A decades-long case involving stolen historic rifles has come to an in depth at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution. On 13 March, a ceremony on the establishment marked the restoration of greater than 50 weapons stolen from 16 separate museums over the course of the late Nineteen Sixties and 70s, together with the Daniel Boone Homestead in Pennsylvania, the Museum of Connecticut Historical past, and the Beauvoir Museum in Biloxi Mississippi, USA Right this moment reported.
Starting in 1968, historic pistols had been reportedly pilfered from collections throughout the US. Museums typically didn’t discover for weeks, months or years that their armories had been compromised. The instances all went chilly till 2009, when Pennsylvania detectives Andrew Rathfon and Brendan Dougherty acquired a false tip involving a gun faraway from the Valley Forge Historic Society.
The pair then started a 14-year nationwide investigation, which, due to what Rathfon described to USA Right this moment as a couple of “fortunate breaks and confidential sources”, led them to the residence of Michael Kintner Corbett in Newark, Delaware. On 24 Might 2017, a crew led by FBI artwork crimes agent Jake Archer searched Corbett’s house, uncovering an unparalleled trove of lacking historic firearms, the manufacture of which spanned your complete historical past of the US, though none truly matched the outline of the unique lacking objects that spurred the search.
Corbett, a 73-year-old historical past buff, struck a plea deal for possession of stolen property in 2022, resulting in a single day in jail, 14 months of home arrest and a effective of $65,000. In keeping with his legal professional, Barry Gross, Corbett by no means supposed to promote the weapons, solely “to have them”. Whereas a “nice quantity” of Corbett’s weapons had been acquired via authentic means from property gross sales and flea markets, Corbett’s potential to guide officers to the previously undisclosed places of the lacking Valley Forge weapons advised a unique story. Authorities couldn’t show Corbett’s involvement within the preliminary burglaries, though assistant US legal professional normal KT Newton quipped that, “I’ll go away you to your individual conclusions” when questioned on the topic.
“We do know that quite a lot of firearms and different objects stolen from the identical museum on the similar time had been present in his house,” Newton advised USA Right this moment. “We additionally do know that within the distant previous, Michael Corbett himself had been arrested and charged with a housebreaking … on the Common Mansfield home, the headquarters for the Middlesex County Historic Society in Connecticut.”
The 13 March ceremony on the Museum of the American Revolution was attended by cultural heritage staff from everywhere in the US, from the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts to the Delaware County Historic Society. “It provides you hope,” ZeeAnn Mason, chief working officer for the Museum of the American Revolution, stated. “When 50 years later we’re capable of get well these objects, it means there’s at all times hope.”
