Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News (b)
Now, investigators had to determine what these items were and where they had been stolen from.
Some of these answers came from Scott Corbett, AUSA Newton said. “He had a very good memory and could tell us where Michael had stolen some of the firearms,” she noted.
The investigative team also traveled to Cody, Wyoming, to attend a national museum curator’s meeting to see if any experts could help identify these mystery items.
“It turns out Michael stole these items from museums from Massachusetts to as far south as Mississippi,” Newton said. “A lot of them were stolen from Pennsylvania. We believe he was responsible for two of the thefts at Valley Forge. He was also responsible for a theft at the U.S. Army War College Museum in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. So, we were able to identify some of these firearms.”
Based on the evidence at hand, AUSA Newton explained, “We couldn’t charge him with the thefts, but what we could charge him with was possession of stolen property that had been transported interstate because he’s in Delaware.”
Michael Corbett was indicted and pleaded guilty. As part of his plea, he agreed to help recover some of the items that the investigators were initially looking for when they searched his Delaware residence.
“Leads in the Corbett case took the FBI Art Crime Team as far west as San Francisco,” Archer added.
Coincidentally, during the investigation, a concerned collector called Dr. Stephenson because he believed he might’ve accidentally purchased a stolen rifle.
The collector initially purchased the gun from a man named Thomas Gavin, believing it to be a copy of a famous rifle built by Moravian gunsmith John Christian Oerter. But the more he researched, the more he suspected he had the genuine article. The collector turned the rifle over to the authorities.
Thomas Gavin turned out to be “a significant museum thief” in his own right, having robbed items from the Valley Forge Park, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, and additional museums in the greater Philadelphia area. “But he too cooperated and told us what he had stolen,” AUSA Newton said.
“We had to then stop, solve that case in order to figure out who stole what from where, in order to then pick the Corbett case back up and bring it home,” Archer recalled of the Gavin section of the overall investigation. “So, it was staggeringly complex across space and time and material.”
But just like in Corbett’s case, investigators are still searching for items that Gavin stole, including a rifle that was once owned by naturalist John James Audubon.