(Even though it's dainty enough to cook hush puppies in, it's an environmental contaminant. In fact, people who do bird rescue at oil spills say it's easier to wash fuel oil off a seabird than it is to wash vegetable oil off, and vegetable oil does more damage to the feathers. Don't get me started on the Great Wisconsin Butter Spill.)

Used grease is stored in a container, often outside the restaurant. Fifty-five-gallon drums are used in some places. More specialized containers look like small elongated dumpsters. Periodically people come to take the grease away. If they're from a medium-size or large rendering company, they pump it into a tanker truck. "It's a pretty interesting vehicle," says Rick Geise, director of marketing for Griffin Industries. Its customized trucks have hydraulic lifts that grab the grease containers, heave them over the top of the trailer and dump them into a holding compartment. "Then there's a hose system in the back so that we can hose off the container."

A small-time operator, on the other hand, might have what Geise describes as "a cheap little system with barrels."

Companies like Griffin have contracts with restaurants to come around regularly and pick up their grease. From Griffin's point of view, the grease is theirs the minute it enters the container. Others have taken the view that the grease is trash, that the grease is abandoned property, that anybody can take it away.

The fact that most small grease transactions are paid for in cash and may involve oral contracts, and the fact that it's dirty work not everyone wants to do, are attractive features for some entrepreneurs, including immigrants.

The grease collector, large or small, takes the grease away and renders it: It is heated to drive out water and filtered to remove what Geise calls "impurities -- papers or fries or any other sediment."

A rendering plant smells dreadful, not because of the lovely wholesome grease but because of the water and organic material that lie underneath the oil and rot. After the first time Jaworski, the grease lawyer, had grease case clients come to his office, he made them put covers on their shoes. "This stuff is rancid," says Jaworski. "The stuff reeks."

The part that doesn't reek, the yellow grease, is ready for sale. It is sold by the truckload, typically 44,000 pounds of grease per truck.

To learn today's yellow grease price, grease purveyors can consult the Chicago Yellow Sheet, a subscription-only publication that tracks the commodities business. Its commodity summary, viewable by nonsubscribers, repays inspection with hard-to-find news like "Loose eggs are adequate for current needs ... Cutlets continue to be mixed with some sources finding them difficult to place while others are well cleared ... Whole birds and wogs are about steady ... Toms are balanced ... Hams and bellies remain readily available and urged for sale."

Bill Warner, byproduct reporter for the Yellow Sheet, explains that while yellow grease goes into the manufacture of soap, makeup, clothing, rubber and detergents, its principal use is as a livestock feed additive. It makes the feed less dusty, which is more pleasant for the livestock, and causes less wear and tear on milling machinery. It's more palatable to the animals: "They like the grease the same as we do," says Warner. It helps the animals absorb fat-soluble vitamins. And, of course, it's a dense source of energy, which is important for animals like cattle and horses that have a hard time eating any more than they already do.

The principal competition for yellow grease is vegetable oil straight from the mills. As the price of soy oil goes up, the price of yellow grease goes up. And as soy oil goes down, so slithers yellow grease. And since people tend to steal stuff that has value, I fear that the deeper soy oil prices plunge, the harder it will be to find a thriving grease underworld.

(There are other forms of grease for sale, like brown grease or trap grease. Brown grease might come off the grill at a burger place, and is more meat-derived than yellow grease, but there's less of it and it's not as valuable as yellow grease. "We don't see many [grease] bandits on the trap sites," says Geise.)

Yellow grease, the object of my cupidity, is more valuable than brown grease, but just how valuable is yellow grease? (Yes, I know what you're thinking: "Holy hell! How much can I get for this stuff?") When I called Warner in October, the news was not good: Those big tanker truckloads were bringing a mere $7 a hundredweight ($7/cwt), or 7 cents a pound. (He was quoting me a Midwest price, he said, say around the Omaha River.) At that rate one of those 44,000-pound loads would bring just $3,080, hardly worth the stealing. And the 11,350 pounds of grease at stake in the 1998 case would bring $794.50.

In that case it was alleged that Griffin Industries was losing $10,000 a week to grease thieves in Texas alone. It was losing 142,857 pounds of grease? Wait -- when that case was tried, grease was going for 14 to 18 cents a pound. At that price they'd only have to be losing 55,556 pounds a week to grease larceny. (In 1996 yellow grease commanded a lordly 20 cents a pound.)

Warner said he'd heard some stories about grease theft, stories in which "people acting like they're scheduled to do grease pickups just ease in" and steal grease, stories from grease's glory days.

I liked the way the Bexar County District Attorney's Office put it: Grease theft, it said, was a multimillion-dollar fraud nationwide. Do the math, and keep it conservative: Just $2 million worth of grease at 18 cents a pound means 11,111,111 pounds of stolen grease. That's over 10 MILLION POUNDS OF STOLEN GREASE HURTLING DOWN OUR NATION'S HIGHWAYS!

But since then there's been a steady downward trend, especially with Malaysian palm oils entering the market. (I told you this was an international crime scene.) The only ray of hope for grease prices Warner mentioned was the advent of cold weather. In the cold the stock needs more calories, and so "we'll see a lot more interest in it as the weather gets cooler." (I will have to watch the futures market as I plan my big strike.)

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