Man caught selling thousands of dollars' worth of stolen Nevada Museum Antiques on Ebay

Beatty Museum, Beatty, Nevada.

by Faith Jessie
KSNV news3lv.com

LAS VEGAS — Beatty, NV, also known as the gateway to Death Valley, sits about a 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The history of the town is told through the items that sit in its museum.

One piece of that history is glass bottles from the Friends of Rhyolite collection. It dates back to the early 1900's when Rhyolite, NV once thrived from the mining industry.

Diane McGinnis presides over the museum's Board of Directors and was surprised when a thief stole some of the antique bottles from the museum to make a profit.

"One of the other community members noticed that they had some stolen products on Ebay," said McGinnis
The Nye County Sheriff's department says the man behind the online sale of the stolen items from the community was 57-year-old Johnny Salisbury.

"They looked at his postings saw that he has the glass bottles and figured you know, we know where those came from," said McGinnis.

Salisbury was arrested by Sheriffs on Monday for stealing the bottles and other property valued at over $2,500.
Mark Hall-Patton, who spends a fair amount of his time with historic objects, says these pieces are valuable to collectors.

"Bottle collectors especially in the old west, what they are looking for are bottles from ghost towns, bottles from places where people are no longer living in, there are no businesses anymore," said Mark Hall-Patton, Administrator Clark County Museum System. "Rhyolight [sic] died fairly early, but the town site is still there and it's one of those towns that really has an image in Western History.

It's a part of history that everyone will be able to see. The bottles are now back where they belong and will be on display this summer at the Beatty Museum.

Big Bear Historical Society members take artifact for museum

An example of an arrastre used during the Gold Rush to crush ore to remove gold. Three members of the Big Bear Valley Historical Society pleaded guilty in December 2012 to stealing a historical artifact -- a similar arrastre -- from the San Bernardino National Forest. (U.S. FOREST SERVICE)

By Brian Rokos, Staff Writer
Press-Enterprise

Three members of the Big Bear Valley Historical Society who were convicted of stealing a historical artifact from the San Bernardino National Forest were simply trying to preserve Big Bear-area history and didn’t mean to commit a crime, one of the members said.

One big problem — they took the artifact without permission.

David North, 66, Jean Karwelis, 50, and Donald Schaub, 77, all of Big Bear Lake, pleaded guilty Dec. 4 to removing a prehistoric, historic or archaeological resource, structure, site, artifact or property from National Forest Service lands, according to the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The item was an arrastre, which was used during the Gold Rush period around 1860 to grind ore that contained gold. An arrastre consists of a circular, stone-lined pit and a drag stone that was pulled in a circle by a horse or mule.

Scores of arrastres survived the period, but most have been destroyed or vandalized, according to a news release on the case issued Friday, Dec. 14.

This arrastre was part of an exhibit on the Gold Fever Trail at the Metzger Mine in Holcomb Valley, north of the Big Bear valley.

Schaub said in a phone interview Friday that the arrastre had been vandalized and that he, North and Karwelis wanted to take it back to the Big Bear Valley Historical Museum, which the historical society runs, to repair it.

“I had no idea that this was a historical arrastre. I thought it was just a bunch of messed-up rocks,” Schaub said. “I’m not a thief. I wanted to help the museum.”

But Schaub also said that there were no plans to return the arrastre to its original site.

“We were going to leave it at the museum for the future people to see,” he said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jerry C. Yang said in a phone interview that the historical society members did not have permission to take the arrastre.

“This is a big deal,” Yang said. “These are things we need to protect and people need to respect.”

The three defendants each were fined $1,000. Also, they must replace the arrastre in its original location under the guidance of a Forest Service archaeologist. The charge was a misdemeanor.

“This sends a clear message that it is not OK to loot archaeological sites,” Bill Sapp, a Forest Service archaeologist, wrote in the news release.

Forest Service spokesman John Miller said in a phone interview that theft of artifacts from national forests is a problem, but that prosecutions are rare because the thefts are seldom witnessed. The artifacts “wind up in someone’s backyard,” he said.

Historical treasures missing from National Archives

Crooks are stealing pieces of American history -- like conman Barry Landau who committed the largest archival theft in the U.S.

FDR's reading copy of his 1937 inaugural address

Bob Simon
60 Minutes

Precious historical artifacts like the Wright Brothers airplane patent, the bombing maps for the nuclear attack on Japan, the original eyewitness radio report of the Hindenburg disaster and photos taken by the astronauts on the moon are just some of the items stolen from our National Archives. So much of our past has been pocketed by thieves that the National Archives has formed a recovery team to get them back. Bob Simon reports on this alarming trend -- and the conman now serving seven years in prison for the largest theft of historic artifacts in U.S. history -- in a 60 Minutes report broadcast Sunday, Oct. 28 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Some of the items are back where they belong, like the Hindenburg recording and the space photos. Recovering the stolen artifacts is the job of people like Mitch Yockelson of the National Archives Archival Recovery Team. "We're missing the Wright Brothers patent. That would thrill me to no end to recover the patent for the Flying Machine of 1903," Yockelson tells Simon. Nobody knows when it was stolen. "We discovered it was missing in 2003."

The armed recovery team, which chases stolen artifacts along with the FBI, was formed by the National Archives' Inspector General Paul Brachfeld. With a rise in thefts in libraries, historical societies and in the 44 separate archives throughout the country, it was time. "Every institution now that has collections is threatened. We all know that there is a major threat and it's getting larger," says Brachfeld.

That threat was made obvious when authorities last year arrested Barry Landau, a conman who created a fake career as a "presidential historian" so he could get access to the archives from which he stole thousands of items. He especially liked signed documents and stole letters and other materials with the signatures of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens. He had large pockets sewn into his clothing to conceal his loot. He managed to get invited to White House functions several times over the decades, where routine photos with important people helped to legitimize him to un-knowing archivists. "From everybody I talked to, he was a master thief," says Brachfeld. "Because he did it over a duration of time. He shopped. He got what he shopped for."

When Brachfeld's team and the FBI searched Landau's New York apartment after his arrest, they recovered 10,000 items, at least 300 of great historical value, including a 533-year-old document penned by a member of Italy's storied Medici family and the original reading copy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1937 inaugural address, with his hand-written notes in the margins. There is no telling what they are exactly worth, because some of these items would never become available on the open market and are irreplaceable. Says Brachfeld, "I think the value was astronomical...it's basically how much the market would bear...to some collector, one document could be worth millions."