Oscar Caper Not the Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

The stolen Oscars caper was an inside job. We should have known it all along.

The theft--and recovery--of the entertainment industry’s most coveted awards appear to have ended with all the drama, mystery and wackiness of a Hollywood movie.

The story has suspense: The 55 Oscar statuettes, en route to Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony, disappear from a loading dock in an industrial neighborhood southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

It has plot: Two hard-nosed detectives follow their instincts by questioning workers at the trucking company where the yet-to-be-engraved Oscars were last seen. One worker confesses and turns in his truck driver buddy. The bumbling thieves had planned to sell the trophies, but, police say, got nervous over all the publicity and dumped them in an alley.

There’s a hero: the humble salvage man, 61-year-old Willie Fulgear, who stumbles upon the missing shipment of Hollywood’s greatest dreams near a Koreatown trash bin and calls police.

“I’ve seen them on TV,” he says of his past brushes with the Academy Awards. “That’s as close as I’ve gotten to them.”

And, finally, there’s a happy ending: On Monday, Los Angeles police proudly stand behind a row of shiny golden-plated icons at Parker Center headquarters to announce the recovery of 52 of the 55 missing statuettes and the arrest of two trucking company workers, Anthony Keith Hart of Los Angeles and Lawrence Edward Ledent of West Covina, both 38, on charges of grand theft.

“And so, the show will go on,” proclaims LAPD Cmdr. David Kalish, who emceed Monday’s news conference but does not appear to threaten Billy Crystal’s role as current favorite host for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Still, the mystery has not been sewn up as neatly as most movies. There still is the question of those three missing Oscars. Detectives are asking the public to notifypolice if the statuettes are spotted.

The suspects were being held on $100,000 bail each, but other accomplices may be found as the investigation continues.

$50,000 Reward Is at Stake

“What you see now is the tip of the iceberg as far as how many people were involved,” said Jon Gerloff, security manager for Roadway Express, the trucking company that hauled the statuettes from the manufacturer in Chicago to the transfer facility in Bell, where they were last seen.

Then there is the question of who gets the $50,000 reward offered by Roadway Express.

Fulgear, the auto parts recycler who found the statuettes alongside a dumpster behind a drugstore close to his Koreatown home, already is planning to use the reward to make a down payment on a house for his son.

But Gerloff said he could not promise Fulgear the reward until the probe is completed. Investigators stressed that Fulgear is not a suspect in either the original theft or the continuing mystery of the three still-missing Oscars.

The theft was the second of two embarrassments for the academy, both involving Bell, a town that may become the butt of some Billy Crystal jokes at the Shrine Auditorium on Sunday night. Earlier this month, 4,000 Oscar ballots were misrouted in the mail, forcing the academy to print new ballots and extend voting. Those lost ballots eventually were found at a bulk mail facility in Bell.

The mystery of the missing Oscars was cracked by veteran LAPD burglary detectives Robert Rivera and Marc Zavala. They were assigned to the crime soon after the Oscars were reported missing March 8.

Zavala said he and Rivera checked the employment records at the trucking firm to determine who was working on the morning that the 500-pound shipment of statuettes arrived at the loading dock, in Styrofoam containers inside cardboard boxes labeled with the Academy Awards as their destination. After questioning several workers, the investigators began to suspect Hart’s story.

The detectives said he eventually broke down, confessed and turned in Ledent, a friend who works as a truck driver at the company.

The two men, who each have worked at the company for about 10 years, were arrested Saturday afternoon.

According to the detectives, Hart and Ledent probably did not have a detailed plan for their scheme.

“The motive was money,” Rivera said.

The gold-plated statuettes are 13 1/2 inches tall and weigh 8 1/2 pounds each. The 55 statuettes cost about $18,000 to manufacture but would have had a much higher value on the black market.

Once the shipment disappeared, academy officials set up a 24-hour tip line and called on the LAPD to assist Bell police in recovering the statuettes. The FBI even suggested that it would help out.

When the detectives searched the alley where the alleged thieves said they had dumped the Oscars, they found nothing. The investigators declined to identify the location of that alley.

On Sunday night, police got word that Fulgear found 52 Oscars in a secluded parking lot behind a Save-On drugstore on Western Avenue, about five miles from the alley where the suspects claimed to have left them.

The detectives say they don’t know how the statuettes got from the alley to the parking lot or who moved them there.

Oscars Amid the Trash

A professional salvage man, Fulgear said he was rummaging near a trash bin in the parking lot, looking for cardboard cartons for a move from his one-room apartment when he nearly tripped over a Styrofoam box.

“I saw this white stuff, but I didn’t pay it no mind until my foot hit it and it felt heavy so I opened it,” Fulgear said early Monday morning as he stood in the litter-strewn parking lot where he made his discovery.

Once he broke open the first container, he wasn’t sure if the Oscars were the real thing.

“I thought it might be fake, I wasn’t sure,” he said.

Regardless, he said he quickly began to toss the boxes into the trunk and back seat of his Cadillac.

When he got home, he called his son, Alan, 22, and asked him to check the Internet. He learned from a World Wide Web site that the statuettes had been missing and that a reward was offered. Fulgear and his son called a television station and the police.

Los Angeles police detectives instructed Fulgear to show them where he found the Oscars and to return them to the exact position in the lot.

Early Monday morning, as detectives photographed and examined the lot where the discovery was made, Fulgear joked with the television camera crews and newspaper reporters who surrounded him. He proudly reenacted his discovery and declared himself “the man who saved the Oscars.”

Actually, the award ceremony was never in jeopardy. The academy placed an emergency order last week for dozens of replacement Oscars.

Robert Rehme, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said they now have more than enough Oscars for the big ceremony.

“We have enough for the next three years,” he said.

Still, Fulgear was enjoying his 15 minutes of fame.

“Have you ever gotten this much attention from the media before?” one reporter asked.

“I have never gotten this much attention from anyone,” he replied, looking like the rare Oscar winner who hadn’t prepared a thank-you speech.

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