Audio By Carbonatix
Yesterday, we informed you that it took eight law enforcement agencies to track down a guy who stole a first-edition book of Mormon.
Jay Linford’s been pegged by Mesa police as the guy who lifted the 182-year-old Book of Mormon from the Rare and Out of Print Books and Art store, and he was arrested in an apartment near Washington, D.C., Tuesday after the Marshals Service and FBI served search warrants.
The book’s recovery is getting touted by the FBI’s Art Crime Team, the arm of the FBI that deals with the Pink Panther-type stuff.
On May 28 — the day the book was stolen — Linford called a rare book dealer in the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas area, seeing if anyone was interested in purchasing some pages from the first-edition book, which is worth between $30,000 and $40,000 as a whole.
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Linford ended up selling two pages to the guy for $7,500, later finding out that someone in Mesa had just had theirs stolen, and phoned up the cops.
Linford was eventually found staying with a pal at an apartment in Herndon, Virginia, near Washington, D.C.
And here’s the laundry list of law enforcement agencies that participated in this whole thing: the Mesa Police Department, the FBI Art Crime Team, the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, the Herndon Police Department, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office, and the Prince William County Police Department.
This morning’s question: were eight law enforcement agencies really necessary for recovering the book?
Cast your vote below:
