Oscars: In 2000, 55 gold statuettes were stolen from an LA loading dock. What happened subsequent?

Get our free weekly electronic mail for all the most recent cinematic information from our movie critic Clarisse Loughrey

Get our The Life Cinematic electronic mail without spending a dime

On the night of 19 March 2000, Willie Fulgear went dumpster diving. It was what he did most nights. He’d moved to Los Angeles 40 years earlier with goals of changing into a singer, however that plan had by no means labored out. Instead, he made his cash scavenging for the jewels of the junkyard. Usually previous bits of automotive. Anything that may promote to steel outlets. But that night time was completely different. Behind the Food-4-Less in Koreatown, he struck gold. Dozens of little gold males, the truth is. Gleaming up at him, in a mattress of Styrofoam, were 52 Oscars statuettes.

Fulgear frantically loaded the 24-carat gold-plated goodies into his 1989 Cadillac Coupe De Ville and sped residence. One fast web search later, he understood what he had: a small military of Academy Awards, with a $50,000 reward connected. He instantly referred to as the native TV station and the police. He was wealthy!

Just six days earlier, on 13 March, Academy govt director Bruce Davis was en path to the annual nominees’ luncheon on the Beverly Hilton when he received the panicked name telling him that the statuettes were lacking. A consultant from RS Owens, the Chicago-based firm that made the trophies, was ringing to tell him that on 8 March, 55 of them had been stolen from an LA loading dock.

A Vanity Fair investigation in 2001 reported that whereas the trophies were sitting on the LA sorting facility, somebody had noticed the Academy’s branding on the pallet. After tearing open one field, staffers on the graveyard shift allegedly posed for images with the Oscars, holding them up for the digicam like Hollywood winners. In the hours that adopted, the pallet ended up on a truck headed for Hawthorne, and never their supposed vacation spot, Beverly Hills. From that time on, the Oscars were formally off-grid.

An enormous hunt for the lacking Oscars started. A 24-hour tip line was arrange, the FBI was referred to as in, and there was a plea to dock staff to return ahead with any info, with a $50,000 reward placed on the desk.

Following an investigation, just a few tipsters had come out of the woodwork. On 18 March – the day earlier than Fulgear discovered the trophies – police arrested truck driver Lawrence Edward Ledent and forklift operator Anthony Hart at their respective properties. Ledent, sharing his story with Vanity Fair’s Mark Seal from jail, insisted it was Hart who had initiated the heist, putting the pallet on Ledent’s truck however not telling him what was inside.

When Ledent, who knew he was carrying stolen items of some form, completed his route, curiosity received the higher of him. He took a peek inside and located the Oscars. Reeling, he took them to his good friend John Willie Harris’s home. Harris, a garbage truck driver, was appalled to get residence to seek out Ledent storing the trophies there. He despatched him away and the Oscars were dumped. Somewhere within the course of, three golden knights received separated from the remaining.

Ledent, Hart and Harris were all sentenced in reference to the theft. A few the three lacking Oscars are believed to have turned up in a federal drug raid in Miami in 2003, however one remains to be on the market someplace.

In a weird twist, Harris turned out to be the estranged half-brother of Fulgear, the person who discovered the trophies by some bins, however detectives – after questioning Fulgear for hours and hooking him as much as a polygraph – determined that this was pure coincidence, and there was no suspicious connection between the heist and the invention.

Access limitless streaming of flicks and TV exhibits with Amazon Prime Video

Sign up now for a 30-day free trial

Sign up

Access limitless streaming of flicks and TV exhibits with Amazon Prime Video

Sign up now for a 30-day free trial

Sign up

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the stolen Oscars – which had been supposed for the 2001 ceremony the next 12 months – were later destroyed. “They were never going to hand out a stolen statue,” RS Owens’ design director Joseph Petree advised the publication.

And what grew to become of Fulgear? He had an increase and fall match for a Hollywood film. At first, he was an area hero, and was offered with a cheque for $50,000 at a press convention in entrance of the LAPD headquarters. The Academy additionally gave him two seats to that 12 months’s ceremony, a free tux and a chauffeured sedan. Fulgear reportedly requested “How long is the limo?” when Academy boss Davis phoned with the invitation. When Davis advised him there’d be no limousine, Fulgear wangled one courtesy of Inside Edition, in alternate for an unique in regards to the ceremony.

Fulgear hit the purple carpet later that month along with his son, Allen. Arnold Schwarzenegger shook his hand, telling him, “Willie, you’re a born star!’” He even received a shout-out onstage from host Billy Crystal, with Fulgear waving his high hat to the gang and Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman applauding the person of the hour.

But the nice instances didn’t final. A 12 months later, Fulgear advised Vanity Fair: “Man, I wish I’d never seen them Oscars. It built me up one day and pushed me right back down the next day. I’m taking medication! I am stressed! I mean stressed out!”

The very first thing he’d finished along with his winnings was purchase a $17,000 gold Lexus. The remainder of the money was locked away in a secure in his residence – however inside weeks his home was ransacked and the secure was taken. The one merchandise the thieves left behind? The big prop reward cheque that Fulgear had posed with at his press convention.

Fulgear died just a few years later, in 2005. While he was by no means charged in reference to the heist, the detective who labored the case nonetheless has his doubts. “He was hurting for money and I think they sucked him into it,” LAPD detective Marc Zavala advised Vanity Fair in 2020. “I knew in my heart of hearts that he knew more.”

Twenty-four years later, the saga of the Oscar theft has just a few infuriating threads left hanging. That final Oscar remains to be AWOL, the police stay suspicious, and the one man who might reveal all met an early demise. If this true-life story ever received the Hollywood biopic therapy, you’d in all probability ask for a brand new ending.