Dubuque Man Sentenced to Two Years for Stealing Brass Ingot
Dennis Lee Maas, 54, of Dubuque, Iowa, was sentenced on August 21, 2026, to 24 months in federal prison for interstate transportation of stolen goods, announced on August 25, 2026.
2 reports on this incident · first at Aug 25, 2026, 4:51 p.m. ET
This case is not concluded. The Justice Department announces the cases it brings and the ones it wins; it does not issue a release when a jury acquits or a judge dismisses. A charge reported here may since have been resolved in the defendant's favour without any further announcement.
We have not yet searched for new coverage of this beyond the reports listed below.
Earlier reports
Aug 25, 2026, 4:51 p.m. ETFirst report
Dubuque Man Sentenced to Federal Prison for Stealing Brass Ingot
A Dubuque, Iowa, man was sentenced on August 21, 2026, to two years in federal prison for stealing pallets of brass ingot from his employer, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Iowa. The sentencing was announced on August 25, 2026.
Dennis Lee Maas, 54, pleaded guilty on March 20, 2026, to one count of interstate transportation of stolen goods. Court records show that Maas, who worked as a janitor at a manufacturing company in Dubuque, stole pallets of brass ingot from November 2024 through September 2025 and sold them to a metals business in East Dubuque, Illinois, for scrap. The total value of the stolen brass was more than $64,000.
Chief Judge C.J. Williams of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa sentenced Maas to 24 months in prison, ordered him to pay $43,845.16 in restitution, and imposed a three-year term of supervised release. Maas is in U.S. Marshal's custody pending transfer to a federal prison. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyndra Lundquist and investigated by the Dubuque Police Department.
Was this report accurate and useful?
Sources
Revision history
- Version 125 Aug 2026, 20:52current
First published.
- Version 125 Aug 2026, 20:51current
First published.
How we work
This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.
Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.
Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.
None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.