The $8M Heist from the Carnegie Library | Hacker News Reader

The $8M Heist from the Carnegie Library

smithsonianmag.com

140 pointsVigier47 comments

Cultural 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.

> 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.

Would be interested in seeing how many robberies are violent and armed vis a vis sentence lengths

While 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.

I 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-fac...

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2000-04-26-000427...

Second link just goes to the CT home page for me.

The 3 strikes rule is indeed a problem, but besides that the parent still has a point. A lot of the low-value robberies involve threats or violence, where as high-value art thefts pretty much never do.

What's worse, Nuisance crime or high impact crime? Do we come down on the fellow who stole a Twix bar for the n-th time or do we lock up the guy who proved that we really need million-dollar locks and alarms for the library holdings?

To play devils advocate, part of the purpose of prison is to shield society from people who are particularly damaging to society. Repeat offenders have shown that even after being given repeated negative reenforcement, they will still carry out activities damaging to society.

I'm not sure life in prison is the answer, but it does make sense that repeated aggressions would be met with stronger negative feedback.

This seems to be a case of "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

Perhaps the crux of the issue is in the "repeated negative reenforcement" and its failure to rehabilitate a person with anti-social behavior.

To bring it back to the library, the thefts occurred over 25 years.

I think the main reason the US throws people in prison for extended periods for petty crimes is if those crimes were repeat offences - so you have ridiculous situations where people serve years behind bars for stealing toothpaste.

This case is kind of odd though, as the perpetrator committed the same crime many times over a quarter of a century. The items stolen were also of great cultural value. So here we have a person who has repeatedly stolen cultural items, yet they get a very lenient sentence - I very much doubt the sentence would have been the same had he been a black man from a working class family.

This case really highlights the two-tier legal system that exists in the US.

> This case really highlights the two-tier legal system that exists in the US.

Like a life sentence for stealing hedge clippers. https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/06/us/louisiana-supreme-court-tr...

Or they have the wrong skin color.

Stealing culturally significant items from the public like this case is more similar to graft or corruption, or breach of fiduciary duty. White collar crime. Far from victimless, it hurts everyone.

How about a teller who steals $20 from the till at a Chase Bank? They will do jail time.

I want these two plunders to rot because people have done time for far less serious non-violent crimes.

This is rotten and perhaps crooked. Someone called in favor from the judge.

> I want these two plunders to rot because people have done time for far less serious non-violent crimes.

I would rather the lenience they experienced be extended to those who have done time for less serious crimes.

I am sorry but that is just wishful thinking. The exception here is the light sentences for these folks and the norm is jail time for others.

> that is just wishful thinking

Of course it is. That's kind of the point of my comment.

Imagine being sentenced to house arrest in 2020 of all years.

This 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".

Wait, they blacklisted you permanently for simply asking about the case?

Sounds reasonable to me, could be a reporter, private eye, or wotnot

Oh no, I've been back several times.

I 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.

I 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.

Thank you for the recommendation; visiting one is on my to-do list now.

These 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.

Yes please. Google would do it for free.

And then show you ads when you look at them.

Which 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.

And then they get bored of the project and delete everything.

Each of the above generating a 200 comment HN thread

So 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.

> These rare books are an intellectual heritage.

From the description in the article, it sure sounds so. Yet one detail in this story that grabbed me is that for 25 years, apparently not a single person noticed any of these books missing. Were there ZERO people who wanted to have a look at them? Was everybody who wanted to see a book being told it was "under restauration", was satisfied with the explanation and never followed up?

I wonder how much of a library's ancient book collection is just pride of ownership, rather than the opportunity to explore the books themselves.

[None of that is meant to excuse the crime, BTW]

From 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.

Agreed. 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.

The 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.

> 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!

I 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.

Sure, 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.

They mentioned it in the article that the only thing stopping someone from stealing things they are supposed to be protecting is a good conscience.

Pay them enough to put 4 kids through private school?

For someone to be solely responsible for such an invaluable collection? That doesn't sound outrageous at all.

I 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.

It 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.

Reminds 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-ca...

American Animals is a movie of a similar situation (if not the same one)

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