Looking for stolen Michael Jordan RC PSA 9 - plus many others! SOLVED!
findingjordan86
Posts: 6 ✭
Hi, I'm trying to get some eyeballs on this stolen Jordan rookie that belonged to my father-in-law, Neil Taylor, who was a sports card & memorabilia dealer and collector in Kennewick, WA. He passed away in 2019.
It was ripped off, along with tens of thousands of dollars of other items, by an electrician that his widow hired - I know this is a long shot but here's the info. It's the only PSA number we have, and are hoping if it's ever located (even in several years), it may lead to other cards or who the thief sold them too. (if the cases weren't cracked).
I made two videos showing me going through his vast collection and examining the theft:
Part 1 -
Part 2 -
These videos tell the whole story so far. We've reached out to PSA already, and of course police, insurance, etc. But we're also trying a grassroots thing to see if we get any pings.
Email us at findingjordan86@gmail.com with any tips! (cash reward if they lead to cards)
We know this is an insane long shot, and probably pointless, but it's a wild story. So here we go. Might as well try - thanks for looking!
57 Michael Jordan RC PSA 9 #15448259
https://www.psacard.com/cert/15448259
Share if you can. Here's the whole list of what we know of.
Stolen Cards - Neil Taylor Collection
Here’s what we know of:
1955 Bowman #179 Hank Aaron RC PSA 4
1963 Topps Pete Rose RC PSA 4
1989 Upper Deck #1 Ken Griffey Jr. RC PSA 10
**1968 Topps **
50 Hank Aaron PSA 6
230 Pete Rose PSA 4 & PSA 6
247 Johnny Bench PSA 4.5
280 Mickey Mantle PSA 6
1971 Topps - dozens are missing, but here’s notable ones:
100 Pete Rose PSA 7 & 6
513 Nolan Ryan PSA 7,6,3
600 Willie Mays PSA 7,6
630A Roberto Clemente PSA 7,7,5
630B Roberto Clemente PSA ?
72-78 Topps - several PSA cards gone
1986-87 Fleer NBA stolen cards - all key cards gone
7 Charles Barkley RC PSA 8
9 Larry Bird PSA 8
26 Clyde Drexler RC PSA 9
31 Julius Erving PSA 8
32 Patrick Ewing RC PSA 8
53 Magic Johnson PSA 8
57 Michael Jordan RC PSA 9 - PSA 15448259
67 Jeff Malone RC PSA 8
68 Karl Malone RC PSA 9
68 Karl Malone RC PSA 8
73 Kevin McHale RC PSA 9
76 Johnny Moore PSA 9
77 Chris Mullin RC PSA 9
82 Akeem Olajuwon RC PSA 9
92 Alvin Robertson RC PSA 10
102 Jack Sikma PSA 9
107 Terry Teagle PSA 9
109 Isiah Thomas RC PSA 8
128 Al Wood PSA 9
132 Checklist PSA 9
132 Checklist PSA 8
1986-87 Fleer Stickers
Comments
That sucks. Sorry to hear and good luck.
Bosox1976
Dang!!! I hate a thief!
Update: it appears the card on PSAcard.com has been reholdered and his the actual card I photographed in 2019. I'm working with PSA on this to get that number flagged and voided. It was reholdered in Oct 2021, which lines up with our burglary timeline. We've got all this in the police report - so who knows? We may see it again (if we can prove ownership, that is)!
Please be sure and look at the current Musser Brothers August Consignment auction. They are in Pasco, wa. Have website. Is many many cards and memorabilia at this current auction, and you can view past ones. I've seen lots of sports cards. They are a good company, and If by chance you could identify anything? I've not one doubt they would cooperate with LE. Best of luck...
Hey, I should update this - I actually caught the guy selling our stuff on his ebay account in early June and he got arrested a couple weeks ago. Booyea
Wow! Did you get any of the cards back?
HOF SIGNED FOOTBALL RCS
Did Ebay help you out directly in this instance or only law enforcement? I can never seem to get them to take removals seriously.
Oh yeah!!! That is awesome news!!
That's great news.
Successful card BST transactions with cbcnow, brogurt, gstarling, Bravesfan 007, and rajah 424.
love to hear corrupt individuals get busted and hopefully he has to serve time...these idiots will never learn...has a good electrician job and he just couldn't help himself...
Here's a thorough update for the curious!
People want to know if we're getting any cards back. Sadly, all the stolen cards are in the wind - though we essentially know what happened to all of them. All the higher-end stuff has been sold and resold multiple times by now, and we know the Jordan rookie card has been sold 2 or 3 times since last fall. The thief sold it for cash to a card dealer in Tacoma, who photographed his drivers license since the thief wanted cash (the dealer had this policy regarding cash transactions).
But what we learned (and already kind of knew going into all this) is that since none of the people who bought cards off of the thief knew they were buying stolen goods, they are under no obligation to return the items. So, there’s no point in us pursuing that. But the thief owes us all the money he made selling our stuff (about 40k restitution for the sales) - if he ever pays up, that is. That end of things is just beginning for us - he confessed to everything once confronted with the drivers license photo the police got from the card dealer in Tacoma. The dude is going to prison 1-2 years for this, and apparently is in the process of taking a plea deal.
In the end, we’ll probably get some money out of the guy, and a search of his residence turned up about 8-10K additional cards, mostly raw commons from what I’ve seen. It seems he just grabbed bunches of cards and jammed them into his work bag, over and over, throughout the summer of 2021. We actually haven’t seen what was confiscated from his home yet - we’re picking the cards up in a couple weeks. Potentially in the mix is thousands of raw cards from the 50s-60s that are missing. I know he sold some of the nicer ones (a really cool raw ’56 Topps Ted Williams, for example) on his eBay, and in the backgrounds of his eBay auction listing photos I saw hundreds of our raw 50s cards stacked up on his bed. Boxes and bags, piles everywhere. We have some pics of what the cops found - among the recovered items I saw a complete raw set of 72 Topps MLB, so that’s actually pretty awesome to get back (Neil loved late 60s-early 70s Topps MLB sets the most).
Here’s the process that led to the arrest. So, to begin, I knew the name of the electrician who stole the cards, but we had no direct evidence to link him to the crimes - even though we all knew he did it. The police officer assigned to the case knew he did it too, but it was all circumstantial. So we had to find some cards he sold and link the sales back to him.
But we didn’t know any cert numbers, really. I had photos of only two certs that I took in 2019, and one of them was the Jordan card - so I had that cert number. The other cert number I had was a 71 Topps Wilt Chamberlin card (a crucial bit of evidence, in the end). At the time, that’s all I had to go on. I started by calling sports card and pawn shops in the area, and one proprietor suggested I try posting this story on social media, and see what turns up.
So I decided to try getting the collecting community involved. My social media campaign on Instagram from late May (see first post, above) put me in contact with several collectors who were interested in helping out - including a former state trooper who immediately found the Jordan card on psacard, except he noted it had been reholdered. He found it within 12 hours of me posting about it! Neil’s holder was old - he got the Jordan card fresh in a pack when they came out (he actually bought cases of 86-87 Fleer from a local gas station the day they arrived, and scored 3 that way - he knew Jordan would be good), and had them graded sometime in the late 90s or early 00’s (the other two were PSA 7’s, and he sold them a couple years before he passed). So, I knew whoever bought the Jordan rookie likely didn’t know it was stolen, since they sent it BACK to PSA to have it reholdered.
So I called PSA customer service to let them know I found our stolen card, but I got nowhere, and was left frustrated. It was at that point that the former state trooper who found the stolen Jordan card on PSA’s site offered to introduce me to his acquaintance, Nat Turner, who then connected me to Jackie Curiel, the PSA chief-of-staff. She was able to confirm that in fact, the Jordan had been reholdered in Oct 2021. But, without a warrant, PSA could not release any info about who submitted it, and then only to the police, not me. We had to prove we owned it, which meant showing Neil was the original submitter… but he kept no records. That’s when we found out he personally had no PSA account, and that it appeared a third party had submitted cards on his behalf over the years. We had to figure out who, so I called my mother-in-law to see if she remembered anyone he collected with who might have done that for him, and she actually knew! We tracked him down - and then with him on board, we were able to connect him with Jackie at PSA to prove our ownership so we could get the cert deactivated and begin the hunt for actual hard proof in earnest.
At this point, the local police weren’t too interested - it happened in a small town, and generally smalltown police departments simply have no resources for a hobby case like this. They weren’t getting back to us, so I continued to kind of poke around PSAcard’s site and entered the cert number for the 71 Topps Chamberlin card - and an eBay auction appeared on the cert page. It showed the username, and it was the electrician thief's name - he had recently sold it! He used a variation of his own name as his eBay username, so it was pretty obvious it was our guy. Though his eBay account had been deactivated since late 2021, all of his sales feedback was still viewable, and there I found evidence of sales of around 100 of our cards, including a few of the high-end ones. It was easy to confirm they were ours, as the holders had Neil’s hand-written stickers on the backs, with his filing system codes. I made a massive spreadsheet with all I’d gathered and sent it to Jackie - and then she connected us with their FBI agent, who specializes in hobby crimes.
I spoke to the agent on the phone in mid-June, and he said that overall, the case was too small for the FBI, but that he’d be happy to call the local police department and light a fire under their butts, show them how to build the case — and it worked. Within a few days, we had a detective assigned to the case (who was awesome) and I gave him all the evidence I’d compiled. He was majorly stoked. From there, he was able to request search warrants for both PSAcard the thief's ebay. Ebay took about 14 days to comply, I think, but PSAcard turned over the info immediately. Sure enough, the person who submitted the Jordan rookie card for reholdering was the dealer who bought it off our thief. When contacted by the detective, the dealer was very helpful - plus he had a photo of our thief’s drivers license from the sale. That’s when we officially had him dead to rights.
After eBay complied with the warrant and the detective got the info he needed, the police were going to move to make an arrest - this would have been mid-July. But, a big local case came up, and our detective went on vacation, so they had to push the arrest back, which ended up being exactly what needed to happen. Since we were monitoring his ebay accounts, and the police already had warrants for those accounts, if he posted new auctions in the time between the warrants and the arrest, the detective would be able to apply for a physical search warrant for his home, as it showed he still had stolen property in his home). The dude posted auctions of a few items that week, and the next week he was arrested on multiple felony counts of trafficking stolen property.
Now we’re waiting for next steps, and we’re very pleased with how everything has progressed thus far. All I wanted was to get this scumbag guy who ripped off my family - money and cards be damned!
The only card I truly miss is the 55 Bowman Hank Aaron card.. and the 55 Bowman Jackie Robinson.. and 55 Bowman Mickey Mantle. Really, those and all the 50s and 60s Mantles. All medium grades (3.5-6 range), but so pretty and cool. 65 Topps Mantle. Oof.
Silver lining - the thief didn’t know about the safe in the closet. In the safe was an old autographed Mantle 8x10 (authentic), and about 20K worth of unopened 60s and 70s wax packs in pristine condition! Also, lots of authenticated HOF’er autographed baseballs. Super cool!
It was a gut-punch to see all of the key cards of Neil’s late 60s and early 70s complete graded Topps sets missing, but there is lots of cool memories in the collection left behind, which helps take away the sting… a little bit. Neil was a huge Mariners fan, and all of the crazy Mariners memorabilia he owned was still there (um, plus tons of SPACE JAM stuff), and I was able to gift it to friends who’d appreciate it. I kept several 80s cello packs to give away to friends - it’s been fun to rip into those 88 Donruss packs and see ‘ole Wally “Absorbing” Joyner or Donnie Baseball peeking out at us!
By the way, the list of stolen in my first post is just the tip of the iceberg! I found a lot more I didn't even know Neil had once I found the ebay sales info.
That's a great resolution even if you lost some of the collection. I love the stories where the scumbag gets their due. It truly is another story of a greedy person doing so many stupid things that gets him caught.
Good for you, and I hope that idiot thinks about Ebay every day he's in prison.
I'm sorry. I can't believe this is true. I mean (obviously) the thief can't give good title to the cards he sold. Are you seriously suggesting that if I were to steal a card that was worth $10,000 and sell it to an ostensibly unaware third party for $4,000 that you can't recover the card once you trace it, but are only allowed to recover the $4,000. I can't understand why you wouldn't get whatever cards that you could find back and that everyone who was victimized by this clown by buying cards to which he didn't have good title has a claim of restitution from him.
Daltex - I was told this by the FBI and the local police, and two civil attorneys. Technically, law enforcement can’t force the new owners to turn the stuff over to us. It’s not that we CAN’T pursue the cards or that it’s impossible - it’s that in this case it would require us filing a civil suit against the new card owner. One could pursue it, but generally that doesn’t end well, and can drag on for years - this is according to the FBI’s hobby crimes specialist. In these posts, I’m only referring to what I learned and went through in our specific circumstances.
Wow, that just doesnt sound right to me, either. Stolen property by definition cannot be legitimately sold and if the cards are traced they should be returned to the rightful owner. Otherwise, just fence the stolen goods and the rightful owner is SOL?
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
That is so horrible. I'm not sure if I could live with myself knowing that a prized collectible was stolen. YMMV.
Thank you for the long explanation. Great job following up and not giving up!
I hope they don't let him plea his way out of prison. He needs to be sent away to prison, not spend a year in county.
Successful card BST transactions with cbcnow, brogurt, gstarling, Bravesfan 007, and rajah 424.