When I read the headline I thought it meant stolen post-purchase. When I lived in Chicago in the '90s I heard stories (never validated) that contractors would show up at the Maxwell Street Market on the weekend to re-purchase the tools that were stolen from their jobsites during the week. I can validate there were a lot of really, really used power tools for sale there.
It wasn't quite that bad; but yeah there were some places in the Chicago area where you could go and be likely to find anything you'd come up missing. It was cool to see what was "OK" for those markets and what they wouldn't buy and sell; police mobile radios should've been a lot more valuable than that.
Even in the mid 2010s I saw some questionable power tools at Maxwell Street Market that "fell off a truck". I have a specific memory of a hammer drill that had splatters of very-fresh cement on it.
