Until two weeks ago, Joseph Romito, a history buff, was not a person who trolled the Internet for artifacts related to the statesman John C. Calhoun, a 19th-century vice president.

But on Jan. 17, he happened to type the name into a search field on eBay, saw a listing for an obscure handwritten letter signed by Calhoun in 1823, and recalled having seen it somewhere else.

What’s more, he had enough knowledge of Calhouniana to turn to his own 25-volume collection of Calhoun’s correspondence to verify his hunch.

Mr. Romito’s index to the Calhoun volumes listed the letter as the property of the New York State Library. He alerted the library, and was told that the matter was being looked into.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Mr. Romito said. So he bid on the item himself. “I knew I wasn’t going to end up buying it — I wasn’t going to pay for it — but I put in what I thought was a very high bid to try and keep it from going somewhere else. The government can be slow.”

Mr. Romito’s discovery led quickly to a state investigation, and on Monday resulted in charges being filed against the would-be seller, Daniel D. Lorello. Mr. Lorello, 54, has worked at the New York State Archives in Albany for 29 years. The state attorney general’s office has charged him with several criminal counts, including grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property, and scheming to defraud.

In a handwritten confession that the authorities obtained from Mr. Lorello on Thursday, he said he had been illegally selling rare books and documents from the state’s collections since 2002. His thefts intensified last year, he wrote, “because my daughter, Maria, unexpectedly ran up a $10,000 credit card bill.”

“I estimate that I’ve taken more than 300 or 400 items in 2007 alone,” Mr. Lorello wrote. The attorney general’s office said he sold them on eBay and at collectors’ trade shows. Robin L. Baker, a deputy attorney general, said at a news conference that investigators had discovered “more than a dozen boxes of stolen items” at Mr. Lorello’s home in Rensselaer. She said they were believed to form the majority of the stolen documents.

The government said that Mr. Lorello was an archives and records specialist at the State Archives.

Among the most valuable items he sold was a “Davy Crockett’s Almanack,” which went for $3,350.

Mr. Romito, whom Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo called “the hero in this case,” is a lawyer in Richmond, Va., specializing in litigation and estate planning. He earned a master’s degree in history at the University of Illinois, focusing on the Middle Ages, he said during an interview, “but I’m also interested in American history, Southern history, and Calhoun in particular.”

The eBay letter, dated Nov. 9, 1823, is addressed to a Colonel Haine, who Mr. Romito figured out was Charles Haine, a personal secretary to DeWitt Clinton, a two-term governor of New York. Over the course of four rather vague pages heavy with insider-speak, Calhoun, Mr. Romito deduced, is asking Haine to drum up support for him in New York should he decide to run for president against John Quincy Adams. “Mr. Adams will fall without a blow,” he predicts. (A year later, Calhoun was elected vice president.)

The listing on eBay, by a seller who identified himself as lld1863, described the document as “a super letter with excellent content and one that would make a great addition to any 19th-century American political autograph collection.” He noted, “There are the usual mailing folds present as well as overall age toning and minor foxing.”

Last Tuesday, the day the auction was to end, bidding for the letter stood at $274 before Mr. Romito took matters in his own hands and indicated that he was willing to go as high as $1,777.77, should a bidding war break out.

At 8:55 p.m., with five minutes to go, a member of the attorney general’s office took up Mr. Romito’s tactics and began bidding for the item — only to be automatically outbid by Mr. Romito. Finally, a bid of $1,802.77 stuck, and the government was declared the winner.

A listing page on eBay shows that without the bids of Mr. Romito and the government, the highest offer was $795, by a bidder presumably unaware of the document’s complicated provenance.

Two days later, the seller gave his confession.

Mr. Lorello wrote that on the last day of the auction, he realized that state archivists were aware of the fraudulent listing, and he began to sense that he was being outfoxed. “I first became nervous after a conversation with Kathleen Roe, my boss’s boss. She asked me if I knew who ‘LLD’ on eBay was. I knew that it was me.”

Mr. Cuomo said that the government was continuing to piece together the value of everything that Mr. Lorello had stolen. Mr. Lorello noted in his confession that most of what he stole was not particularly valuable (some of his items sold for as little as $10). Most of the artifacts were known among dealers as trash, he wrote, although he used a trashier word than trash.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/nyregion/29library.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin

Too funny: a Virginia lawyer, studying the father of State's Rights from South Carolina, busts a New Yorker ripping off the state, right under his bosses' noses

Fact is stranger than fiction.

__________________
1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

I love it when insiders get busted.

Someday I'll tell among ye of the Great Nassau County Museum Hoax,fascinating story that.............

I remember somebody getting caught a few years ago for cutting old maps and illustrations out of books in the Library of Congress. I'm glad somebody caught the guy.

__________________
" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

OBK #55

1998 Lincoln Continental - Sold
Max 1984 300TD 285,000 miles - Sold
The Dee8gonator 1987 560SEC 196,000 miles - Sold
Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
2016 AMG GTS 12,000 miles

Oh please tell us now.

I was at the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in (was it...) 1994 a week after all the Rembrants were stolen during the Titian exhibit. I think I posted a link here of the story of how they were found over ten years later (what, all but two of 16?). I was fascinated.

Happens all the time with natural history prints cut from old books. Also maps. You've probably seen them framed stylishly in somebody's home. Maybe even yours or your Mom's.

Most of them are legit but a growing number are not. And there is only a finite number of antique prints.

B

Ok,Ok,but DON'T ask me how I know!!

http://msn-list.te.verweg.com/2005-March/003300.html

I remember having a customer who worked in a lab that made prints for the library of Congress from their original negatives. He worked there as a teenage and into his twenties. Every job he did, he made dupes of every negative. One day he started a business of selling old photographs and sports memorablilia. He ended up with a whole chain of these stores in malls. He wasn't exactly stealing, but I always suspected he didn't really have permission to do it either.

__________________
" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

OBK #55

1998 Lincoln Continental - Sold
Max 1984 300TD 285,000 miles - Sold
The Dee8gonator 1987 560SEC 196,000 miles - Sold
Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
2016 AMG GTS 12,000 miles

It just goes to show that obsession with obscure 19th century vice presidents can eventually pay off.

As a general rule, any government record can be duplicated ad nauseam. You already paid for it.

Photography is a record.

A Night is the Museum was loosely based on the story of a friends of mines life, we did donuts in a die cast 1967 Mustang Fastback.

Yip

Funny that the theories behind a lot of the bumper-sticker political comments you make here originated with this obscure 19th century vice president.

Right down to hating the president and wanting to impeach him.....