Stealing Superman: Episode Two – Four Empty Frames

One of Nicolas Cage’s rare comics turns up in Connecticut, which seems like a slam dunk for investigators. And we meet a renowned (but reformed!) art thief, who explains the true motive behind its appearance.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
In early two thousand, eBay was still a little bit
of a novelty. The auction site hadn't even introduced the
buy it Now feature four items. If you wanted something,
you had to wait days until bidding ended, and you
had to hope you had the highest offer. Sniping, or
the act of bidding at the last possible second, could rip.

(00:27):
Some prized would be possession out of your grasp, especially
if someone had a broadband connection with blazing fast internet
speeds instead of you know, dial up. eBay was also
becoming a hot market for comic books. Before eBay, if
you wanted to buy a rare comic, you'd have to

(00:50):
go to an auction in person, or attend a comic
convention or by a trade publication and scan their list
of comics. Then may you and in order with a check.
But Eva was changing all that. It was democratizing the
buying and selling of collectibles. That's important to know in

(01:11):
order to understand what happens next. As you'll recall, comic
book dealer Stephen Fishler got a frantic phone call from
Nicholas Cage, who explained his three most prized comic books,
worth hundreds of thousands of dollars had been stolen. Action
Comics number one, Detective Comics Number twenty seven, and the

(01:35):
lesser valued but still important Detective Comics Number one vanished
without trace from his house in a gated community in
bel Air. No leads, no suspects, just a despondent cage
staring at empty wall frames that had once housed the
debuts of Superman and Batman. Stephen, of course, was key

(02:00):
bring an eye on the collector's community, looking for any
sign of the stolen books coming onto the market. He
owned his own place, Metropolis Collectibles in New York, but
the chances of the thief strolling into his business were slim. Still,
Stephen kept looking. Hope was the only currency he had

(02:20):
at the moment, and look optimism is a defining Superman trait.
One day, a collector showed Stephen one of his newer acquisitions.
It was a copy of Marvel Mystery Comics number seventy one,
dated April. The original human Torch is flying through the air.

(02:42):
A number of characters from ancient Egypt are shocked by
his appearance. His young side kick, Tora, who is also
on flare, is sacking someone in the gut. Another man
appears to be reviving Cleopatra from her sarcophagus, injecting her
with a strange serum. It's your typical Golden Age comic cover,

(03:05):
lots of disparate elements stitched together to compel a kid
to spend his one and only dime to see how
the hell any of this made sense These days. It's
a desirable comic, though not one of the most sought after.
Some people chase it just because the cover is cool,
A dynamic composition by Golden Age artist Alex Schomberg. What's

(03:32):
with the Egyptians? Well, it was just after World War
Two and comics needed new villains to employ. But something
else about it seemed strange to Stephen. Not just the
fact that to self immolating heroes were punching ancient Egyptians.
Besides that, here's Stephen to explain. He showed it to me.

(03:56):
It's a well known collector in New York, and I went, weird,
you get this book? And then you said, I got
it from this woman, and I'm looking at it. I'm
looking at it. This is impossible. I sold this book.
How could Stephen possibly know that there were hundreds of
copies of Marvel Mysteries number seventy one out there that

(04:18):
had survived being thrown away by parents. But this one
was different. Inside on the first page was a handwritten
sequence of numbers and letters seven eight four one dash
D dash three to zero. It's an old comic book.
Kids wrote or drew all kinds of things on them

(04:39):
before they realized. Some of them could put their kids
through college. But this isn't just a doodo. It's legendary
in the comic book collector's community because it means the
comic belonged to the d collection, one of the most
comprehensive ever assembled. It's a pedigree like a fingerprint. The

(05:01):
person who bought this comic book and thousands of others
wrote a code on the first page of everyone he
bought as a teenager and young adult. There's only one
Marvel Mystery Comics number with those numbers inside, and it
once belonged to a collector. Stephen Fishler knew, well, this

(05:22):
was exactly a book that I had sold Nick that
somehow left his house. Someone hadn't stolen three comics from
Nicholas Cage. Someone had stolen four for I Heart Radio.
This is stealing Superman I'm your host, Danis Schwartz, and

(05:46):
this is episode two, four empty frames. As soon as
Stephen got a look at the Marvel Mystery, it was
his turn to call Cage and a near panic. It
was possible he was somehow mistaken that he misremembered selling

(06:06):
it to him, that maybe it wasn't the d copy
Cage had bought, but no Cage confirmed it. He had
had a Marvel Mystery and now it was gone somehow.
In the chaotic aftermath of the heist, he hadn't noticed
it missing. Everyone's attention had been on the Big Two,

(06:27):
Action number one and Detective number twenty seven. No one
had noticed the weird Egypt meets Marvel comic had vanished too.
Nick had a run of Marvel Mystery and the only
Marvel Mystery missing from the house it was Marvel seventy one.
He had one through ninety two, I believe, but missing
the seventy one. And I said, well it was the

(06:48):
seventy one was taken out of the house. We're a book,
I went, that's it was a pedigree book with very
unique markings. It's the same book. So who was this
woman on eBay had sold the book to his collector friend.
eBay seller profiles usually have scant information. People can be
as anonymous as they like. For the most part, you

(07:10):
might buy something, even something worth thousands, and not have
any more information about the seller than that their screen
name is Biceps Due. There's just one exception. An eBay
profile usually offers up the user's city and state. The seller,
the one with cages book was in Connecticut and obviously

(07:34):
connected it to the theft. There's no way if I
sold in this book that a woman in Connecticut would
have ended up with. But that's how it happened. So
that was the only lead that I had. Somehow, in
the span of just a couple of months, this book
had been taken from cages home and been delivered miles

(07:54):
away and then wound up on eBay. A few fouls
it a monumental book on its own, but it just
was a book that I told them. There was just
one thing to do. He asked the buyer for more
information about the seller, and so he gave me the
person who got it from and that's how that we began.

(08:18):
This isn't as strange as it sounds. The rare comics
collecting community is small Plenty of people buy and read comics, sure,
but not that many deal in rare, high priced books
from the nineteen forties. Stephen is among the most well
known dealers of such paper treasures. The collector was from

(08:39):
New York, where Stephen lived. They had done business before,
so the comic finding its way to Stephen wasn't far fetched.
Most desirable comics made their way to him eventually, and
the man, whom Stephen prefers not to name, trusted him,
and so he told him that the seller was a she,
a woman named Kimberly. He gave Stephen a phone number

(09:03):
and an email, so Stephen began dialing, wondering if the
person who would pick up the phone knew that the
comics she had sold had been taken from the home
of Nicholas Cage. I had contacted the woman asking how
she got it, and she was very worried and defensive.

(09:24):
Kimberly did not wish to discuss where her Marvel Mystery
number seventy one had come from. Stephen kept trying left
her phone messages but got no response. Maybe she was
just unsettled by the question, maybe she had no idea
it was stolen. But then the buyer told Stephen another detail,

(09:44):
a detail that didn't do anything to convince him. Kimberly
was an innocent bystander. He had bought the comic in person,
an in person swap money for the Marvel Mystery. This
is the kind of thing people may do on Craigslist,
but on eBay, even back then, it was unusual. The

(10:07):
whole point of eBay was to find items you couldn't
find locally, and with relative anonymity, you could purchase them
safely without risk of being lured into someone's basement. But
Kimberly preferred a personal meeting, and the collector didn't mind.
Connecticut was a short drive. He had no idea the

(10:29):
comic was well questionable, and no idea why Kimberly wanted
to keep it offline. A cash transaction didn't leave much
of a paper trail. If Kimberly didn't know the comic
was hot, why insist on meeting up in person? Why
the Cloak and Dagger stuff? Stephen pondered, whoever took the

(10:53):
Marvel Mystery had taken the other books, the very rare,
very valuable com x. It stood to reason Kimberly probably
knew something about the others. So he sat down and
began typing another message. This one was more to the point.
I sent a letter quietly to this woman who somehow

(11:17):
had one of the other stolen books, the Marvel seventy one.
Sent her a letter and I said, you know you
might have gotten books. This is my only lead. I said,
you may have been in possession of books that could
be stolen, But the owner really just wants to get
his book back. So I said, here's a picture of
a book that was stolen. If you have this book,
I will give you ten thousand dollars. There's no questions,

(11:38):
asked finders a reward for returning this book, Thinking you
know she got this cheaper book, Stephen was essentially offering
her a finder's fee if she could procure the real treasure,
the action number one or the detective number twenty seven
or both. He mailed the letter and wait did And

(12:02):
while he waited, he thought about something else, something else
that was strange about seeing this comic on eBay. When
it disappeared from Cages House. It had been raw. That's
what collectors called a book that hadn't been graded by
a third party company, hadn't been assessed for its condition,

(12:22):
for blemishes, for an objective ten point rating of how
well it aged, since it was first on the stands
in the system. All changed in two thousand when what's
now called the Certified Guarantee Company or c g C
started looking at comics. For a fee of roughly twenty dollars.

(12:45):
C g C would take your rare comic, examine it,
and put it in a protective plastic case so it
would be forever sealed against further wear. It solved the
problem of a dealer and buyer having different ideas of
what a comics condition was. It was perfect for eBay
when you had to buy items site unseen. C g

(13:08):
C really took off in the early two thousand's mostly
because of eBay. That's Paul Lytch primary grater for c
g C. Back then he was the secondary greater. So
what CDC really did. It really gave buyers the level
playing field to say, no, c g C, this third party, independent,

(13:31):
impartial company gave this book that you're selling me an
eight five, so I'm only going to pay the eight
five price. C g C could make sure a comic
was unrestored, hadn't been messed with and they graded down
to the tenth of a point, from point five to
nine point two to rarely a ten point Oh, this

(13:54):
Marvel Mystery scored very very high, a nine point four,
close to perfect. Once a book is slabbed, it's protected
against a lot of things that age old comics which
were never printed to last, Cheap ink and cheap paper degrade.

(14:15):
So with the micro chamber paper in there, it will
help aging of the book and it will help it
with environmental storage problems that may happen down the road
depending on how you store your comics. So that comic
is then placed into an inner well. In the inner
well we have many, many different sizes that are custom
made for comics. That inner well is sealed on all

(14:39):
the edges and then it is placed in the outer
acrylic folder, which is just an acrylic plastic, very sturdy,
and that is sonically sealed and welded shut. And so
you have a tamper evidence very what's the word. I'm
looking for safe way to store your comics and archipe

(15:00):
a nice archival way to protect your comics and protect
them from any kind of other damage that could happen
just with life. So someone had thoughtfully taken Cage's stolen
comic and decided it deserved archival protection, at which point
it was sent to c g C for grading before

(15:21):
being auctioned on eBay. Someone wanted to squeeze every last
dollar out of its value, which was contrary to most
stolen goods, where getting a fraction of an item's worth
is usually good enough. This was well bold. Imagine swiping
a painting from a wall and then going to get

(15:42):
it appraised in the hopes word hadn't yet reached the
expert about the art going missing, or going to a
framing store with a swiped van go to pick out
the perfect frame for your wall. Kimberly either didn't know
it had been stolen, or knew but figured it was
one of many Marvel Mystery comics. She didn't seem to

(16:05):
have any idea it was a D copy, one instantly
recognizable someone had slipped it. Suggested that the thief knew
enough about comics to grab the most valuable ones, but
wasn't that much of an insider to know about the
D collection. It revealed something else too. The comics were

(16:29):
taken from Cage's home just days before c g C
officially opened for business just days c g C began
accepting submissions from the public on January first, two thousand.
It's possible that whoever took Cage's comics wanted to get

(16:51):
ahead of c g C, ahead of Cage, possibly submitting
his valuable books to be slabbed and therefore making them
harder to steal. Each slabbed c g C comic carries
a certification number. There would be no way of reselling
it in its c g C case without someone realizing

(17:13):
it had been stolen. Someone would have to take it out,
crack the slab, make it a raw book again. It
would be harder. Whoever took the comics may have been
knowledgeable enough to know that if they waited any longer,
the comics might be off to c g C for submission.

(17:34):
Than in case and trackable, we have helped our chatboards.
Dealers have listed books and the serial numbers and the
grades that have been stolen from their shops, and our
comic book community has helped find them. And it has helped,
but unfortunately still some tests do happen. But it also

(17:55):
presented another avenue for Stephen to explore. Anyone submit to
c g C had to provide a name and return
address to get their comic book back from their office
in New Jersey unless they submitted it through a participating dealer.
So Stephen reached out to a contact at c g
C to see if he could learn anything else. In fact,

(18:19):
Stephen had actually helped get c g C off the ground,
helping map out what the ten point grading system should
look like, and he discovered something very interesting about Kimberly.
She apparently called c g C and said, the c
g C g about personal information about who it's a grade.
It's something about that. Whole situation looked pretty bad. Kimberly

(18:42):
from Connecticut was definitely getting worried. She didn't know Stephen
had already gotten her information from the buyer. C g C,
for the record, didn't provide any further details about Kimberly
to Stephen, but what they had done was confirmed what
he already knew to be true that the comic he

(19:03):
sold Cage was undoubtedly part of the d collection. If
Stephen had any doubt before c g C provided authentication,
they always noted a comics pedigree on their label. Kimberly
had taken steps to guarantee that it was Cages comic
beyond all doubt. So out of those four comics, why

(19:26):
had this one, the least valuable, least important, come up first.
Why wouldn't the person who grabbed it from Cage's home
try to cash in on the action number one for
two hundred thousand dollars? Why not in case that one
in a C G C slab and shoot for the stars.

(19:47):
It's a marvel mystery mystery. So we asked someone who
might know. We asked an art thief. Well, what did
she want? Attitude is I never give anyone the benefit
of the doubt, and God everyone is despicable as each other.
And if you go into these things with that attitude,
you normally can't go far wrong. Okay, so let's be clear.

(20:24):
We asked a reformed art thief, a man named Paul Hendry.
Paul is from the UK, and for years he made
a dishonest living as a knocker. That's a person who
would find reasons to get inside someone's house and assess
their belongings for anything worth stealing. If he found something good,

(20:46):
he'd rope in some co conspirators, the people doing the
actual liberation of the goods. Well, yes, I was born
in Brighton on the South Coach of the UK in
nine and was adopted. And then when I was twelve,
I went out on the knocker, which is something where
you knock on people's heals you try to buy antiques.

(21:07):
I moved swiftly up the food chain and started organizing
thefts from country houses, and then I became very, very
successful in the nineteen eighties, and then I gave up
the business early nineties when my son was born, and
I went to university and got a BA honors degree
in American Social Studies and a master's degree in contemporary history.
And I now commentate on art related crime because I've

(21:30):
seen it from both perspectives. Paul has helped the FBI,
foreign Law Enforcement, and local bureaus find and recover stolen artworks.
He's well versed in what happens when someone steals one
of a kind pieces and then tries to figure out
what to do with them. Well, yes, people call me

(21:51):
the art crime on Bardsman. So really, when I see
wrong doing, whoever's doing it, whether it's law enforcement, the
insurance industry, private art detect chie's themes handless whoever, I
call everyone out. So to be honest with you, I
upset everyone at some point each time, and the fact
that the Marvel Mystery, the least valuable comic in the bunch,

(22:14):
was the first to surface, doesn't surprise him one bit.
Like obviously the person put it on eBay testing the water.
It's a test balloon scene whether it can slip through
the market without coming on top without being discovered. Remember,
two of the four comics were the two rarest The
other two the Marvel Mystery and the Detective Number one, weren't.

(22:38):
The Action Number One was worth at least two hundred
thousand dollars, the Marvel Mystery about a thousand dollars. To
be honest with you, because of the large discrepancies in value,
I will be leaning towards they took those to use
a test balloons and the proof of putting in that is,
the first comic that surfaced in Connecticut was the lesser

(23:00):
valued one, right, So I would actually look towards that
as Yes, they took one very valuable one and one
less valuable one, one very valuable one, one less valuable
one to use as bargaining chips as a test balloon.
If the Marvel Mystery had gone undetected. It was entirely
possible that the more valuable comics would have surfaced soon

(23:24):
after the Action number one and detective number twenty seven.
Maybe they'd be in shiny new c g C slabs
ready to be framed or displayed. Maybe they already were
c g C. After all, couldn't possibly be suspicious of
every comic that was submitted to them, or treat the

(23:44):
submitter as though they were a thief. But the Marvel
Mystery did not go undetected. Stephen detected it. This was
a real lead, tangible, verifiable proof that at least one
of the comic was out there, and proof that the
comics weren't taken as a prank or had some home

(24:06):
been misplaced. Whoever had taken the comics had not done
so for their own personal pleasure to have some kind
of illicit comic book collection for their eyes only. The
Marvel Mystery was put up for sale for money. You

(24:26):
have to remember art, be a comic, a painting, a sculpture,
or anything. He's just a commodity, and that they steal
them because they pan and then they try to monetize them. Now,
comics are like say, musical instruments, they're quite unique and
knee market for them, and collectors market is a very
very small market. The majority of art crime is against

(24:49):
personal householders where they have art and antique stolen with
values ranging from say a thousand dollars up to ten
tho dollars and maybe a hundred thousand dollars, and those
things happened every day of the week all over the world.
Every now and again you get a big heist from
a museum where paintings worth millions and tens and hundreds

(25:11):
of millions of dollars stolen and then either ransom back
to the insurance company or victims, or they're held as
collateral and used within the underworld in drug deals because
the moving of money around the world is much more
difficult because of money laundering laws. So these comics, including
the Superman ones and all of them, are just a commodity.

(25:33):
If you put it in a safety deposit box, you
can give the person that you're going to borrow some
money off, or you're going to get some narcotics off.
You give them the key to the ux and access
to it as collateral, and then when you sell the
drugs to pay the money back, you can then get
the access back again when the cage books went missing.

(25:53):
When any art goes missing, there's always a question of
whether it was an impulsive crime, something done at a
spur of the moment, or something premeditated. And if it
were premeditated, whether the thief knew exactly where the comics
were going to go, whether they had a buyer already
lined up. If not, how else could one of them

(26:15):
get from Los Angeles to Connecticut so quickly. If this
would a carefully playing theath, then the people would have
eva had someone that they were going to sell them
too straightaway already sold it out, or they would at
least know where they were going to monetize them or
what they were going to do with them afterwards. Bob
Whitman x FBI Art Crime Team Boss, he's got a

(26:37):
good saying, you know, aren't Thieves are very good at
steam in art, but they're terrible businessmen and terrible at
trying to monetize the art once they've stolen it. Were
it not for that infernal decollection marking, the Marvel Mysteries
could have passed unnoticed. Comics have the benefit of being
printed in multiples. Most art is one of one and

(27:01):
therefore much harder to return to a legitimate market. Well,
a lot of art theft, you see, is opportunisty or
even those that are planning right, they put a lot
of planning into the actual ceiling of the artwork, but
not so much planning there's what they're going to do
with them once they've stolen them, and then they find
that it's even in the art world, it's a very
very exclusive club and it's very very difficult if you

(27:24):
don't know the right context to know what to do
with these things, unless, of coursehip was something like, I
mean there's a gang in the UK. Then they raised
stately homes. Now they sold a solid gold toilet that
was being exhibited at Blenheim Palace. And this solid gold
toilet ways, it's something like a hundred and twenty teals,
and they ripped it out of where it's been exhibited.

(27:46):
They cut it up and they put it in the
melting pot for five million dollars and it was insured
for six million dollars. But it got mounted down, you see,
so that the work of art that could just literally
be monetized because of the material that it was made
by it there was also place where there was a
diamond tr in Portland, Tiara that was stolen worth millions

(28:06):
of dollars. They just popped all the big diamonds out
of it and melted down the frame and sold the
stones for a few hundred thousand dollars. So there are
different things. I mean with this comic, you couldn't do
anything like that because it's an an animal object, something
that you can't change it into anything. But again, it
needs something that could be used as collateral by the underworld.

(28:28):
But you've got to get it into the underworld, and
from what I can see, I don't think they ever
really reached the underworld with this. Unfortunately, this was no
golden toilet, but it was altered in a way when
it was stolen from Cage's house. It was raw. Now
it was slabbed. Kimberly may have wanted to give the
comic a fresh start, have it appeared to be something

(28:51):
other than what had gone missing. Some art is stolen
for ransom, kind of a Lindberg baby situation, a kid nothing.
The intent isn't to try to move it on the market,
but to tempt the owner with it if some kind
of agreement can be made to dangle the art in
front of the nose of the victim and promise it's

(29:12):
safe return in exchange for a fee. Stephen Fishler had
essentially done that in reverse. He proactively offered a reward
to the mysterious Kimberly from Connecticut. The question was would
she bite guilty or not? Kimberly was not playing it cool.

(29:49):
She had phoned c g C in a panic, hoping
they wouldn't give out her personal information. She refused to
speak to Stephen, and when Stephen offered her a monetary
reward that was virtually ten times with the Marvel Mystery
was worth, she never responded. But Stephen wasn't out of options.

(30:09):
In addition to offering Kimberly a reward, he reached out
to Los Angeles Detective Donald Harrisik, the man who was
leading the investigation into the heist. Stephen expected harre sick
to do something. Make a call, contact the Connecticut police,
follow the only lead anyone had. Maybe not kicked down

(30:30):
her door, but something. I got a feeling from what
I heard about this woman's reaction. Who I contacted asking
how she got this Marvel mystery, she got very panicky,
so I said to the police, she's acting like she
contacted the company graded the book for her and was
worried that they would reveal her information. And when that's

(30:50):
somebody who knew that book was questionable. According to Stephen,
Detective Harrisick wasn't as enthusiastic as one might expect. Well.
He was annoyed that I contacted the woman directly and
now she won't talk to him. You're the police, I said,
call her up and see who you are. You know,

(31:11):
I don't think police work. Ended with the notion of
she won't talk to me. When Kimberly refused to talk
to her, Sick, it seemed as though he just well
gave up her re Sick was less than curious. Stephen
knew that Cage had his own security personnel working on things,
so he reached out to them to let them know

(31:32):
that a woman named Kimberly in Connecticut was in possession
of one of Cage's comics without question or doubt. The
d copy. Yeah, I had spoken to Oh, absolutely, just
give me an update, I said, I have found a
book that left Nick's house and it was transacted off
the v Bay by a woman in Connecticut. Well, they
found it interesting, but I'll be honest, it seemed a

(31:55):
bit like they were being annoyed by me. Why Nick
had a purity person I cannot remember his name in place.
A little bit after that and I all right, we'll
have the security person follow up on this. Why am
I doing this? And the security person didn't seem to
be bothered by trying to track this down. I mean,

(32:16):
I found it a little frustrating talking to Nick's people
when something's not let me just makes sense here, like
I could have been talking to somebody who stole it,
like they didn't want to deal with it, and maybe
they had. I don't know, to be honest, I just
don't know. There was some weirdness going on. Instead of wow,
Steve's really trying to find the book, it became wow,

(32:38):
Steve's really annoying us. I said to myself at the time,
I said, this is bizarre. It is bizarre. And Paul
Hendry has a theory about that too. The police will
go out to Shay the person in Connecticut and try
to track it back from there. The fact that I
didn't do it makes you wanted a lot about this, Like, well,
initially I think We've got a look that behavior, and

(33:01):
any investigator would look at that behavior. Has perhaps Nicolas
Cage has some idea of who stole these things and
the reason that they stold them, because, to be honest
with you, you know what celebrities are like. If this
was just a genuine theft and Nicolas Cage is a
victim of this theft, it would have been all over
the news and it would have given interviews because you know,

(33:22):
in that world, Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse
than bad publicity is no publicity, and this would have
given a platform for Nicolas Cage to say he's a
victim of an art theft. We've seen it before when
famous people have been robbed. I mean they've gone out
and they said, we'd like the things back, and they
contact the police. But at this point, Cage had still

(33:45):
not gone public with the theft, and neither the police
nor his security seemed enthusiastic about pursuing the Kimberly situation.
Cages people did send a letter to her, and according
to what Stephen was told, Kimberly sent a letter back
insisting they were harassing her. So it's possible Nicholas Cage

(34:07):
didn't want to be perceived as someone who was ordering
his staff to bother a strange woman who may or
may not know anything about his stolen comic books. That's
a weird National Enquirer worthy headline. But she was the
only link to the heist, So why didn't anyone make
more of an effort to question her? I think, as

(34:29):
we've gone through the whole story, it really is a
Russian dole. You're opening more and more layers, You're peeling
back the onion and every kind of stop. There is
something there that doesn't smell right, it doesn't taste right,
and doesn't look right. And in the normal world of things,
this is not only what would happen, from the theft
of it to the handling of it to the surfacing

(34:50):
Stephen Fishler agrees. And I gave the police this lead
and they were really just not doing much with it,
and I said, all right, well, here's the book that
he from Nick's house. This is my only lead. The
police don't seem to have the wherewithal to really follow
it up or the motivation, and I just became like
the crazy uncle who was still trying to find these books.

(35:12):
And the detective zombie as a sort of a nuisance.
But that was then and this is now. Time has
passed and you're probably thinking, well, why not try to
find Kimberly today. There's one hurdle to overcome. Kimberly's full
name is not uncommon. In other words, a lot of

(35:34):
people named Kimberly live in Connecticut. So we needed more
to go on a town a phone number, information that
has in the intervening years slipped through Stephen Fishler's memory.
But it is the kind of information c g C
would have recorded back in two thousand when they accepted

(35:56):
the Marvel mystery number. Seventy one escape end of the
comic still exists. So we typed in the certification number
into the c GCS database. The registrate Paul Lytch was
talking about the one given to the comic back when
it was graded. It's a ten digit number that gives

(36:17):
a person general information about the comic, like the data
was examined and any grader's notes like catch up staying
on third page. But the c g c S database
couldn't find the certification number. It seemed to have disappeared
from their system entirely. That was unusual. Had c g

(36:39):
C scrubbed the number after Kimberly called to complain, or
was it just a glitch? So we asked Paul Lynch.
According to Paul, the number not coming up means the
comic may have been resubmitted at some point. Some collectors
do this in the hopes c g C might wind
up giving their comic a more favorable grade. If that happened,

(37:04):
then the old label and number would have been destroyed.
I don't see why we wouldn't. It's got to be
here somewhere. But as far as to submitted it that's
above my pay grade, you'd have to, I don't know.
That's one of the head hunchos. Paul told us to
talk to someone higher up in the c g C
hierarchy to see what we could find out. We had

(37:28):
a full name and a state, a non working certification number,
and a question about a comic submitted that had been stolen.
Could they help us find Kimberly from Connecticut? We went
to the head hauncho to find out Harsh and Patel,
vice president of the c g C. We explained the situation,

(37:50):
and harsh And understood, but however, noble our intentions. The
c g c has a commitment to protecting the privacy
of their customers. Harshin told us that the only way
he could hand over that kind of information would be
with a subpoena. That was dead end number two, so

(38:10):
we tried something else. In two thousand two, that same
copy of Marvel Mystery Number seventy one went up for
sale via Heritage Auctions, one of the largest auctioneers in
the industry. Auctions like these are always private. No one
but the auction house knows who the buyers or sellers are.

(38:32):
It's possible the seller was the same person who bought
it from Kimberly, but again, Heritage couldn't reveal their identity.
Strike three. For now, the location of the elusive Kimberly
remains a mystery, but maybe not for much longer. There's
one more thing to try. Stay tuned, But what about

(38:58):
that Marvel Mystery Number seventy one. Shouldn't it have been
returned to Nicholas Cage. Shouldn't the New York buyer have
forfeited what he knew to be stolen property? Well he
would have, except Cage wasn't asking for it back because
the main thing was trying to figure out the Action
One trying to undertake him. I had mentioned to Nick

(39:22):
about this lead, and if Nick said to me, that's
my book, I wanted back. It was more about the
lead versus getting it back. By this point, Cage's insurance
company had paid out on all four books. He had
been financially, if not emotionally, compensated for their loss. The

(39:43):
Marvel mystery was in some ways small potatoes, even though
the fact that it had materialized in Connecticut means someone
had crossed state lines and technically made a Los Angeles
robbery a federal crime. And maybe it was someone Cage knew, Well,

(40:05):
maybe someone Cage already considered a suspect, which made looking
into Kimberly less of a priority. To find these comics,
someone was going to have to take the initiative. The
problem was there was no analog for this heist. There
were plenty of art thefts, but not many comic book thefts.

(40:28):
It makes you wonder if anyone had ever been bold
enough to steal an Action number one before Cage's copy
went missing, if any crime had been an inspiration for
this one, if it had been a kind of copycat
comic heist. It turns out the answer is yes, and
it happened in of all places, Connecticut. Stealing Superman is

(41:02):
written by Jake Rawson, sound design scoring by Josh Fisher,
additional editing by Jonathan Washington, Mixing and mastering by Baheed Frasier.
Original music by Aaron Kaufman. Research and fact checking by
Jake Rawson and Austin Thompson, with production support from Lulu Philip.

(41:23):
Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Our executive producer is Jason
English and I'm your host Danish words. If you're enjoying
this show, check out Haileywood and Noble Blood and give
us a nice review. We'll see you next week. Stealing
Superman is a production of I Heart Radio.