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

27:10Dana Schwartz:Brady's story may have been invented, but plenty of Oscars have gone AWOL. Since the Academy's first ceremony in 1929, roughly 80 Oscars have gone missing, including the 55 from the Roadway Express 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, heist movies 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$4 million or whatever.

28:00Or a museum is unaware that the thing was stolen and they've acquired it. Like, there seems to be, like, some wiggle room, especially regarding the history of some of the art pieces, you know.

28:13Dana Schwartz: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.

29:04Dana Schwartz:O 'Brien plays Tootie, the younger sister of Judy Garland's Esther. When she won the award, she was just eight 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 'Briens fired her. She didn't return the award, possibly out of spite. For the next 40 years, the statuette 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.

30:02Dana Schwartz: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 Whoopi 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 R.S. Owens for refurbishing. But R.S.

30:51Dana Schwartz:Owens only got an empty box. Apparently the Oscar en route to Chicago, no, it never left California. A security guard found it in a garbage can. Presumably someone had seen the box, opened it, and then removed the Oscar, or was afraid that, you know, they would be seen with an Oscar and dumped it. The Academy, as it does, 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 forego the plan. So the security guard found it in the garbage and it was sent back to the Academy and then sent it back to Lovie Goldberg.

31:35Dana Schwartz: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 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 inscribed 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.

32:25What am I supposed to do with this thing, actually?

32:28Dana Schwartz:For these thieves, the answer involves a lot of finger-pointing. And a dumpster.

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35:23Dana Schwartz: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 Knowles of Ain't It 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. me. But those were nothing compared to the mass disappearance of 55 Oscar trophies. Once Roadway Express bumps the reward up to$50 ,000, Detective Mark Zavala gets a call.

36:19Dana Schwartz:It was another anonymous tipster. This person advised Zavala to take a look at a roadway forklift operator named Anthony Hart. This caller claims he actually saw Hart load the Oscar pallet onto the truck of one Larry Ledent, a driver for the company. Sure enough, both Ledent 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. So Zavala drives to the home of Anthony Hart, who refuses to discuss anything at all. 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.

37:13Dana Schwartz: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. We'll 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 schemed 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 purloined Oscars, Oscars that Hart had apparently forklifted into his truck.

38:16Dana Schwartz:Here's Olivia again. I think Hart was the one who told Lett, like, put something on your truck. And he was like, okay. And then later realized that they were Oscar statuettes and freaked out because they were, it's not like a rug 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.

39:04Dana Schwartz:Happens every day. Harris agreed, but the statuettes 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.

39:50Dana Schwartz:But authorities do wind up charging Hart months later, after Lee Dent offers additional testimony about Hart's role, and after police uncover 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.

40:40Dana Schwartz: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 Full Gear. Willie, as you'll recall, is the scavenger who was looking for packing boxes in a Koreatown dumpster and got a surprise instead.

41:36He thought, apparently, that what he had found was 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 he saw that it was something else. His son did an internet search and realized there was a reward out for them.

41:56Dana Schwartz:Armed with the knowledge he had a lot more than packing boxes on his hands, Willie makes two phone calls, one to the LAPD and one to a 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 happen across them? Or did someone tell him where they could be found? Police think it's odd, too. They 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.

42:56Dana Schwartz:He even passes a polygraph test, which is inadmissible 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 cut him loose and Roadway cut 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 and is like, you're the star.

43:45I shouldn't say that. You know, they're like, I've been watching a lot of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. It's weird how pregnancy gives you cravings that are sometimes media related.

43:54Dana Schwartz: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. While 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.

44:44So 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 nothing was ever left to chance.

45:00Dana Schwartz:The frantic search for the 2000 Oscars was actually a frantic search for the 2001 Oscars. R.S. 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 IOUs. 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 Full Gear, he takes some of the reward money and buys a gold Lexus, possibly in 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.

45:58Dana Schwartz: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 feel-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, for the people to receive their awards.

46:46He's not part of a 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. And a year later, his life is horrible.

47:05Dana Schwartz:There's also that one final twist that authorities wouldn't actually cover until months after the 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 Lennant, 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 these statuettes beyond finding them by sheer coincidence.

47:53Dana Schwartz: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 inconsequential as they had been estranged for some time. Willie Fulgear 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.

48:46Dana Schwartz:Nameless and faceless trophies. That Oscar that once belonged to Vivian Leigh 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 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.

49:34Dana Schwartz:The Oscars are currently manufactured by Polich Tallix Art Foundry in New York. And unless you're 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 britanium is. And so polishing his rear down 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.

50:20Yeah, there was advancements in butt technology.

50:28Dana Schwartz: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 Fulgear 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.

51:23So 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.

51:39Dana Schwartz: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, replated, 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 they were ever awarded. But a representative for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 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.

52:29Dana Schwartz: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 they're standing sentry 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.

53:25If you do and if you're listening, please, please contact me. I would really love to talk to you about that.

53:34Another solid episode in the books. Any last minute Oscar thoughts or projections for either of you? Have you seen many of the nominated films?

53:44Dana Schwartz: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 host Oscar parties when I was young, and I still keep up through tradition where I print out all of the nominations.

54:22We 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. And I've never considered actually winning one of the little gold man statues, but stealing one. Now that's something I can get behind. I think we should win one if we were going to set our sights on it. Is it a short film?

54:41Dana Schwartz:Oh yeah. That maybe is the easiest one to win because you can kind of sneak in maybe. I think animated short. People aren't really paying attention to that one. Yeah. Have you seen a strong premise, some interesting iconic artwork? You're almost happy 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 coloring. Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people. This show is hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zarin Burnett, and Jason English. Our senior producer is Josh Fisher. Today's episode was written by Jake Rossum. Editing and sound design by Jonathan Washington.

55:19Mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher. Additional editing by Mary Du. Original music by Elise McCoy. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Social clips by Yarberry Media. Our executive producer is Jason English. If you want to email the show, another mailbag episode is coming. Very special episodes at gmail.com. Very special episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.

56:16We'll see you next time. weather never takes you by surprise, so you can plan every day with confidence. Download the free weather bug app from the App Store today and start getting accurate weather forecasts 24-7. This is Ashley Akinetti from the Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous podcast. iVeam is built for losing weight and moving forward. iVeam is built for feeling your best and seeing real results. iVeam is a medical weight loss program built for you. Their approach is individualized, virtual, integrative medicine. 99.2 % of patients who've completed the IVIM weight loss protocol achieved meaningful change, dropping an average of 45 pounds.

57:01IVIM, built for your wellness journey. IVIM, built for real life. When you sign up right now, you can get a one month free trial. Start your personalized plan in minutes by visiting IVIMHealth.com. That is IVIMHealth.com. Subscription required, medication, labs, and supplements not included. Results based on patients who completed the full IV protocol over 68 weeks. Individual results may vary. Not all patients are eligible. Prescription medication may carry risks and should be used only as directed by your provider. Discover a spectacular island destination. with crystal blue seas, endless sunshine, and the cool Bahamian breeze.

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