True Crime

The Inside Story of the $8 Million Heist From the Carnegie Library

Precious maps, books and artworks vanished from the Pittsburgh archive over the course of 25 years

Like nuclear power plants and sensitive computer networks, the safest rare book collections are protected by what is known as “defense in depth”—a series of small, overlapping measures designed to thwart a thief who might be able to overcome a single deterrent. The Oliver Room, home to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s rare books and archives, was something close to the platonic ideal of this concept. Greg Priore, manager of the room starting in 1992, designed it that way.

In the spring of 2017, then, the library’s administration was surprised to find out that many of the room’s holdings were gone. It wasn’t just that a few items were missing. It was the most extensive theft from an American library in at least a century, the value of the stolen objects estimated to be $8 million.


https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/theft-carnegie-library-books-maps-artworks-180975506/