Movies
The Night 55 Oscars Went Missing
Two weeks before the 2000 Academy Awards, every one of that year's 55 statuettes vanished in transit. A dumpster-diver behind a Food 4 Less thought they were toys.
I thought they were toys. Brass. And I can sell brass by the pound.
Two and a half weeks before the 72nd Academy Awards, a 500-pound pallet holding all 55 of that year''s newly minted, serial-numbered Oscar statuettes vanished in transit from the Chicago manufacturer to Los Angeles. The Academy scrambled: about 20 factory workers at R.S. Owens worked around the clock to remake the entire inventory in time for the ceremony.
Meanwhile, on the evening of March 19, 2000, a 61-year-old junk scavenger named Willie Fulgear was digging through dumpsters behind a Food 4 Less in Koreatown, looking for cardboard boxes. His foot bumped something: 52 gold statuettes packed in Styrofoam. He loaded them into his 1989 Cadillac, figured out what he had, and called the TV station and the police.
Fulgear collected the $50,000 reward, two tickets to the ceremony, a free tux, and a chauffeured sedan, and briefly boasted he had "more Oscars than any of the movie stars." Two dock workers were arrested; of the three statuettes still missing, one turned up three years later in Florida during an unrelated FBI drug investigation.
The lo.st takeaway: The Oscars carried serial numbers, yet still needed an honest stranger and a media frenzy to get home. Serial numbers only work if the finder knows where to check. A scannable tag turns "I thought they were toys" into an instant match.