Movie Mystery: The 2000 Oscars Heist [from Very Special Episodes]

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Some cardboard moving boxes. It's March 2000 and 61-year-old Willy, a junk scavenger by trade, decides to look inside a dumpster behind the food-for-last grocery store. He's in the Korean town section of Los Angeles. He figures it to good place to find some discarded packaging.

He's right. Inside this large orange container full of trash are nearly a dozen boxes. Willy picks one up. It's obviously heavy. He opens it.

Inside he sees what looks like a figure, maybe a toy, made of brass. When he takes a closer look, it's something he's only ever seen on television, and academy award trophy. Better known as Oscar, the gleaming gold-plated award handed out to a select few actors and filmmakers each year.

Willy looks through the rest of the packages. That isn't just one Oscar. It's four or five to a box. As Willy keeps opening boxes, he finds more and more of them. In total, over four dozen Oscars are in this smelly dumpster off Venice Boulevard.

What these Oscars are doing in the garbage is a pretty incredible story.

It what happens to Willy full gear after he finds them in the garbage is another wild tale. Willy doesn't know it yet, but he's about to make Oscar history. In a story with enough twists and turns or the of a Hollywood screenplay. And by the end, more than a few people will be wishing for a rewrite. Welcome to very special episodes, and I heart to original podcast.

I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this is Movie Mystery, the 2000 Oscar's Heist. Welcome back to very special episodes. I'm Jason English, she's Dana Schwartz, he is Zaron Burnett, and this is our Oscar special. Zaron Monty is this Sunday, Dana, I know you've been to the Emmys have you ever made

it to the Academy Awards? No, but I might make it this year. My husband is writing. What? Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Oh, please take lots of photos.

“Is our version of the Egot for getting to attend the four ceremonies?”

Yeah. I'm a good choice and spouse. I'm a lucky day. You know, we didn't actually have bonds on him in the back.

The man discussing Oscars butics is Joseph Petrie.

“Joseph is the design director of RS Owens, a trophy manufacturing business located just”

outside Chicago. The company got it start making pigeon racing trophies. They apparently did a pretty good job with those because from 1982 to 2016, RS Owens was the exclusive producer of the Academy Award Statue. Each year, the company made 55 of the trophies to exact specifications, including just

how the figures rear end should look. Yeah, Oscar has no crack. The process was involved, while Oscar might look like solid gold, it's not. The Oscars were cast out of a material called Britannium, which is a very rare pewter alloy and what it does is it flows at a little bit lower of a temperature but allows you to get

“absolute detail, but you get enough hardness so that you can polish them really really well.”

The pewter was covered in multiple layers of copper, one layer of silver, a layer of nickel and then a top layer of gold. The name plates would come later after winners had been announced and if one Oscar made it through the assembly process even slightly imperfect, it was destined for the torture room.

That's where Joseph would make sure it never saw the light of day in a most violent manner.

So we had a fallout rate, you know, we usually figured a few percent and anytime we got to that level, the protocol was, we would immediately take it into the casting room to a bandsaw and cut him in fourths. RS Owens was also responsible for refurbishing damaged Oscars, surprisingly some recipients didn't treat them with the utmost care.

There was a guy who was a pyro-technics guy and one of the big blah-blum-um-up movies who actually melted his Oscar in his driveway, so we had to replace his and then one guy was using it for a hammer to put in screws so the back of his head had all kinds of Phillips screw marks on it. But we used to get him in for all sorts of reasons.

The Oscars were the brainchild of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which

first convened in 1927 as a way of organizing the various factions of the movie business.

Silent Pictures were on their way out, movies with dialogue known as "Talkies" were coming in. The Academy decided that an awards ceremony was in order to publicise their flourishing industry. The best actors, directors, writers, and films would be recognized. And what to give them? MGM's art director, said Drake Gibbons, conceived of a man with

a blank expression and a crusader's sword, standing atop a real film that had five spokes. Those five were meant to represent the five branches of the Academy at the time, acting writing, directing, producing, and technicians. The design was realized in three dimensions by sculptor George Stanley. Oscar was born.

The first Academy Awards were handed out in 1929. The ceremony has been held annually ever since, and aside from the wartime Oscars where the trophies were crafted in plaster due to supply shortages, they've largely been the same statue you see today.

“The Oscar itself, as I recall, was 13 and a half inches high, I think it was about”

eight and a half pounds, and that weight was predictable in that. After we had the base attached and we had the statue, we would weigh them, and if they were anything above or below, we had weights in the bottom of the base, so that each and every one of them weighed the exact same amount. We should also mention the Oscar trophies are technically statueats, not statues.

Well, they're a statueat in that they're produced in bulk, produced in multiples whereas most the time statues might have an original maybe a few replicas, but statueats are typically smaller, typically handheld, and they're produced in greater quantities.

In 2000, RS Owens is doing what it always does.

into 10 or 11 cardboard boxes.

“All the boxes are then shrunk-wrapped together on a pallet.”

The entire shipment makes for one massive, 470 pound behemoth. In the notoriety of the Oscar, you might expect that the trophies would be delivered to the Academy's Beverly Hills office under armed guard. You might get that impression because that's exactly what happened a previous year. The organization made a big deal of having the world's famous Pinkerton security and detective

agency escort the trophies from Chicago to California. But as with many things in Hollywood, it was a lot of smoke and mirrors.

The whole armed guard show was mainly for publicity purposes.

What the Academy normally did, and what it's doing in 2000, is a schedule delivery with a trucking company called Roadway Express.

“The service didn't operate with armed guards or armored trucks or anything else.”

The actual material value of those 55 Oscars is about $18,000. Price is sure, but not exactly a King's ransom. So regular freight seems appropriate. The way you might ship a load of potato chips or computer equipment. The Oscar pallet makes its way from Chicago to the Los Angeles suburb of Bell, California

in just a few days, as it usually does. On March 8, the truck is parked in a loading dock area, as it usually is. But instead of winding up in Beverly Hills a few days later, it seems to just disappear. Roadway Express supervisors don't panic. They figure they've simply lost track of the shipment.

What happens? They spend the next four days searching every truck, dock, and terminal in the entire country. But the Oscars fail to turn up. And that's when the proverbial alarm goes off. The Oscars haven't been misplaced.

One of the guys from our shipping department came in and said, "Hey, we think our shipment's been hijacked." Roadway Express phones Bruce Davis, then the executive director of the Academy on March 13. They tell him that the Oscars intended for the 2000 ceremony, which is just two weeks away, have disappeared.

This is a rather seismic development. It's like realizing that your years' host Billy Crystal had dropped off the face of the earth, or that someone had run off with the envelopes containing the names of winners. You couldn't hand Merrill Streep and IOU. Bruce Davis springs into action, making two calls.

The first is to RS Owens.

With the Oscar ceremony so close and the fate of the statuettes up in the air, the Academy places a rush order for 35 replacement Oscars to join the 20 they have on hand that were left over from previous years.

“What would normally take months, RS Owens will now have to do in a matter of weeks?”

To make sure we were able to get this done, because we knew all of it was going to be done under heavy scrutiny, cameras everywhere, press everywhere. So once we got that ball rolling, which was about, I want to say, within 24 hours, maybe 48, but we got rolling pretty quickly. It was time to step up, take it to the next level, be a big deal, make sure the Oscar

show went off without a hitch. But even if RS Owens can fulfill the order in time, the Academy has no desire to have dozens of stolen Oscars out in the world. They're fiercely protective of the trophy. So Davis also calls the Los Angeles Police Department.

The LAPD assigns a detective named Mark Zavala to the case. Not because Zavala is an expert in Oscars or black market goods, but because he's part of the department's cargo theft unit. When large quantities of shipped material went missing, he can often find them.

This is perhaps overly optimistic.

The employees are union members, and union members are by nature a pretty codified group of people. Put another way, Teamsters don't snitch on one of their own. Zavala knows it was likely an inside job for one big reason.

“Remember RS Owens shipped the Oscars as a single package.”

It weighs nearly 500 pounds. If you wanted to make off with it, you were going to need a forklift and a truck big enough to accommodate it. Zavala knows that at a minimum he's looking for two suspects. The forklift operator and a driver.

You'd figure surveillance footage would be helpful.

Might even catch the perpetrators in the act, but no such luck. So with the cooperation of roadway, Zavala tries a different tact. The trucking company offers a $25,000 reward to anyone with information leading to the recovery of the Oscars. Causes a little mumbling among the Teamsters, but still no snitches.

Roadway quickly bumps the reward up to $50,000. Zavala soon gets a message from a man claiming to be an attorney. He said he represent individuals who would be willing to return the Oscars if no questions were asked and no arrests were made. Zavala and his colleagues are interested in this man.

But before blindly giving him the money, they decide to follow him around for a bit. In the meantime, Zavala has a larger question to resolve. As a cargo theft specialist, he knows that when you steal a pallet full of clothes, watches, or electronics, you can resell them. You can make money, but what is anyone going to do with 55 stolen Oscars?

“An Oscar is the worst thing to steal if you're looking for something to steal.”

Segregation in the day integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules. And we didn't worry about what we were on outside. It was like sipping on another world. Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together, but not everyone was happy about it.

When you saw the cake cake cake? Yeah, they were just up in that uniform. The cake cake set out to Ray Charlie taken away from here. Charlie was an example, a poem. He had a crush in it.

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“Until now, listen to Charlie's place on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever”

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Search for iHeart TikTok Radio, make it a preset, and stay connected all day. All right, son, down to put out this campfire. Dad, we learned about this in school.

Oh, did you now? OK, what's first? Smokey Burst, too.

First, drown it with the bucket of water, then stir it with the shovel. Wow, you sound just like him. Thank you, son. If it's still warm, then do it again. Where can I learn all this?

It's all on smokybeard.com with other wildfire prevention tips, because only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the at council. Excuse me, I'm hiccuping because I'm so pregnant. Just give me one second to read a liver that. That's Olivia Routigliano.

Olivia is a book and online features editor who also has what you'd call a particular set of skills. She's a historian of misplaced Oscars, lost stolen and everything in between. I like to say missing Oscars because it's unclear if some of them were in fact stolen,

But some of them were literally stolen, and it does seem a bit of an undersell, not to say that as well.

“So stolen in missing Oscars is a good umbrella term for them.”

Olivia's fascination with missing Oscars goes back to a trivia book she had as a 12-year-old. This was the complete Oscars up to 2003 by Gale Ken and Jim Piazza. This huge coffee table book my mom got it at Costco. And they would include details about Oscars that have, you know, reportedly been stolen just in the trivia section. And eventually I was like, "They're even a couple of these."

They're being a couple of these instances. This subject is so intrigued young Olivia that should began doing her own research. I wonder if there's an interest in obtaining stolen Oscars, and my research took off from there.

“I was like 12, and I would go to the New York Public Library.”

I grew up in New York and so I go to the New York Public Library and do research on the computers and try to find articles about stolen Oscars. It's easy to see why someone can fall into a rabbit hole of Oscar mythology. It's a cultural touchdown. We're a society obsessed with the best, the best football team, the best pizza. And even the best in the highly subjective field of art.

When the Oscars began airing on television in 1953, the general public quickly grew consumed with the awards race. Suddenly there's a way through your television you can be connected to. The spectacular world of Hollywood that you are becoming entranced with, because it's the most appropriate and everyone would be depressed otherwise. So I very much think that the broadcasting is what contributed to the academy becoming a household name in terms of like

movie-going institutions. Then there's the nickname itself Oscar. The trophy is already humanoid and the proper noun lends it more of an emotional pull. Technically, the award is named the Academy Award of Merit. But since the 1930s, it's been best known by its nickname. And no one, not even Olivia, is quite sure why. But the most salient rumor about the naming of the Oscars that the Academy Secretary, I believe

Margaret Herrick, nicknamed it Oscar. I'm just called it Oscar. But I don't know beyond that. I cannot say anything definitive at all regarding that. But I do find it funny if it was just a pet name for this object that wound up blowing up and becoming the main moniker. Talking to Olivia tends to result in a lot of interesting revelations. Like the fact that the Oscars don't technically belong to their recipient, at least not in the way you might think.

Since the 1950s Academy Award winners must first agree to the Academy's terms

before taking possession of their statuettes. When you win your Oscar, you are taken backstage

“and you are, you know, met with a bunch of contracts and lawyers and you have to sign”

a document saying that if you wish to give away your Oscar for any reason, that includes bequeath it when you die, sell it, give it to a loved one, anything like that. You must first offer it back to the Academy for a sum of $1. There is a bit of a loophole. Someone could, in theory, sell an Oscar belonging to someone else with their permission or that of the estate. Or it might have been given out so long ago, it's now more historical artifact than anything.

That's how Vivian Lee's Oscar for Gone With The Wind wound up selling at auction for over

a half million dollars in 1993. Even though the Academy told trade publication variety,

they were, quote, "concerned" about such Oscar sales. But stolen Oscars present unique problems. One of the first cases that Olivia worked on originated in 1938. That's when a best supporting actress award was given to Alice Brady for the film in Old Chicago. The movie is a highly fictionalized telling of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire. Brady plays a woman whose clumsy cow knocks over a lantern, starting the blaze.

But Brady had been on a bed rest at home with a broken ankle and was unable to attend the ceremony.

accepted the award on her behalf and then disappeared with the award and no one had ever seen him

“or the statue at since. And when I say statue, I was kind of a plaque statue.”

It wasn't the same as the ones we have now. And that was so cool and weird. But the Oscar, or rather the plaque, hadn't been stolen at all. At the behest of Olivia, the Academy's Librarian, Libby Burton revealed she had excavated the truth. She presented me with several newspaper articles that she had found that showed what actually happened that night. Apparently the man was not so mysterious. He was the film's director, Henry King,

and he apparently brought the Oscar to a Brady that night according to a fan magazine. So there's definitely reason to suspect that the Oscar wasn't stolen at all. And I was really excited to encounter her research and the fact that she had sort of found this answer. Brady's story may have been invented, but plenty of Oscars have gone a wall. Since the Academy's first ceremony in 1929, roughly 80 Oscars have gone missing, including the 55

from the roadway expressed heist. And they often take a circuitous journey before being returned to their rightful owners, or if they're deceased their estates. And as thieves often find out,

“they're incredibly hard to monetize on any so-called black market. I think Oscars even more”

than paintings, because you can, you know, high smoothies have taught me that you can find a weirdo who's obsessed with Vermeer, who just wants to look at it, and they'll pay you

four million dollars or whatever. Or a museum is unaware that the thing was stolen and they were

as quiet, like there seems to be like some wiggle room, especially regarding the history of some of the art pieces, you know. Unlike paintings, all Oscars have a serial number, making them easily traceable. And because the Oscar is only gold, plated, and consists mainly of other less valuable materials, melting it down doesn't make a lot of sense. So why do people steal them?

“Sometimes the motive is something other than money. One of the first Oscars ever stolen”

belonged to child actress Margaret O'Brien, who was awarded a special Oscar dubbed a juvenile Academy Award for her role in the 1945 film Meet Me in St. Louis. The musical details the exploits of the Smith family in the months leading into the 1904 World's Fair. O'Brien plays 2D, the younger sister of Judy Garland's Esther. When she won the award, she was just 8 years old. A few years later, in 1954, O'Brien's family housekeeper took the Oscar to polish it at home.

When she failed to come back to work, the O'Brien's fired her. She didn't return the award, possibly out of spite. For the next 40 years, the Statuet was missing. It wasn't until 1994 that it turned up at a flea market in Pasadena. Two memorabilia collectors picked it up for $500, then returned it to O'Brien when they realized it had been stolen. Then there was the one belonging to actress Olympia Dukakis for her performance in the 1988 romantic comedy Moonstruck.

That Oscar was swiped during a home burglary just months after the ceremony, plucked right off a kitchen table. The thief took nothing else except the Oscar. It felt a little personal. Not long after, Dukakis' son received a call that offered to sell the award back. A meeting was

arranged but the kidnapper never showed up. And then there was a thief who seemingly got cold feet.

In 2002, actress Olympia Goldberg thought her best supporting actress Oscar for 1990's ghost was looking a little pale. She sent it back to the academy which intended to forward it on to RS Owens for refurbishing. But RS Owens only got an empty box. Apparently the Oscar went around to Chicago. No, it never left California. A security guard found that an garbage can presumably someone had seen the box opened it and then removed the Oscar

thought that maybe the thief had intended to steal the Oscar and then realized that it was

“serialized and had a name on it and decided to forco the plan. So the security guard found it in”

the garbage and it was sent back to. The academy is then sent it back to what we go over. But no one had ever attempted anything as audacious as the roadway express heist. This wasn't one Oscar sitting on a shelf. This was a 55 Oscars yet to be awarded. A quarter ton of Hollywood iconography that didn't really have value because they didn't yet belong to anyone. Their worth is tied directly to the name and described on the plaque. And if you

try to sell one, even if you legitimately won it, the academy is likely to take aggressive action.

So what exactly could anyone have been thinking? Whenever someone thinks they can steal an Oscar, it's you know, it's this moment of hope. It's discovery. Oh my god I hit the jackpot and

“then there's a quick like Google search and it's like crap. What? What am I supposed to do with this”

thing actually? For these thieves, the answer involves a lot of finger pointing and a dumpster. Together to create something new. I love it. We're the world of TikTok meets your playlist. Three words that will change your life. I heart TikTok radio. The biggest hits across I heart

radio. What's trending for you on TikTok? Tell me a sound that's better than this.

Plus TikTok's most influential creators all in one place. Search for I Heart TikTok Radio. Make it a preset and stay connected all day. Segregation in the day. Integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like sipping at another world.

“Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together, but not everyone was happy about it.”

When you saw the KKK? Yeah, they were just up in that uniform. The KKK set out to Ray Charlie taken away from here. Charlie was an example, a poem. They had a crush in. From Atlas Obscura, Roko Ko punch, and visit Murdoch Beach comes Charlie's place. A story that was nearly lost to time. Until now, listen to Charlie's place on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Everyone needs to take care of their mental health,

even running back beach on Robinson. When I'm on the field that filmed the pressure, usually just take a deep breath. When I was breathing and seeing what's in front of me, everything just slows down. It just makes you feel great before I run the play. Just like these on, we all need a strong mental game on and off the field. Make a game plan for your mental health. I love your mind, playbook, back org. Love your body.

Brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health Foundation, the Arthur M. Blink Family Foundation, and the ad console. 2000 has already been a peculiar year for the Academy. Months earlier, several thousand ballots intended for voting members had gone missing in the mail, only to turn up in California. Then a short time later,

movie blogger Harry Nulls of Ainted Cool News claimed he had obtained a list of possible nominees before they were officially announced. The list turned out to be quite a ways off the mark, but it still sparked talk of security issues within the Academy. But those were nothing compared to the mass disappearance of 55 Oscar trophies. Once roadway expressed bumps the reward up to $50,000, detective Mark Zavala gets a call.

It was another anonymous tipster. This person advised Zavala to take a look at a roadway fort-lift operator named Anthony Hart. This collar claims he actually saw Hart load the Oscar pallet onto the truck of one Larry Lee Dent, a driver for the company. Sure enough, both Lee Dent and Hart had been on duty during the window of time the pallet had disappeared. What's more, other anonymous tips, phoned in, had also mentioned Hart by name.

But Zavala does note that Hart's brother-in-law is the same attorney who had phoned in

“to inquire about the $50,000 reward. If Hart wouldn't talk, that leaves Larry.”

But Zavala might run into the same stonewalling. So detectives decide to lean on Larry by telling him a lie that Hart has just confessed. It works. Larry has a story to tell. Will call it Larry's version. In his telling, Larry was minding his own business at the dock. When Hart told him he had loaded something into the back of his truck. This, according to Larry, was not unusual as the two had

skimmed to help themselves to inventory before. Stuff like clothes and shoes.

Larry says he wasn't sure what to make of this information at first. He drove around for a bit,

before finally peeking inside one of the boxes where he discovered the 55 perloined Oscars. Oscars that Hart had apparently fork lifted into his truck.

“Here's Olivia again. I think Hart was the one who told Letton, like he put something on your truck.”

And he was like, okay, and then later realized that they were Oscar statutes and freaked out because they were, it's not like a, you know, wrong or a bunch of cologne. Larry felt a surge of panic, not wanting to transport stolen goods. He headed to the house of a

friend of his named John Harris. He told Harris he was going to leave the Oscars with him for a

short period of time until he could figure out what to do about them. Again, he drove to a friend's home and informed him he had 55 Academy Awards he wanted to drop off. Happens every day. Harris agreed, but the statutes were only with him for one night before they were on the move again.

“Apparently Harris was like, whoa, these things are hot. This is very bad. Do not bring these to”

my house. Please do not involve me in this. After that Larry tells police he wanted nothing more to do with the heist and dumped the Oscars. He was, as he says, afraid of losing his job. A reasonable concern. Larry is arrested and charged. Hart is arrested, but released, owing to a lack of evidence. Police can't prove he knowingly loaded the Oscar pallet into Lee Dent's truck. It could have been an accident, but authorities do wind up charging Hart's

months later. After Lee Dent offers additional testimony about Hart's role and after police uncovered telephone communication between the two around the time of the heist. Lee Dent pled no contest to charges of grand theft. He got six months in jail and a fine. Harris pled no contest to receiving stolen property and one count of accessory to grand theft after the fact. He got three years probation. Hart pled no contest to receiving stolen property and also got

probation. Hart vehemently denied all of Larry's claims that he was in on it. He said he knew nothing about the theft. He said he pled out to avoid being chewed up by the system. He asserted Larry's confession had been coerced. Later Hart sued the LAPD, the Academy, and Roadway Express, alleging they had violated his civil rights and that the LAPD had defamed him by naming him as a suspect in a press conference. He lost on appeal in 2006. At the time of his arrest for the Oscars,

Larry tried telling police where the stolen statuettes could be located. But when police arrived at the places he indicated, nothing was there. This brings us back to Willie Folgier. Willie as you'll recall is the scavenger who was looking for packing boxes in a Korean town dumpster and got a surprise instead. He thought apparently that what he had found with brass and he had you know great success selling brass. I mean you know really good brass is you know is worth

a pretty penny so he called his son though when saw that it was something else. His son did an internet search and realized there was a reward out for them. Armed with the knowledge he had a lot

Los Angeles news outlet. Within minutes Willie is posing with the Oscars near the dumpster.

“The media is already hailing him as a hero. But by now you're probably thinking this doesn't”

quite add up. How did the Oscars get into that dumpster? Larry claimed he didn't know. Hart claimed not to have any involvement at all and did Willie really just hop in across them or did someone tell him where they could be found. Please think it's odd too. A question Willie to see if he had any potential involvement but Willie insists he did not that he found them in the dumpster by happenstance. He even passes a polygraph test which is in admissible in court

but a technique that police often put faith in when it comes to evaluating potential suspects. Absent any evidence of wrongdoing and with increasing pressure from the public to give Willie the

“$50,000 reward cops caught him loose and roadway caught him a check. He also gets something”

priceless. A grateful academy extends an invitation to the ceremony and a car and driver to the event held March 26th at the Shrine auditorium in Los Angeles and he is the hero of the red carpet like so many articles say you know Arnold Schwarzenegger comes up to him. He was like you'll just thought I shouldn't say that you're like you're I've been watching a lot of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies it's weird how pregnancy gives you cravings that are sometimes media related.

That night American beauty wins the Oscar for best picture beating the likes of the green mile and the sixth sense and despite the presence of luminaries like Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie it's

Willie who is the star. Over 46 million people watch as he's called out by name by host Billy

Crystal clad in a tuxedo and top hat he waves to the crowd the hero civilian who made the ceremony possible. Hadn't he? There's an interesting addendum to that. Well the media played up the idea that the Oscar statuettes were needed for that year's show they didn't have the story exactly right. As far as certain things about the Oscar nobody was to ever know at that point that what we were making was for essentially next year. So as far as the whole world knew except for very few inside

the factory because even some of the employees had no idea that we were producing them like I said a year behind so then we just nothing was ever left a chance. The frantic search for the 2000 Oscars was actually a frantic search for the 2001 Oscars. RS Owens was according to Joseph working a year in advance just in case something like this were to

“ever happen. The show was never in any danger of handing out IO use. So why the mad rush to make more?”

It's possible though not confirmed that a dash to replenish the academy's Oscar inventory simply made for some good publicity. It is show business after all. As for Willie Fulgear he takes some of the reward money and buys a gold lexas possibly an homage to how he got his windfall. He also plans to use some of the funds to fix up a property in his home state of Mississippi. But when he returns from a trip there later in 2000 he discovers someone has stolen

a safe with the remaining reward money about $40,000. It was never recovered.

To Olivia, Willie's flirtation with fame and fleeting celebrity isn't quite the fuel-good story it appears to be and not just because he himself was robbed. For that night he is the guest of honor and then it's over the next day it's over. He is nothing to that community because he hasn't accomplished anything of note. He's just made it possible for the show to go on. Made it possible for the ceremony to continue so the people to receive their awards.

He's not part of the production. He's not going to be making movies and so he sort of becomes a footnote in the lore of that particular ceremony rather than a member of the community.

wouldn't actually cover until months after their recovery of the trophies.

“Willie had always maintained he had nothing to do with the heist itself.”

But his family tree told a little bit of a different story. When it turned out that he was the half-brother of John Willie Harris, the friend that led it the truck driver had brought the statuettes to. John Harris and Willie had actually arrived in California together in the 1960s, but both claimed to be estranged from one another. Harris denied that Willie had any involvement in the statuettes beyond finding them by sheer coincidence and Willie maintained he had nothing to do

with any of it. The polygraphs they put him through, you know, did not turn back anything suspicious. Apparently, you know, the fact that the two men were half-brothers was in consequential as they had been

estranged for some time. Willie full gear was never charged with any crime in connection to the

“Oscar heist. Was he involved or simply tipped off or was it all just a massive coincidence?”

We can't ask Willie. He died in 2007. In a sense, the trophies were a kind of trash. They were the raw materials of wish fulfillment among filmmakers. Without intent behind them, they're just trophies. Nameless and faceless trophies. That Oscar that once belonged to Vivian Lee and sold for a half-million, without her name, without her story, without the legacy of gone with the wind, it would have been just an auction of glorified tin alloy. If you've stolen one Oscar or

100 before they've been awarded, what have you really stolen? It's solid, but it might as well just dissolve in your hands. Once they are in the hands of their winners, once they symbolize the

“achievement that their winners are accomplished, then they will be worth more. They still won't be”

able to be sold, but they will be worth more in an abstract way. The Oscars are currently manufactured by Polic, Talix, Art Foundry in New York. Unless you're a Joseph Petrie, they probably look like every other Oscar out there with one small exception. The new company had a better butt because they were working with a newer technology that evolved. They went back to bronze, which was how they were originally made, and bronze is much harder than retaining them is, and so polishing

is rear down. It would take a lot more work than it's worth to try to do that, but I would say he had probably a little bit better butt with the new guys. Yeah, there was there was advancements in butt technology. There are mysteries within mysteries in the 2000 Oscars Heist, how the trophies wound up in that dumpster, whether Larry Lee Dent knew what he was driving off with, and whether it was just sheer coincidence, Willie Folgier stumbled upon a trash heap containing 500 pounds

of his brother-in-law's stolen loot. But there's one more. Just what happened to those 55 recovered statuettes? Were they given to winners during the ceremony? Or did they suffer a more gruesome fate? Here's Joseph Petrie again. There was always kind of some conflicting evidence or stories as to what actually happened. It was some had suggested that they had been destroyed because they were stolen, so now they're tainted. If you will, knowing the academy,

that would more than likely be my first thought. I never knew for a fact or nobody in our

organization to my knowledge knew exactly to a fact exactly what happened. At the time of their recovery, Academy Executive Director Bruce Davis said some of them would be handed out. A 2001 article in Vanity Fair states the stolen statuettes were cleaned, replayed, and handed out the following year. Because the statuettes have serial numbers, it would be simple enough to trace the ones taken from roadway express, and see if and when

didn't return our request for comment on what exactly happened to those 52 trophies. Oscar has a mystique to him, and it looks like the Academy wants to preserve that. And yes, I said 52. Of the 55 Oscars taken, only 52 were in the dumpster. One was recovered three years later in 2003 when a Florida drug bust uncovered a statuette in the possession of a drug dealer. When asked where he got it, the man said it had been given to

him by a person who had owed him $10,000. He took the Oscar in lieu of payment. That leaves

two Oscars outstanding. Somewhere out there there are two trophies never inscribed,

never awarded. Maybe their standing century in someone's garage or bathroom, modestly polished buttocks and all. If anyone out there happens to be listening and has one or both, Olivia has a request. If you do, and if you're listening, please, please contact me. I really love to talk to you about that. Another solid episode in the books. Any last minute

“Oscar thoughts or projections for either of you have you seen many of the nominated films?”

I have seen most of them, but unfortunately with a baby, it's hard to get to a theater, so I've watched them at home, which is never quite the same experience. But I feel very generic like I'm like on a dating profile being like, I love movies, but I do. I love movies. I'm such a sucker

for like a montage during the Oscars. It always makes me tear up. I really love the Oscars

in a non cheesy ironic way. It gets me very hyped and excited and makes me very proud to work in this industry. Yeah, I'm right there with you. I absolutely love the Oscars. My mother used to always post Oscar parties when I was young, and I still keep up through addition where I print out all of the nominations. We have a contest who can pick enough of them to write to win, and I look forward to it every year because it's just one of the coolest things. I've never

considered actually winning one of the little gold man statues, but stealing one. Now that's something I can't get behind. I think we should win one. If we were going to set our sights on it, is it a short film? Oh yeah, that maybe is the easiest one to win because you can kind of sneak in maybe.

“I think animated short people are really paying attention to that one. Do you see the strong premise?”

Some interesting iconic artwork. Do you're almost out there? Can you draw? Can any of us draw?

There's always a catch. Yeah, I can color. So if you guys can draw, I can do the color.

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