May/June 2004
Leonard Levine’s modest nature belies the sizable reputation he has earned in the copper business in his 58-year career.”
By Si Wakesberg
You’d think that a man with 58 years of experience in the metals industry, a man recognized as an expert on the buying and selling of copper and copper-based scrap, would have at least a little ego about his accomplishments and his respected position in the business. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong—at least when you’re talking about Leonard Levine.
Levine, president of Leonard Levine Metals Corp. (Highland Park, Ill.), is about as modest a person as you could find. He was even hesitant, almost incredulous, when asked to be interviewed for this profile. “I never thought when I first went to work for International Minerals & Metals 58 years ago that someday I’d be sitting for an interview about my work in the scrap industry,” he says.
Yet few metal executives are more deserving of recognition than Levine. In his career—including 31 years running his own company—he has built not only a successful business but also a professional reputation that’s as shiny as bare bright copper. “I never heard a bad word said about him,” remarks one executive, who echoes many others—including Maureen Cooper, Levine’s assistant for the past 25 years. She describes Levine as “honest, professional, ethical, and very very smart,” adding that “there are so many more wonderful adjectives I could add.” But you get the picture. In an industry as competitive and demanding as this one, that’s high praise indeed—and it says a lot about this very private man.
Building a Copper Career
Though Leonard Levine has spent most of his life in the Chicago area, he is at heart a born-and-bred New Yorker, spending the first 26 years of his life there. Born Oct. 11, 1928, he grew up in Brooklyn—and boy did he grow up, reaching the lofty physical height of 6 feet 4 inches. He attended Brooklyn College, where his talent—and his height—earned him the center position on the school’s basketball team. Money was tight, so Levine had to take classes at night and work during the day. It was 1946 when he walked into the Manhattan offices of International Minerals & Metals Corp. (IMM) in search of a job. He walked out with a position as an office assistant at $35 a week.
Levine’s principal duty was to help with settlement statements for IMM’s scrap purchases. Through that work, he met the man who would have the greatest influence on his career—Harry Turkel, an IMM veteran who worked as a copper scrap buyer for the firm.
When a position opened up to hire another scrap buyer, Turkel suggested hiring Levine even though he knew “absolutely nothing about copper and certainly less about scrap,” Levine says. In the end, he adds, “Harry talked them into giving me a chance.”
Levine found the business fascinating and was a quick study. Turkel, who was 12 years older than Levine, served as his mentor, giving him a hands-on education about metals, taking him along on buying trips, introducing him to industry contacts, and so on. “I owe a lot to him,” Levine says. “He’s really the reason I am where I am today.” With additional instruction and guidance provided by other IMM employees, Levine soon picked up the fundamentals of the business.
Levine’s financial situation improved when IMM got a contract from overseas to supply a large quantity of brass shells, and it was his job to keep records of this complex transaction. “It was a bookkeeping nightmare,” he says, recalling that he had to work overtime to keep up with the pace of deliveries. His hard work was rewarded, however—at the end of the week, his paycheck read $125. That was a lot of money in 1947, especially for a young man just starting out. It was then he realized he could do well in this industry.
In the course of his work, Levine had to travel to upstate New York to develop a survey of scrap companies in the area to see what business could accrue. In Kingston, south of Albany, he learned of one dealer whom he decided to visit. “I ended up at this guy’s house,” Levine recalls, “and he said he wanted to show me his scrap supplies. So he took me into his back yard, where he had one refrigerator and two small radiators.”
In addition to such humorous asides, these early travels had some heartwarming moments. At the time, Levine was a young, handsome bachelor, so the upstate New York scrap dealers besieged him with their daughters, sisters, and neighbors. “In Syracuse, particularly, I had a date every night,” Levine says. Not only were the dates enjoyable in their own right, but they also provided “a good entrée to the families to do business.” In fact, Levine was told later that the boss at IMM, hearing about his social success, had said—jokingly, we assume: “If Levine ever gets married, fire him!”
By 1954, Levine had developed a coterie of customers and had become well-known in the industry. That was a seminal year for it was then that he was sent to run IMM’s office in Chicago. By that time, he was indeed married (but not fired), so he and his wife, Gloria, had to acclimate themselves to a new city. In short order, Levine grew IMM’s business there—virtually doubling it—and made a name for himself in the Midwest. Later, he was given responsibility for the Southeast region as well.
By the early 1970s, though, big changes were afoot. As the number of domestic copper scrap consumers diminished, IMM started phasing out its scrap-buying operations. Levine saw the writing on the wall. When IMM decided to close its Chicago office, the company asked Levine—then 45—to return to New York City to work. By then, he and Gloria had two children and had settled into life in the Chicago area.
So, in 1973, after 27 years with IMM, Levine decided to remain in Chicago and establish his own company—Leonard Levine Metals Corp. He set up shop in an office at 10 South LaSalle Street and began building his business. For the first six years, Levine was a one-man operation with a receptionist, brokering nonferrous metals for the domestic and export markets. In 1979, he hired his first assistant, Maureen Cooper, who has been with him ever since.
In 1992, the company entered a new phase when Levine’s son, Matt, joined the family firm. Matt, who now serves as vice president, brought with him a sophisticated knowledge of hedging, Comex transactions, and other up-to-date trading techniques. Matt’s knowledge, gained in part from working as a floor trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, enabled the company to expand beyond its brokerage activities to also include trading services.
Thanks to the combined efforts of father and son, Leonard Levine Metals continues to thrive to this day. While Levine is still very much involved in the business, he points to Matt’s growing role as an example of a larger trend in the scrap industry. As he notes, “there’s new blood in the industry as younger and more technically trained men enter the industry to take over their parents’ businesses.”
Past Changes, Future Promise
When Levine looks at the copper scrap market today, he finds it worlds removed from when he first joined IMM. The refineries that used to be the major purchasers of copper scrap—Anaconda, Kennecott, American Metal Climax, Phelps Dodge, and others—found it too costly to invest in environmental equipment when the U.S. EPA imposed stricter regulations. So they just stopped buying copper scrap. Most of those refineries are gone, and the few that are left are not scrap users.
There also used to be about 50 or 60 brass and bronze ingotmakers competing for scrap and glutting the market with finished ingot, Levine recalls. They managed to knock each other out to the point where, today, there are fewer than a dozen ingotmakers in North America. So where does copper scrap find a home? The answer, says Levine, is export.
When he entered the business, export consumers were mainly in Europe, though Japan loomed on the horizon as a big Asian buyer of copper scrap. That has all changed. Today, the main consuming countries are China, South Korea, and Taiwan. “Without the Asians,” Levine asserts, “it would be a dead market.” And yes, he says, his company is involved in the export business, recently shipping about 15 containers a week.
As for the future of copper scrap, Levine has only bullish predictions. “There are just not enough natural resources in the world to satisfy the requirements of global consumers,” he says. “The way I see it, there will continue to be demand for copper scrap, and there may be insistent pressure for the material at times.”
Banking on Trust
With almost six decades in the scrap business, you can bet that Levine has amassed a sizable vault of memories. Recounting one such memory, he offers: “Once, IMM bought a load of ingots from Japan, and Harry Turkel and I went to inspect them when they arrived. They were in a pyramid pile, and Harry began to climb the pile. Suddenly, there was an avalanche as the ingots came crashing down. Some of them broke open, revealing that the seller had carefully implanted a railroad spike in every ingot to bolster the weight.”
He also remembers that sometime in the 1950s, the Internal Revenue Service announced that company executives would have to prove they did business at an industry convention if they wanted to deduct the expenses. “Well, for two weeks before a convention, no one wanted to sell a cent’s worth of copper—they all wanted to hold their material for the convention,” Levine recalls. “A couple of us went to the hotel on the first day of the convention and stood in the lobby with pencil and pad, as dealers lined up to take our orders for No. 2 copper. It was hilarious.” Industry conventions today are different, he says, summing them up as less social and more focused on business.
Levine certainly knows about industry conventions and chapter meetings. Throughout his career, he was an active participant in the National Association of Recycling Industries (NARI) and its predecessor organizations, variously named the National Association of Waste Material Dealers (NAWMD) and, later, the National Association of Secondary Material Industries (NASMI). Levine served on many committees (including the national planning committee and the public relations committee), became chairman of NASMI’s Midwestern Division, and was a member of the association’s national board of directors.
After the NARI merger with the Institute of Scrap Iron and Steel to form ISRI, Leonard Levine Metals continued to be a supportive association member (though Matt assumed most of the active involvement in ReMA activities). Today, Levine sees ISRI’s role in the scrap industry “as a very important one in bringing industry members together, getting them to discuss challenging developments such as environmental matters, and representing the industry in Washington at congressional hearings.” Also, he adds, ReMA meetings are an invaluable “sounding board for the ongoing economy of the scrap industry.”
In his association involvement and his day-to-day work, Levine met many remarkable personalities who ended up being mentors, friends, or both. In addition to Harry Turkel—who always tops his list—Levine says that IMM’s Vice President Theodore Gruen, who served as president of NASMI from 1962-1964, helped instruct him in the basics of the scrap industry.
Levine also tells how, when he became a scrap buyer for IMM, his first meeting with a scrap dealer turned into a lasting friendship. When Seymour Levin of Levin Brothers (Burlington, N.C.), a young man just back from World War II military service, visited the IMM office, he was paired with Levine at lunch. As Matt observes, “They are still fast friends and can’t agree 50 years later who paid for the corned beef sandwiches at that lunch.”
Levine also mentions Ed Pins of of Silverstein & Pinsof, Harry Marley of Marley’s, and Dan Roblin of Buffalo House Wrecking as individuals who began as business contacts but who ended up as long-term friends.
These scrap recollections also lead Levine to tell how he met his wife, Gloria, through scrap sources. In 1951, he was attending his first association convention at the Hilton in Chicago. There, he met a man who was friendly with the Horns, a Long Island family that had one daughter—Gloria. It didn’t take long, says Levine, to convince him to call her. A telephone call, a meeting, a romance, a wedding—and 52 years later they’re still happily married.
In addition to their two children—Matt and Margie, who lives in Miami—the Levines have four grandchildren. At 75, the slim, buoyant, and young-looking Leonard Levine barely looks the part of a grandfather, though he insists that his active, youthful days are behind him. “I don’t play tennis anymore,” he says, recollecting those tournaments when he pounded the ball with Harry Turkel and Emanuel Spitzer, another IMM employee. As for attendance at industry meetings, “I go infrequently,” he says. “Matt knows most of the people at those gatherings, they are people of his age, so it’s logical for him to go.” Levine is still culturally active, however—he and Gloria can be found often at the famous Lyric Opera in Chicago.
Looking back over a lifetime in the copper scrap niche, Levine observes that the industry is based on a high level of trust. That’s not to say his trust hasn’t been tested along the way. Once, he says, the rug was pulled out from under him by a client that went bankrupt. That incident, which occurred only seven months after he’d started his own company, cost him $750,000, he says. Industry veteran that he is, he got up before the count of 10, paid back what he owed, and went on to develop a highly successful business.
Despite such bad experiences, Levine says his philosophy is that “the people in this industry keep their word. Every item bought or sold over the telephone goes into effect without a signed order. In the 58 years I’ve been in business, I’ve had excellent relationships with companies, and only once or twice was there a big headache. That should tell you something.”
Indeed. One or two big headaches in 58 years is a track record to be admired, just like the man behind it.
Si Wakesberg is New York bureau chief for Scrap.
Leonard Levine’s modest nature belies the sizable reputation he has earned in the copper business in his 58-year career.