14 DAY TRIAL // Sometimes background and periodical psychological checks of employees are in order. I know nobody's going to do it because I said so, but some have already suffered because they skipped that part and went straight to the hiring. Such is the case of Daniel Lorello, a 54-year-old New York state employee, who had access to government owned archives and stole hundreds of historic documents from them, as Reuters reports.
Important pieces of United States history have gone "missing," like an 1823 letter written by U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun, copies of the Davy Crockett Almanacs and pamphlets in his writing. The police were noticed by a history buff who noticed them on the popular site eBay, up for auction, the state attorney general's office said in a statement.
The defendant's plea was "innocent," despite formerly confessing to stealing, in 2007 alone, something between 300 and 400 documents. The police have recovered about 400 of those items, roughly 90 percent of all those taken, if we believe Lorello. Some of the prices fetched for the items are nice sums, ranging from $1,001 to $3,200 (Davy Crockett's Almanac). That's a little extra pocket change for a department of education archivist, right?
The online auction site, eBay, has collaborated with the authorities all throughout the investigation and provided information about all the actions taken by the accused, drawing attention to a Currier & Ives lithograph, described by Lorello as being "in excellent condition."
He must not have been very familiar with the Internet, or else he would have known that a theft of this magnitude and, more over, advertised publicly on eBay would not go unpunished. Or perhaps he thought that nobody would notice the missing documents. I mean, yeah, who gives a damn on old pieces of paper? Especially, when they hold your country's history.