "To get a closer look, we had legal scrapper" "Honest Don show us through a school to see exactly how they go about systematically scrapping the entire building." "CHOE:" "They got every single locker, huh?" "What's going on here?" "They ripped the lights out?" "All the wires are missing out of these." "This is where all the showers were, huh?" "CHOE:" "This is an amazing pool." "When did they build this school?" "Whoa." "CHOE, VOICE-OVER:" "Since 2008, Detroit has shuttered nearly 100 schools in an effort to shrink their massive budget deficit, and those buildings left behind are being ravaged by illegal scrappers." "So this all happened within about a year." "Jesus Christ." "CHOE, VOICE-OVER:" "This phenomenon of gutting a shrinking city's old infrastructure is not just happening in Detroit." "It's happening in all of America's old industrial cities, like St. Louis, Milwaukee, Buffalo," "Flint, and Cleveland." "In Cleveland, where manufacturing has been extremely hard hit, scrapping has become a cutthroat and even deadly business." "We met up with a young scrapper named Sean." "He took us out late one night and showed us how he makes a living." "SEAN:" "This is like Scrap Mile right here." "So everyone is scrapping." "Everyone is scrapping." "Do you feel like you're doing anything wrong?" "I know what I'm doing wrong." "I'm going in and taking stuff that's not mine." "Ha ha ha!" "Yep." "That window is open." "We can get in there." "Right there?" "Yep." "See that one?" "That's the one we go in every time." "I got my little, basic haer." "I usually clip with this, and I got the trusty crowbar for all your BE needs." "This is an old mattress factory, so they have a lot of weird stuff, a lot of stuff to do with mattresses." "It's creepy in there, too." "Oh, yeah." "[Thud]" "You're a graffiti artist." "You know what you're doing." "[Thud]" "♪" "Stuff like that, that's going with me." "There's wire right here." "See, I'm cutting that right now." "See the copper?" "You got a little copper in there." "Cha-ching." "Be careful." "Let's go up to the roof and just see what it looks like." "[Taps]" "Yeah." "No one is in here." "Some birds." "Are those birds?" "This is a nice-ass load, man." "So someone came up here, obviously" "So someone came up here and made their own load, planning to scrap, but I'm taking it." "And then why do you think they didn't take it?" "I don't know." "They had no ride?" "I don't know." "Fuck them." "It's mine now." "That's how I look at it." "Usually what I do is get your load straight to the edge, ready to drop off, right, wait for the train to come." "You could throw anything off this roof, and you won't hear it." "So you use the train going by as a distraction for the noise." "Yes." "That's exactly what I do." "There we go." "That's stainless." "That's some stainless steel." "All right." "We can load out." "I'm gonna get the hell out of here now." "All right." "CHOE, VOICE-OVER:" "For Sean, this building represents a steady and relatively safe cash flow of money to get by, but if you're willing to take higher risks, you'll get higher rewards." "All right." "CHOE, VOICE-OVER:" "Later that night, we met up with a scrapper who goes by the name Dreadlock." "He took us out and showed us the next level of scrapping." "You see where that fence is right there?" "Yeah." "In that yard, I had a whole container" "OK." "that I lived in." "No one ever really knew I was there." "You lived in a scrapyard?" "Yeah." "That's crazy." "Over there, I got shot, as well." "Who shot you?" "I got shot by one guard over in here and one guard over there." "There was a bounty out on me because I was hitting them real hard." "I'm a little bit unclear what's going on." "You used to live in a scrapyard and steal from the scrapyard and sell to another scrapyard?" "Yeah." "I mean, that's next-level criminal shit." "I wouldn't even think to scrap the scrapyard." "It's a lot more chancy." "Every place has security." "Are we gonna get shot at right now?" "No." "That took too long to answer." "No." "We're-- Ha ha ha!" "The pause scares me." "Ha ha!" "This is fucking crazy." "What is he, Heathcliff the cat?" "This motherfucker is going to break in again." "I mean... this guy does not give a fuck." "Not only are there people scrapping buildings for the scraps." "They're scrapping the scrapyards." "Have you gone to jail for scrapping?" "Yep." "So you've been incarcerated and physically harmed, and yet you still do it." "Why?" "My last cash-in..." "Right." "was $751, and that was a day's work." "Right." "My first paycheck of two week's paycheck..." "Right." "was $690-something." "So in one day, you can make more than two weeks of work." "There you go." "CHOE, VOICE-OVER:" "The amount of money made in scrap is a major reason for the lengths these guys go in order to obtain it." "The price of a pound of scrap copper, for example, is about 5 times more than it was in 2002." "To get an idea of what is causing this incredible boom in scrap metal, me met with Glenn Perrenoud, the owner of Western Reserve Recycling scrapyard, who has been buying and selling scrap in Cleveland for over 30 years." "CHOE:" "How good is business?" "Statistically high right now." "Right." "The scrapers bring the scrap here." "You guys take it." "Then what happens next?" "Where does it go?" "Through the years, it's been almost 100% export to China." "100%?" "Pretty close." "Whoa." "So the Chinese buyer comes here, picks out what he wants." "They furnish export containers, and we load the containers." "Right." "The container goes on a train and then onto a boat, and then goes to China." "It's a good deal because the day we ship the stuff, they wire the money, and you have it the next day, and they don't see the material for two months." "It's crazy to think that the U.S." "is this superpower that was," ""We're number one!" "We're number one!"" "We're not anymore." "CHOE, VOICE-OVER:" "Wanted to see how this goes down day to day." "We met up with this guy Johnson Zeng," "A Chinese buyer who zigzags across America buying our scrap." "CHOE:" "So how many times have you driven back and forth across America?" "So you drive a lot." "You probably see more of the United States than most Americans." "Well, I'm glad you're in North Carolina today." "Got lots of scrap." "Open-eye helix." "$1.72, $1.73, somewhere in there." "Yeah." "Oh." "Oh." "We'll go in here and see if we can't find some brass." "This is the red, semi-red that you buy, and over here, we have our mixed brass turnings you usually buy." "$1.9is gonna be close." "Yeah." "$1.30?" "Nope." "$1.38." "OK." "I think that's about it, Johnson." "We can head down and..." "OK." "see how your prices are today." "OK." "All right." "Let's see what we got here." "GORDON:" "Oof." "Christmas wire 53?" "You're gonna have to buy that if you're gonna buy anything." "Ha ha ha!" "That red brass is good, clean red brass, no yellow in it." "[Homer on phone speaking Chinese]" "That'll work." "Johnson, I always give you the preference." "You gonna prepay 50,000?" "Dee, sold Johnson 3 loads." "Thanks, Johnson." "CHOE, VOICE-OVER:" "As they concluded their business, we realized one of the reasons the prices are so high is because Johnson is not the only one buying." "[Laughter]" "Oh..." "Hi." "Nice to meet you." "So while we're here at Gordon Scrapping, you ran into some competition." "How much competition is it, hundreds of guys or thousands of guys?" "They don't even need to see it." "CHOE, VOICE-OVER:" "With hundreds, if not thousands, of these guys traveling the country buying scrap, we wondered, "Just how big an industry is this?"" "So we talked with Adam Minter, author of "Junkyard Planet"" "and frequent writer on the subject of the worldwide scrap trade." "MINTER:" "China really came on the international scrap market starting in about the mid 1980s, and by the early 1990s," "China had a huge demand for raw materials to fuel its industrial behemoth, to become the workshop to the world." "For years, the price of copper, for example, hung around a dollar a pound, and all of a sudden in the 1990s, you could see it start edging upward." "CHOE, VOICE-OVER:" "The increase in Chinese demand spread to all types of metals, from aluminum to iron." "MINTER:" "There's no faster way to get raw materials than to just scrap something that's in somebody's junkyard." "It's a lot cheaper, and it's a lot quicker than digging a copper mine, say, in the Andes, and there are times when I go to Chinese scrapyards, and I get a little upset because I'll see" "this perfectly good scrap metal that I know was recovered in the United States, and sometimes it's really obvious." "You can see road signs with American cities on them, but we live in a globalized economy at this point." "Whether we like it or not, this idea that the U.S." "sends recycling to China, we're kind of stuck with it." "It's too late to change it." "It's a multi multibillion-dollar industry." "CHOE, VOICE-OVER:" "In fact, we exported nearly 10 billion in scrap to China in 2012, which made me think two things-- one, at $10 billion, how many of these guys like Sean, Dreadlock, and Honest Don are out there" "every night ripping up our cities, and, two, that we're literally tearing up the old infrastructure of our golden industrial age, shipping it to China so it can be melted down to build the hospitals, schools, and factories" "that will fuel their golden industrial age." "♪" "Remote control drones have changed modern warfare." "Pilots located thousands of miles from the battlefield can now eliminate targets with a simple click of a button." "For the U.S. government, drones are perceived as a surgical weapon that keeps our solers out of harm's way..." "Dozens of highly skilled Al-Qaeda commanders, trainers, bombmakers, and operatives have been taken off the battlefield." "Simply put, these strikes have saved lives." "SMITH: but for the innocent victims caught up in these attacks, these drones are anything but precise." "Suroosh Alvi recently invtigated the issue of so-called collateral damage due to drone strikes and the problem that it's creating in the countries where they're being deployed." "His report begins here in the USA." "♪" "MAN: — I never thought that I would be able to kill someone." "I was a U.S. Air Force MQ1 Bravo Predator sensor operator." "I had a responsibility, you know?" "I swore an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." "How many people do you think you killed operating drones?" "Directly?" "Yeah." "3, 3, 2, 5, and that would be 13 people." "My second shot was a building, and they'd been monitoring it for a couple days, and then we fired on it." "In that instance, there was what I believed to be a child that ran around the corner of a building right before missile impact." "Do you feel like maybe you killed a kid?" "Yes." "I feel like that shot resulted in at least a civilian dying and a child civilian, at that." "♪" "Telling us that civilians won't die was a part of the indoctrination." "It was part of the ability to get us to accept what was going on." "ALVI, VOICE-OVER:" "After sitting with Brandon Bryant," "I wanted to see the effects of these drone attacks firsthand." "So I traveled to northwest Pakistan, one of the most heavily targeted regions in the U.S. drone campaign." "♪" "The Swat Valley has historically been on the front lines of the battle with the Taliban." "Today the Pakistani Army has a tenuous hold on power in the area." "Under the Obama administration, drone strikes in Pakistan have increased by almost 600%." "In fact, a few days before we arrived, there was a drone strike just outside the major city of Peshawar." "WOMAN: — An apparent U.S. drone strike in Pakistan has killed another senior figure of the Haqqani network." "Police said he was one of 3 top militants who died when missiles blasted an Islamic seminary." "The Afghan group is allied with the Taliban." "ALVI, VOICE-OVER:" "It's strikes like these that have caused outrage amongst the Pakistani public and have sent anti-American sentiment to a boiling point." "ALVI, VOICE-OVER:" "We wanted to get the Pakistani military's perspective on the drones." "So we met with General Javed Bukhari, who, just days before our meeting, was appointed to his position after his predecessor was blown up by a Taliban IED." "ALVI:" "I wanted to ask you from a military perspective what your view is on the drone campaign in the tribal areas of Pakistan." "The drones have, unfortunately, been of no help in any way in terms of the efforts which have been going in Pakistan by government of Pakistan, by the army, even by the common people, common citizen of this country." "Unfortunately, it has been very counterproductive." "It seems as though it's given a propaganda tool to the Taliban and helps them recruit." "It does." "It certainly does help them recruit more people." "The resentment among the population of that area which is being struck by the drones and the fear under which the people of that area live, that causes a lot of stress which actually translates into a lot of resentment" "among them." "Right." "So they have been truly counterproductive." "ALVI, VOICE-OVER:" "This resentment is creating new enemies for America every single day." "[Man on loudspeaker speaking Arabic]" "ALVI, VOICE-OVER:" "Madrasas, schools dedicated to the study of Islamic religion, are often seen in the West as breeding grounds for terrorists." "To see if the drone campaign was being used to radicalize militants in these religious centers," "I visited Darul-Uloom Haqqania, one of the largest and most notorious madrasas in all of Pakistan." "♪" "ALVI:" "We're about to meet with Maulana Sami Ul-Haq." "His father was the founder of a madrasa outside of Peshawar that has about 4,000 students." "Former graduates of this place include" "Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban, and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who actually changed his last name in honor of the school and, in turn, named his terrorist group the Haqqani network." "These men are the most important figures in the Taliban, all indoctrinated in this one same school." "This place is known as the University of Jihad." "[Children speaking Arabic]" "ALVI, VOICE-OVER:" "Inside, we found a number of students who had direct experience with drone strikes." "One of them was particularly interested in speaking to us when he saw our cameras." "ALVI:" "How do they affect the young people from this area?" "♪" "ALVI, VOICE-OVER:" "I wanted to understand how this madrasa was fanning the flames of this frustration." "So I sat down with the leader of the school himself." "What do you teach your students about the relationship between Pakistan and the Muslim world and America?" "What advice would you give to one of your students here if they lost a family member due to a drone strike and they said, "I want to get revenge and kill American soldiers"?" "What would you say to that student?" "ALVI, VOICE-ER:" "Sami Ul-Haq's support for revenge was echoed by everyone we spoke to in the region, but there are forces in this country hoping to work against these ideas." "Sabaoon is a Taliban deradicalization center in the Swat Valley." "Feriha Peracha has been working here to deprogram young Pakistani militants." "ALVI:" "What is your view on the effect of the drone attacks on this region?" "What do you think it does for the recruiters, these strikes?" "♪" "ALVI, VOICE-OVER:" "Although Dr. Feriha works on deprogramming as many young radicals as she can, there are many she cannot reach, and what they have to say is terrifying." "♪" "Through difficult negotiations with spokespersons," "I got an unprecedented opportunity to speak to speak to an active Taliban militant in a secret location." "He agreed to be filmed but only if we could conceal his identity." "ALVI:" "Do you want to get retribution for your family members who were killed by the drone attack?" "Do you have friends that also joined the Taliban like this?" "ALVI, VOICE-OVER:" "As part of our negotiations with the Taliban, we were able to send a special envoy deep inside the militant stronghold of North Waziristan." "There, we were allowed to capture exclusive footage of an actual Taliban recruitment meeting." "ALVI, VOICE-OVER:" "It's a self-fueling fire initiated by the drones, which causes the Taliban to gain popularity, thereby creating more terrorists who, in turn, attack us." "BRYANT:" "If our actions create more enemies, we have to look back and question whether our actions are actually worth it."