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The $8M Heist from the Carnegie Library
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bredren 6y agoI went to the Portland and Seattle rare book shows this past year. Rare book shows are a wonderfully slow thrill. Attendees are almost all senior citizens and there is some awesome stuff to behold. While all the sellers are in business to sell their books each have a love affair with their particular categories of collection. If you enjoy reading and these fairs resume I can’t recommend them enough. In just mild exposure to the stuff I’ve seen, reading the sentencing for the perpetrators feels painfully modest. Given how drug crimes are prosecuted, it seems like these guys got off with barely any impact. It doesn’t seem fair, probably because it isn’t.
- RandomBacon 6y agoThank you for the recommendation; visiting one is on my to-do list now.
- PascLeRasc 6y agoThis was in my city. It was such a weird story, everyone was acting like there's absolutely nothing that could be done other than a slap on the wrist. I've actually been going to the Caliban bookstore for years and was there around August 2018, and was about to buy an old record but asked an employee about how the case was going, and they told me to get out and never come back. It's just the kind of thing that screams "this should be looked into a little more".
- dwohnitmok 6y agoWait, they blacklisted you permanently for simply asking about the case?
- quickthrower2 6y agoSounds reasonable to me, could be a reporter, private eye, or wotnot
- PascLeRasc 6y agoOh no, I've been back several times.
- Vaslo 6y agoI lived in Oakland for about 10 years and frequented the library and occasionally stopped at Caliban. I am amazed that they are still open! It’s incredible they were able to get away with it for so long, and even more so the lenience if the punishment. The library guy will feel the pain more since he is an older felon with no experience other than the library job. Caliban could survive or rebrand. I guess the fact there aren’t many rare bookstores will be their saving grace.
- canada_dry 6y ago> The recipient and re-seller of the stolen books - Schulman - was not only a member of the Antique Books Assoc he had served on its ethics and standards committee. Not really that shocking... really it's no different than people who regularly attend Church every Sunday yet lie and cheat the rest of the week without batting an eye!
- jonathanliu 6y agoI think people have this internal moral scale where they're okay to sin if they throw a few bucks into the collection plate. So serving on the ethics board might've made him feel okay to cheat.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoThese rare books are an intellectual heritage. One thing that should be top priority for libraries that have these valuable works is high fidelity digital scans of all their works. Any location in the world can be subject to man-made or natural destruction. If these collections are digitized and placed online, at least there is a better chance of the knowledge being preserved.
- emmelaich 6y agoYes please. Google would do it for free.
- acheron 6y agoAnd then show you ads when you look at them.
- mindcrime 6y agoWhich you will either A. block with uBlock Origin, etc. or B. not be bothered by if you choose not to use an ad blocker This isn't the worst imaginable outcome, especially weighed against losing access the the resources altogether.
- fyver 6y agoAnd then they get bored of the project and delete everything.
- quickthrower2 6y agoEach of the above generating a 200 comment HN thread
- PapaBless 6y agoMore google control, no thxs.
- _ph_ 6y agoSo much this. In recent years, we had one large library with historic books and one city archive of a 1000 years largely damaged and destroyed by a fire and a building collapse. These kind of heritage all should be digitized in high-res and put online so that a) all people have access to this heritage and b) the online archives could be easily replicated. If there were just 10 archives for a country like Germany, and all these archives would replicate each other, this would mean a huge level of safety. Add Amazon glacier or something to it, and we have a good chance of preserving this important part of history.
- pavel_lishin 6y agoCultural heritage aside, it's incredible that someone can rob someone to the tune of eight million dollars, and their punishment is a few years of house arrest, while someone who steals candy from a bodega gets to spend years if not decades in prison. I don't want these two dingdongs to rot in prison; I want our justice system to treat all criminals proportionally.
- anon84827820 6y ago> while someone who steals candy from a bodega gets to spend years if not decades in prison it's usually because the bodega thief is waving a gun around and threatening to kill someone, while the library thief isn't.
- sushshshsh 6y agoWould be interested in seeing how many robberies are violent and armed vis a vis sentence lengths
- adventured 6y agoWhile the parent is correct that the person robbing a store is very likely using a weapon to do it, they left out that the US uses a rather extreme increasing punishment system for repeat offenders. People robbing stores, I'd wager, are often repeat offenders. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws over the last few decades have dramatically increased the prison-time durations for those people, even for many lesser/low violence crimes.
- tyingq 6y agoI believe it's an example of a "3 strikes" type rule where it really was just shoplifting. Here's a couple examples. No violence, just shoplifting: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/04/473004950/new-orleans-man-faces-20-years-to-life-for-candy-bar-theft https://www.npr.org/2016/04/04/473004950/new-orleans-man-fac... https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2000-04-26-0004270254-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2000-04-26-000427...
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- TwoBit 6y agoFrom a security perspective I think this results from a single person being able to act unchecked. Reminds me of the McDonald's game system cheat in which a single person controlled the entire country's game pieces unchecked.
- foreigner 6y agoAgreed. The article describes it as "defense in depth" but then goes on to say that one person held all the keys. That's negligence on the part of the library and their reputation should rightly suffer for it.
- dreamcompiler 6y agoThe McDonald's system had ostensible two-person control. It failed because the second person was a woman who could not follow her male partner into the restroom. The Carnegie Library didn't seem to even have ostensible two-person control.
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- ooobit2 6y agoI feel bad, but then I remember that Aaron Swartz (created RSS, Markdown, and co-founded Reddit) committed suicide after federal charges would have put him in prison for life for stealing public grant-funded research papers from JSTOR at MIT. I truly do not care about library theft at this point. Steal it all. There's nothing in their possession more important than a life, especially someone like Aaron, who had done so much good with his before he had even turned 18.
- nestorD 6y agoIt is not, at all, the same kind of thief or library. Old books are unique pieces and having them in library make them accesible to the largest number (digitalization being the obvious next step). Stealing them and selling them to private collectors makes them inacessible to the public. Academic papers are accesible as pdf provided by editors, they can trivially be copied and shared without making the originals less accesible. Pirating them makes them more accesible and does not hurt the public (at least this is my belief, editors hold a different position). Equating libraries that provide a public service with editors that restrict access to knowledge hurts more than it helps.
- godmode2019 6y agoAmerican Animals is a movie of a similar situation (if not the same one)
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- kickling 6y agoReminds me of the director of the royal coin cabinet in Stockholm, Sweden. He sold coins and medals from the museum for a value of 20 million sek (~$2m) through a coin collector/trader from 1997 until a few years ago. He could only be sentenced for selling 10% of those coin because of lack of evidence. https://coinsweekly.com/theft-at-the-stockholm-royal-coin-cabinet/ https://coinsweekly.com/theft-at-the-stockholm-royal-coin-ca...
- PapaBless 6y agoThings like this should be digitized and shared as much as possible, to prevent consolidation.
- NautilusWave 6y agoSure, stealing is bad; but honestly, don't underpay the person in charge of something so valuable! Besides that, this sounds like extreme negligence on behalf of the library.
- felipemnoa 6y agoThey mentioned it in the article that the only thing stopping someone from stealing things they are supposed to be protecting is a good conscience.
- quickthrower2 6y agoPay them enough to put 4 kids through private school?
- NautilusWave 6y agoFor someone to be solely responsible for such an invaluable collection? That doesn't sound outrageous at all.