Stealing Superman: Episode Three – The Collector

Nicolas Cage’s copy of Action Comics #1 wasn’t the only one stolen. Another was taken just weeks prior to the Cage theft — from the safe of a billionaire. Was it a coincidence, or a rehearsal?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
You know how this story started. A New Year's Eve
party at Nicholas Cage's house in late nine d perfect
cover for someone to run off with cages copies of
Action Comics Number one and Detective Comics Number twenty seven,
two of the most valuable comics in existence, a theft

(00:31):
that would ultimately have value in the millions. It was
the Stewart Isabella Gardner heist of the comic book world.
That's the infamous Boston theft of priceless art works back
in nine You can probably find a lot of podcasts
about it. You know what would be strange, though, if
you took a famous art heist like the Gardener Museum

(00:53):
or the Mona Lisa theft, and somehow found that someone
somewhere had done something almost exactly like the robbery, right
down to the modus operandi, and did it just weeks
before the more well known heist, like it was some
kind of criminal dress rehearsal, and the parallels were so eerie,

(01:15):
so puzzling, that you'd almost have to think the two
had to be related. Example, what if someone told you
that just before someone stole Nicholas Cage's copy of Action
number one from his bel Air home. Someone took another
copy of Action number one from the home of another

(01:35):
collector in Connecticut, and did it just after the person
had a party with dozens of guests at their palatial
residence that was known to have lack of security measures
and that there were no shortage of suspects, from his
house staff, to his guests, to his two house sitters.

(01:56):
How could two copies of the same priceless comic be
stolen thousands of miles apart at practically the same time,
the only two recorded times anyone has ever been audacious
and brazen enough to steal Superman's first appearance. I know
I'm asking a lot of rhetorical questions, and what I'm

(02:19):
about to tell you isn't exactly like the Cage case.
For one thing, it took place on the East Coast.
For another, the collector wasn't a famous millionaire. He's a
famous billionaire. For I Heart Radio, this is Stealing Superman.

(02:45):
I'm your host, Danis Schwartz, and this is episode three.
The collector. Drive about an hour northeast of New York City,

(03:07):
and you'll find yourself in Westport, Connecticut, a bedroom community
for city workers looking for a little quiet. It's safe, peaceful, friendly,
and home to a lot of wealth. Up until his
death in two thousand eight, you might have caught sight
of the actor Paul Newman, who was a resident for decades.

(03:28):
Martha Stewart used to live here too. This is where
a woman named Anne found herself in late ninety nine nine.
Anne was a student at the time, in her early
twenties and dating a man named Jeff. Jeff taught tennis
at the local recreation center, and like most couples in

(03:49):
early adulthood, money was a little tight. Then Jeff heard
about an opportunity. Someone in the area needed a house
sitter and maybe there could be a trade tennis lessons
in exchange for free rent. Yeah, Jeff was always open
and tells things and looking for a commodations or something,

(04:11):
and said, Hey, looking for someone that's there during the
week to watch his house. I guess, And that's how
we got to live in his house. That's Anne, and
the house she's referring to belonged to one of Westport's
wealthy residents, and and Jeff were intrigued by the idea
of becoming house sitters, but a better term may have

(04:32):
been mansion sitters. The owner who had invited Anne and
Jeff to house it worked in the finance world and
knew how to navigate it, so much so that later
on he'd take on ownership of a professional sports team.
Let's talk about his vacation home. There was a tennis court,

(04:53):
eight bathrooms, stone walls, a gate. It was a palace
fit for a king, and he needed someone to watch
it while he was off making gobs of money. Well,
you know where I'm from. I don't know that it
was for him. Yes, their main resident was in Manhattan,

(05:13):
and then they would come on the weekends that the
family mainly just the kids and him, and spend the
weekends there or vacation there. Yes, it's a mansion, so
it's a huge house. We didn't need to live in
the main house. We lived in a side house, separate house.
You imagine like a castle looking like it was all

(05:34):
made out of stone. House and then their kitchen would
connect like a walk away to the house to what
we had at a house into like a little living
area with the kitchen, and an upstairs for us was
our bedroom. Will be respectful of his privacy and call
him the collector. The collector's home in Westport was cavernous

(06:00):
and reportedly filled with memorabilia of all kinds, from sports
cards and jerseys to autographs to comic books, especially comic books.
The collector had grown up idolizing Superman and Batman, their adventures,
their code of honor, their exemplar modern mythology. When he

(06:22):
was just a kid and worked at the local pharmacy,
he was paid in Superman comics, a weird way of
his employers skirting child labor laws, but the collector didn't mind.
It instilled in him a lifelong love of the character.
He had a lot of comics, but only two were
kept under wraps, Action number one and Batman Number One.

(06:46):
That comic isn't actually the first appearance of the Dark Night,
but it's his first solo title, and it's perhaps the
third most desirable comic in the world. It's the first
time anyone ever glimpsed the joke Er and Catwoman. The

(07:06):
collector had just moved the comics from his home in
Manhattan over the summer. Both of those comics were kept
in protective cases to ward off fingerprints, dust, body oil,
anything that could corrupt their excellent condition. The Action number
one was valued around two hundred thousand dollars, while the

(07:28):
Batman could fetch hundred thousand dollars. If it were a
stack of money, it would take up an entire Duffel bag.
But these comics were just a quarter inch thick at most,
and like Cage, the collector had bought them from dealer
Stephen Fishler and Metropolis Collectibles. Here's Stephen, I'm gonna go

(07:49):
through my memory banks so that you're mentioning it. I
remember like, oh, you gotta be kidding, not again. What
was interesting about this is that Fishler sold both copies,
one to the collector and one to Cage, around the
same time, and both were virtually in the same, very
fine condition. The books were like doppelgangers. Well, I had

(08:13):
sold a tim for a hundred fifty thousand, and in
fact I sold two copies within thirty days of each
other for a hundred fifty each, and they were very
similar to each other. So in ninety I had two
copies and they sold for exactly the same price, very
close together. Time wise, if the collector was a little

(08:34):
cavalier about the other collectibles in his home, he was
downright militant about these two comics. He kept both in
a Century Safe Model six. It's about the size of
a dorm room refrigerator with a numbered keypad. This isn't
national security level stuff, but it should dissuade most people

(08:56):
from trying to get inside. Jeff and Anne were not collectors.
They were sort of well oblivious to all of it. Now,
not really, I mean at that time, howell was I
have no, We're just like dumb kids. We were happy
where we were and happy that we could live there
for free, and just now not even researched it or

(09:18):
even like, oh, how much are they worth or whatever?
I never thought of that. Oh comic books, okay, frame
and put them up for I don't know, well, framing
comics hadn't turned out too well for cage. But anyway, besides,
Jeff and Anne weren't usually in the house. They were
staying in a guest area that was connected to the

(09:41):
house but relatively separate. This was a pretty good arrangement.
The collector allowed them to live there to keep an
eye on things, make it seem like the house was inhabited.
On weekends, the collector would come in from the city
by himself or with his family, and then off he'd go.
It was really an ideal situation, except well, except for

(10:05):
a couple of things, like the fact Anne and Jeff
weren't the only people there. And to know that there
are too many people around. I don't know. I mean,
at one point Jeff even thought the driver comes in.
We didn't know when someone would come, someone would drop
off some of someone. These people are just coming and going.

(10:26):
There are always different people, and they don't introduce themselves.
They just come in and they're just of a sudden,
stand right next to you and you're in their house.
Despite his memorabilia and his other possessions, the collector didn't
seem overly concerned with security. Maybe it was the presence
of Jeff and Anne to human guard dogs, who might

(10:46):
ward off any theft by their mere presence alone, but
even patrol officers in the area would notice how the
collector didn't seem to mind leaving doors unlocked and giving
people plenty of acts us. Hey, it's Westport. The property
crime rate is almost half the national average. The collector

(11:07):
had a housekeeper named Linda, who came in multiple times
a week to clean. Linda had been working for the
collector for years and was trusted implicitly well by the collector. Anyway,
when she was there, we state on our side. When
I was even there, I went to school, Jeff went
to work, so I don't know when she was there,

(11:28):
I would say hi, and that was Then there was Rodney,
the collector's driver. Rodney was around even when his boss
wasn't dropping things off and picking them up. He had
a key to the house, just like Linda did. Yes,
there were multiple drivers. They would pick up different cars,

(11:49):
drop off different cars, just come and hang out in
the house. I guess, so did a guy named Joe,
a contractor. The collector had some home improved projects going on,
so Jeff and Ann would sometimes see Joe and his
workers around. And so things went on like this for
a few months, Jeff and Ann living beyond their means,

(12:11):
but in kind of a cool way. And then, because
there's always and and then and opened a drawer one
day to find something very unusual. A few weeks prior,
Jeff had given her a gift, which she kept in
a jewelry box inside of the dresser in her bedroom.
As she reached for it, she realized something was wrong.

(12:36):
Jeff had given me some diamond ear rings, and those
diamond ear rings, the piece on the back of the
stut was through on, so when I was putting them on,
they just clicked in and I was like, now something's wrong.
There was something different about the diamond gold earrings. Anne

(12:56):
couldn't quite put her finger on it until she put
her finger on it. So I looked at him and
I could tell that there were struns, and I was like,
those are not my ear rings. And then I looked closer.
That didn't have any stamp, you know, like how they
have a stamp in it that they're real and nothing.
And then I called him and I said, something that

(13:18):
doesn't seem right. Someone had gotten into Anne's rare and
replaced the earrings with fakes. That would mean someone had
been looking in the drawer, found them, and made the
very deliberate choice of returning with a fake pair to
try to keep the theft undetected. It was planned. I mean,

(13:40):
you can say someone looked already through everything beforehand to
see what we have. Anne immediately told the collector about
what had happened. After all, a theft had taken place
in his home, but his reaction seemed a bit muted.
He was like well, we'll take a look at it.
I mean him, that's minor. I'm sure so. And then

(14:02):
I think they're just talked Jeff and him to locate
where it was. I mean, I don't know. It was
strange to me at that time, and now it's even
stranger because who comes in our room and steals that
tiny of something knowing that I'm wearing I have. About
two weeks after Anne's earrings disappeared, the collector came back

(14:26):
to the house for the weekend, and that's when it
was his turn to notice something was very amiss. The
collectors safe was kept in a bedroom closet. At the time.
It contained the comics, about five dollars in cash, and
an expensive Cardier watch. He noticed someone had tossed some

(14:47):
clothes on top of the safe. When he pulled the
clothes away, he saw that the safe had clearly been
pride open. There was no elegant safe cracking here. It
was brute force, and when he opened the bent, twisted door,
he found his Cardier watch, but the five hundred dollars

(15:09):
was gone, and so was the action number one, and
so was the Batman number one. The Westport police would
soon be on the case, But unlike in Los Angeles,
there was no dedicated art detective, nor was Westport some
massive metropolis. If the Collector and Cage were ever to

(15:31):
get their comics back, they'd need some kind of specialist.
Do you mean the forensic comic cologist. The action number
one's taken from the homes of the Collector and Cage
are by far the two most significant comic book heists

(15:55):
in the history of the hobby. They're practically mirror images
of one another in much the same way Bizarro is
a mirror image of Superman, only a little off, a
little different. You know, Bizarro, he's Superman's opposite, wielder of
broken syntax and calling himself Kent Clark. Instead of an

(16:18):
S on his chest, there's a bee or later a
reverse U S. There was an episode of Seinfeld where
Jerry met a Bizarro version of his friends. The Collector's
heist was kind of like that, a Bizarro theft, or
maybe Cages was the Bizarro version, But there was one
major component both crimes had in common. Police departments are

(16:43):
usually ill equipped to investigate these sort of thefts. Remember,
there are hardly even a handful of our thief detectives
in the world, let alone comic book detectives. But there
is one person, maybe the only one in the world,
is uniquely qualified to talk about these kinds of heists.

(17:04):
My name is Jamie Newbold, live in San Diego. All
my life. I own Southern California Comics. It's a business
that's been in effect now since the late nineties. Several
years before that, I retired from the San Diego Police Department.
I had done twenty years there. Jamie, by the way,
is talking to us just after hip surgery. I'm waiting

(17:28):
for this guy to come pull my stables. It's unusual
to find a comic bookstore owner and collector who also
happened to be a uniformed police officer. It's kind of
a genes plicing of law enforcement knowledge and the insider
perspective you can only get when you've grown up reading comics.

(17:50):
And while Cage and the collector may have been shocked
that someone came for their books, Jamie has seen it before.
In fact, he worked a stolen comic case back when
he was a cop. The books were all kept in
America Comics, which debuted before the US entered World War Two.
The very first appearance of the patriotic hero who was

(18:12):
injected with super steroids sorry super Soldier serum and fought
for the American way. If you've got the first issue
in your attic or around the house, tried to dust
it off. It's worth over three million dollars in excellent condition.
This gentleman, his name is Ray, lived in the Beach area,
San Diego, and his job takes him out of town.

(18:36):
Frequently leaves his home no one's there. He had a
collection of Golden Age Captain America's he was quite proud of,
and they were missing one day. Now he can't explain
who or how. He just knows they were gone. I
was detailed to take the police report, and I'm like
the only comic book guy on the department at the time,

(18:57):
so I was able to give him some feelers and
what I would do if I were him. Fortunately everything
fell into place. I told him, I will get you
into con if you don't have a badge for comic Con.
This was years ago when you could still get badges
just off the street. Jamie is referring to the San
Diego Comic Con, the apex of comic book gatherings and

(19:19):
a place where it might be easier to pass along
a stolen comic. Jamie had a feeling that the thief
might head there to sell his Captain America's and well,
you go ahead and look around for those comics. I'll
be set up there. I always have a booth at con.
And if you're lucky enough and maybe somebody actually has
your books and selling them, come get me. We'll get

(19:41):
security and we'll go over and lock it down. Well
that's exactly what happened. So the gentleman had the books
was another one of these locals, like a Craigslist guy.
He would buy and sell through Craigslist. He lived in
a hangar at one of the local private county air fields,
so it's a really odd location. So the story was

(20:02):
that he had someone offered to sell him some books
through Crazy List, and he bought him when the guy
came out to the airfield and sold him to him.
This man had no idea that he was stealing was
stolen property, but I sensed that he should have. So
when we did, in fact lock the mooth down, security came.
It led not only to the recovery of all of

(20:23):
these expensive golden age Captain America's, but it led to
the suspect. The dealer had no choice but to give
it up to the police to stay out of trouble.
And here's something important to note. Possessing stolen property isn't
a crime as long as you didn't steal it or
admit you knew it was stolen. They hit your heart

(20:45):
on that when it's time to decide if you're a
thief or an innocent. If this old man had tripped
up and said something about he knew they were stolen,
but he didn't think he'd get caught, then he would
have been guilty. But he didn't know or said he
doesn't know, and there's no way to prove it, and
less the suspect confest. But that's low hanging fruit at

(21:06):
that point. Once you have the suspect of law enforcements
less interested in the guy defense the items, So that's
a problem. Even if your stuff is recovered and you
want justice, that's two different things. Getting him this one
thing justice is a complete other bugaboo. It's why art
theft can be so lucrative and so low risk. Imagine

(21:29):
swiping a comic than trying to sell it then being caught.
If you're smart. All you'd have to say is that
a third party sold it to you and gee, you
didn't know it was a hot item, sorry, officer. Combine
that with the skepticism facing comic collectors, and you have
the recipe for a near perfect crime. It's no wonder

(21:53):
thieves were tempted by the collector's comics and cages. When
it comes to collectors or mac shops having their books stolen,
Jamie doesn't think the law is acting as much of
a deterrent. In fact, his shop has been broken into
more than once, and even after handing over video and
other evidence to the district attorney, it's difficult for them

(22:16):
to act. So he came up with another solution, one
that probably would have solved Cage's problem. In our store,
we have a lot of expensive stuff. Now that I've
said that, my listeners are wondering if I'm an idiot. No.
The answer is if you come into the shop, all
you're gonna see her xerox printouts. Good stuff is stored elsewhere,

(22:39):
so we locked them in glass cases for appearance, but
they're nothing more than pieces of paper with a picture
on the Cage could have done something in his own home,
even to protect against ultra violet light. He could have
just made copies and frame them. They give him the
same thrill, and he knew he owned them. He didn't
have to showcase him. But that's just a difference between
what he's thinking and what I'm thinking. But in both

(23:03):
the Collector's case and Cages, the thief or thieves weren't
likely strangers. If he kept shifting that stuff around, then
those things were somewhere else in that wrong somebody knew
it well that would take a repeat have to be
somebody who had been there either more than once realized
there were more than these books on the wall that

(23:24):
meant the rest of them, or someplace else, or somebody
who had taken a tour of the room and had
seen other stuff, which would make it more grizzly for
Nick Cage, because then it was somebody worthy of his
time and friendship to do that only be ripped off.
These are the things, though, that a private investigator who
would have brought pain to Nicholas, because he would have

(23:45):
made him think deeply about people close to him until
the detective finally found a change in the armor. It's
just the way it works. I don't know if cage
if he hadn't hired a private investigator. Maybe he was
satisfied with the assurance, or maybe he just didn't want
anyone digging into his life, including people looking for the thieves,

(24:06):
because maybe he knew him in a different way. In fact,
he thinks it's far easier to traffic and stolen books
than you'd ever think. Possible. Problem is encouraged by the
fact that comics are so liquid they can be stolen
and sold to the next door down the block. The
back issue market is rife with people who are forced

(24:27):
feeding the public stolen books. Dealers have a cage problem
every time they put books out for sale, especially at
comic conventions, so that if you're a pair of thieves
and there's one person working at a booth, all those
booths have wall displays, one of the two will ask

(24:47):
the person in the booth to turn around and get
a price tag off that book at the top for him,
because he can't see it from where he's standing in
that moment, either that person is stealing or another us
and next to him, who was in that person's blind
spot as well as stealing. This happens all the time.
The other tell is a comic con. For instance, they

(25:08):
hand out these massive tote bags and they hang on
straps over your shoulder so that the opening of the
bag is about wigs tight, and they'll use the same dodge.
They'll get your attention, and then they'll have you distracted,
and then they'll simply scoop stuff off your table into
one of those conveniently placed bags and move on their way.

(25:32):
The stores the problems theft. Graded books are the choice
plumb because the public is willing to pay more for
a graded book, knowing that they'll pay close to retail.
The thieves target those raw comics are a harder sale
because so many stores don't know how to grade, they

(25:54):
don't know what the books are worth, and they're reluctant
to pay in your wheel money. And it's unbelievable, it's
just it's just stamick. And I can't explain the organization
behind this, but there certainly seems to be some sort
of common knowledge, if not a greater connection. And these
are all problems. These are the tells. Tells are the locations,

(26:15):
The hands are the demons, tools, and the inability for
comic bookstores to play policemen or to be trained to
do this is inevitable or not supposed to be. Cops
were just retailers, but there's still a difference between unloading
a valuable comic and getting someone interested in an action

(26:38):
number one, and it's possible that both the collector and
cage thieves realized just how hard it was going to
be only after they had the goods. The collector was
in a big hurry to get back to new work.

(27:00):
He brought the safe downstairs and left it in the kitchen.
It was upsetting, but he really didn't have the time
to deal with it, not right then. Jeff and Anne
didn't even know the collector had a safe when I
had no idea he was a collector. He had things
like that. It was obvious that whoever had taken the
earrings had also helped themselves to the comics, but the

(27:23):
party had muddied the waters. Had it been a guest
or had one of the collector's many helpers used the
party as a cover to confuse detectives. There were no
signs of forced entry, so whoever the culprit was, they
didn't need to break a window or shimmy a doorlock
to get access, and that narrowed things down. A few

(27:51):
days later in November, the collector finally phoned the Westport
Police Department and explained what had happened. That his two
rare comics had been stolen, oh and and earrings too.
But even though Anne's property had been swiped, she and
Jeff were in an awkward position. They were the full
time occupants of the property with access to the entire house,

(28:15):
so detectives sympathized with and missing jewelry, but they also
had to question both of them. The problem was the
collector had shown Jeff and Anne the bedroom, which they
never usually went into, to explain what had happened. This
turned out to be slightly unsettling for Anne. I just

(28:36):
remember it showed us everything, and then in the end
it was like, well, police is going to come and
check everything. And then Jeff and I were like, well,
we touched everything, and I think that was another reason
why we were not staying investigative, but asked as well, yes,
they talked to me, and then I remember Jeff wasn't there,

(28:56):
so they just talked to me and they told me
that fingerprints it found my fingerprints up there, and then
I had to just tell them, Well, yeah, because we
all went up to look at it, and then yeah,
you open things and you lean against stuff. I was like,
I've never seen this room before. I've never was up
there before. Detectives took away the Century Safe Model sixteen

(29:20):
ten and photographed the closet area. Then they put out
a kind of a c B or All Comics bulletin
asking comic shops in the area to be on the
lookout for the missing titles. And then they began looking
more closely at the cast of the collector's vacation home.
That left Linda the housekeeper, Rodney the driver, and Joe

(29:45):
the contractor each had unsupervised access to the home, and
in some cases more than just access. It's not fair
to call them suspects. Let's call them interviewees. The first
was Linda. Linda had been with the collector for about
a year and was introduced through a relative of hers.

(30:07):
The collector told police that Linda had access to his
valuables and in all the time she had been working
for him, nothing had ever come up missing. Was she
going to snap one day and pry open a safe?
It seemed unlikely. Although Anne had her doubts. I always
like we were going through it, and at that time

(30:28):
I said it was the housekeeper or she was involved
in it. I don't know. I didn't like her demeanor,
I didn't like I don't know, but as a ninety
year old, you can whatever. And then I have no idea.
I mean, I think it was an inside job. They
also spoke to Joe, the contractor. Joe was an interesting person,

(30:51):
a person of interest, one could say, while he was
also a trusted member of the collector's circle, having done
work at several of the collector's proper these for several years.
Joe sometimes brought along helpers. There was a guy named Ed.
Ed was once left alone in the house for several hours,

(31:11):
but Joe insisted Ed was a family friend, not of
the collectors, but of Joe's family, and Ed was trustworthy.
Probably knew his way around a crowbar, but that's neither
here nor there. Joe insisted he had no idea the
collector even had a safe let alone what was inside
of it. Detectives also spoke to Rodney, the collector's driver.

(31:37):
Rodney was well special. He had been working for the
collector for about three years, constantly coming and going from
the home like the others, he had house keys. But
what made Rodney different was that he had the combination
to the safe in the upstairs bedroom. The collector had
given it to him so Rodney could get his passport

(32:00):
for him once. This was when the safe was in
the collector's other home, but the safe had been opened
with force, not a combination. If Rodney was the culprit,
it's possible the combination had revealed to him the valuables inside,
but didn't leave him any options If he took anything,

(32:20):
and the collector hadn't given the combination to anyone else,
that's one giant flapping red flag. If Rodney pried it open,
that would certainly widen the pool of suspects. Rodney, though
didn't seem like he had much to hide. He openly
admitted to having the combination to the safe. He also

(32:41):
said he sometimes brought along his stepson or a friend
to help him with errands, but no, he had no
idea who had taken the comics. After a round of interviews,
detectives didn't have much more than archetypes to go on.
The maid, the driver, the contractor. It was like a

(33:02):
Bizarro game of clue. The driver in the bedroom with
the pride bar and the action number one. What made
the case even more complicated was that the collector had
held a birthday party that fall, with roughly a hundred
and twenty friends and family attending. There were caterers and

(33:25):
tents and food and drinks, even a DJ. So for me,
I think Jeff recalls it differently, but I thought there
was a huge party and he had invited us to.
We were around, but it was all outside and people
would just come in, I guess, to go into the bathroom,
but there were servers there at least there was a

(33:46):
band too, and it was under a big tent in
the backyard. And after that I remember that he had
said someone broke into the safe, and I thought it
must have happened at the party. R He did have
one thing to add during his talk with police. He
told them that some of the workers with the tent

(34:06):
company had migrated inside into the living room. That wasn't
really where they were supposed to be. If the collector
was feeling paranoid at this point, that was understandable. He
had opened his home to a number of people he
felt he could trust, and someone had betrayed that trust

(34:27):
and taken two very valuable comics. What was worse was
that the collector hadn't been in that closet for months,
not since September of the theft could have taken place
any time from September to November, which was when he
checked the safe again. He had no idea who could

(34:49):
have done it. And because he had no idea, Jeff
and Anne were about to get some bad news. The
collector wanted them to leave. I didn't feel good in
my gut anymore to be there, and I think shortly
after that we found a home place and moved out.

(35:09):
It wasn't a hostile split. It was as amicable as
it could be given the circumstances. But the collector just
didn't know who in the house could have taken the comics.
It no longer made sense to have a full time
house setting couple there. At best, they hadn't been much
of a deterrent when it came to a robbery. By

(35:30):
February two thousand, with the police failing to generate any leads,
the collector's insurance company paid his claim a total of
two hundred and forty thousand dollars for both comics and
ear rings were all but forgotten. Perhaps the only man
in the world who could feel the collector's pain was

(35:51):
across the country. Nicolas Cage was still in the throes
of brief after his copy of Action number one had
been stolen after a party with many suspects. Here's Jamie Newbold.
Cage is one of our people. He's one of my people.
I understand exactly what he must be thinking or half

(36:12):
thought when that happened, how it felt to him. We
all do. We are collectors first and then dealers second.
We don't go to comic book college and get a
b A and comic ology. You are a fan from
the get go, and you become a lover of this stuff,
and then the buying, selling and trading becomes an act
where you're playing out the hobby to a much more

(36:35):
satisfying degree. Now you're a player. Finally, when you reach
my level, it's a living. And when you're robbed of
your living, jeez, yeah, it's miserable. The parallels to the
Cage crime are uncannon and and Jeff left without knowing
who the culprit was, and today the Westport Police Department

(36:58):
has no record of the case being closed, which means
the police didn't find the thief or thieves, and no
charges were ever filed against anyone. Not even Stephen Fishler
is quite sure what happened. We tried to find the housekeeper,
but there's nary a trace of her anywhere. The driver, Rodney, unfortunately,

(37:19):
he passed away a number of years back, and a
relative says they don't know anything about the comics. The contractor, Joe,
doesn't know anything either. But here's what we do know.
The collector got his comics back, both of them. Each
comic has markings that identified them as being specific copies
belonging to their original owners back in ninety eight and

(37:42):
nineteen thirty nine. Like the d copy of the Marvel
Mystery comics that surfaced after being stolen from Cage's house,
The Action number one belonged to a pedigreed collection which
had been discovered back in the nineteen sixties. That particular
copy of Action number one made history when it sold
for one million dollars, in the first time a comic

(38:06):
has ever reached that magical number, the very same copy
that had gone missing from the collector's house. His copy
of Batman number one sold for even more a few
years later, and In a sign of the current state
of the hobby, it wound up with a company named Rally.
They sell shares of comics like the stock market. You

(38:29):
buy a share of a rare book, and when it's
time to resell it, you also share in part of
the profit, assuming it appreciates in value. Each share is
just ten dollars. In other words, both comics had been
returned to him. They had to have been since he
eventually sold them. So we asked the collector more than

(38:52):
once what happened to his comics, who had taken them
and why, But he didn't respond. Being from the cold
case stolen comic division of podcasting didn't seem to make
much of an impression on him, and and Jeff never
spoke with him again either. So, I mean, we haven't

(39:13):
even thought about it. I just heard that like a
couple of years ago that he was a partner or
something of the could have been a basketball did he own,
was an owner of a basketball team or something that
where a name came up, or he was on the TV.
And then we talked about a briefly what happened between
the comics disappearing in two thousand and the Action number

(39:34):
one coming up for sale in It's possible whoever took
the comics decided the books were too hot to unload,
or maybe the collector let it be known that he'd
let the matter drop if the books were returned unharmed,
or maybe if the thief was very crafty, they ransomed
the books back to the collector. Whatever it was, it

(39:56):
didn't involve the police. So it's the real connection between
the theft of the collector's copy of Action number one
and cages copy. Did the same person do it weeks
apart on different coasts. No, that doesn't seem likely, But
these two cases are connected in a very real way.

(40:20):
Talk to a law enforcement official about art crime, and
you'll hear the same thing again and again. An art
heist is often preceded by media coverage of the art
in question, something to alert the thief that an item
within their reach has real value. Just a few weeks
before Cage's Action number one was stolen, a newspaper, The

(40:44):
Norwalk Hour ran a story about the collector's misfortune. Extra
Extra read all about it. It didn't name him, but
it did go on to state that his Action number
one had been taken and that it was valued at
two hundred thousand dollars. That story was then picked up
by the Associated Press and the New York Times, which

(41:06):
repeated the value of the comic two hundred thousand dollars.
Two thieves across the country likely never met, never knew
one another, but one inspired the other. The article was
a big flashing neon sign, come and take me, come
and steal Superman. How else is two hundred thousand dollars

(41:31):
ever going to fit inside your jacket? One thief had
created a bizarre thief. And in case you are wondering, no,
and never got her earrings back. No nobody ever told
us or there was never police report or a conversation, nothing. Now,

(41:53):
I had told them to about the hearings, but that
was minor. There was no investigation on that at all.
That was just a little thing on the side. I
guess one Action number one had been recovered and the
collector could breathe a sigh of relief. But Nicholas Cage
was not so fortunate. The case was cold, really cold.

(42:16):
It wouldn't heat up again until two thousand and two.
That's when his copy of Action Comics Number one was
spotted in Memphis. The home of Nicolas Cage's other favorite
hero and where apparently someone was looking to pass off
his Action Number one for the right price, and this

(42:38):
time the police were ready. That's next time on Stealing Superman.
Stealing Superman is written by Jake Rawson, sound design and
score by Jonathan Washington, additional production support by Josh Fisher,
Original music by Aaron Kaufman, mixing and mastering by Baheed Fraser,

(43:03):
Research and fact checking by Jake Rawson and Austin Thompson,
with production support from Lulu Philip. Additional voices by Ruthie
Stevens and Ben Bowan, show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Our
executive producer is Jason English and I'm your host Danish Wartz.
If you're enjoying this show, check out Haileywood and Noble

(43:26):
Blood and give us a nice review. We'll see you
next week. Stealing Superman is a production of I Heart Radio.