The Red Crow flies at dawn

From the Newtown Pentacle:

One of the rules of dumpster diving in the City of Greater New York dictates that mattresses are not a desirable item and are in fact avoided like lepers. If its on the street, there’s either an infestation or somebody died on it, and Bedbugs can jump like Fleas. Essentially valueless as a manufactured good, the general custom is for the merchant that sold and delivered your bedding is to remove and dispose of the old mattress- often at no cost. Nobody really wants a used mattress. What, then, would motivate this incongruously well dressed Crow into such an odd pursuit?

Steel springs, the coil structure within the bedding, are highly prized items for recycling. The reason that its not economical for a commercial enterprise to do so is the cost of removing the deeply embedded metal from its surrounding padding and removal of the metals using electromagnetics. Mattress merchants factor the cost of this process into every new bed sold, by statute in some places.

Somewhere, whether it be in the backyard of an isolated house in Flushing or an empty lot along the Newtown Creek in Greenpoint or East Williamsburg, the steel springs will be freed and the charred padding discarded. Elsewhere, plastic insulation will be melted off copper wire and tires will be melted open to reveal their internal steel belting. The Crows will clean up after themselves and no one will be the wiser for the extra tax free bucks that they pick up off the streets.