A Museum Heist in Washington, DC

Everyone loves a good caper story. Many of our guests are drawn to DC sites like the Library of Congress and the National Archives because they saw these buildings in the popular National Treasure movie series. Dating back further, the unsolved Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in Boston in 1990 is an obsession for many true crime fans and the basis for many documentaries, books and movies. On our Smithsonian Highlights tour, guests always ask how often the Hope Diamond has been stolen because a jewel heist captures the imagination. The answer, by the way, is zero times since the French Revolution. However, the Smithsonian did experience a string of thefts in 1981.

The Hope Diamond on display at the Museum of Natural History. Photo Credit Liam Gideon

The First Heist - A National Treasure Goes Missing

On the morning of February 9, 1981, a museum technician at the Museum of American History entered an exhibit on the second floor to find that a pen used by Secretary of State John Hay was missing from its case. The pen, a silver 7 ¼-inch Parker Jointless pen, was an artifact of the Spanish-American war.

In December 1898, commissioners from the United States and Spain met in Paris to formalize the end of the war with the Treaty of Paris. This treaty resulted in Cuba’s independence from Spain and the United States acquiring Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as new territories. Though he had not been part of the original negotiations, the new Secretary of State John Hay had the honor to sign the document and the pen he used was eventually donated to the Smithsonian Museum of American History where it would remain forever…or, at least, for 100 years. 

7 ¼-inch Parker Jointless pen patent, June 1898

The pen had been taken out of the case to be photographed for a book by the Smithsonian Institution and, apparently, had never been returned. In fact, none of the technicians had seen it in the few days since it had been photographed. It was gone, and nobody knew how long it had been missing.

Unfortunately for the museum, this was not the only item that had wandered off from its collection in the previous decade. One 1978 report estimated that 130 items had been stolen from the Smithsonian Institution museum complex, including a pitcher believed to have been made by Paul Revere. Almost all the items had one thing in common - silver. 

Secretary Hay using the silver pen to sign the treaty. Photo Source

Of course, silver has always been valuable, but its market price skyrocketed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, all thanks to brothers Nelson and William Hunt. Inheritors of their father’s billion-dollar oil business, the Hunts began investing in silver, believing that silver’s value would rise in the coming years. Their manipulations of the market forced the issue and the price of silver rose more than 2000%. When the Hunts began hoarding silver in the early 1970s, silver was worth $2 an ounce. Within a decade, the Hunts owned nearly 1/3 of the world’s silver supply and the price of silver shot up to $50 an ounce. Historical items made with silver, like the hundreds within the Smithsonian collections, became increasingly vulnerable to thieves who hoped to sell stolen goods and/or melt them down to liquid form, cashing in on the enormous value of precious metals at this time.

The FBI began investigating the case of the missing pen on the very morning the pen was reported missing, already having noticed an uptick in the theft of jewelry and silverware throughout DC in prior days. It appeared to many involved that the museum was especially prone to these kinds of crimes, as it was in the process of transitioning between museum directors and overhauling several major exhibits. 

The Second Heist - Silver and Gold

About a month after Hay’s pen disappeared, the museum was again rocked by another major silver theft, this time from the Military History wing. Two swords covered in precious metals and gems that had once belonged to military heroes from the 1880s (one encrusted in diamonds), and two gold medals - one awarded for laying the first trans-Atlantic telephone cable and one for discovering Antarctica were swiped from their cases. These items had been taken by force rather than spirited out of an unattended storeroom. The FBI theorized that the perpetrator climbed a ladder and cut the wire mesh on top of the plastic seven-foot-tall display cases. Altogether, the artifacts were valued at over $75,000.

Military History exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Photo Credit, Biana Gideon, Unscripted Tours

The Final Heist - George Washington’s Dentures

Undoubtedly to the dismay of those at the Smithsonian Institution, just as it seemed like things could not get any worse, they did. A pair of George Washington’s dentures - the upper plate made of gold, the lower of ivory (and perhaps of real human teeth) - disappeared from a locked storeroom on the fifth floor of the museum. To add insult to injury, museum officials admitted that they were not sure how long the dentures had been missing - AND the dentures had been on loan to the museum from the University of Maryland.

George Washington's uniform in the Museum of American History. Photo Credit, Biana Gideon, Unscripted Tours

Discovering the Culprit 

Though security at the museum was admittedly somewhat lax at the time given its transition phase, the FBI determined that the culprit was probably a staff or volunteer at the museum, knowing the maze of collections and items much better than a stranger. Finally, after several months of intensive investigation, the FBI arrested a museum guard, 26-year-old Vincent Butler Whitley, on May 7, 1981 in connection with the thefts.

Butler had worked at the museum since he was 19 years old, proving the FBI’s theory that the thief was likely a staff member. Authorities also arrested Whitley’s cousin, Watson Lewis Mills Jr., and a third man, Ronald Conrad Pugh in connection with the thefts. All three were charged with theft of government property. Only Whitley was sentenced for the crime, however, receiving two years of probation after pleading guilty to stealing one of the swords. Though certain details are still unclear, it seems that Whitley stole the items while on shift and worked together with his conspirators to sell the items to a fence (usually a precious metal dealer, who traded in stolen goods). The fence then attempted to sell the items to be melted down. Whitley received one $200 payment from Mills and Pugh, with the agreement that the three would split the profits after the metal had been smelted. 

The FBI building along Pennsylvania. Photo Source

Artifacts Returned

Finally, the museum's luck had turned - just weeks after the arrest of Whitley, Mills, and Pugh, Hay’s pen and the two swords were recovered from various smelting companies in the state of Maryland. One of the swords had been stripped of its precious gems, but otherwise, all the items were intact and returned to the Museum of American History in August 1981. According to sources, in 1973, the pen was appraised at about $25,000 - it was sold to the smelter in 1981 for just $25. It seems likely that the other stolen items sold for a similarly low price given their extensive historical value. For the first time in nearly 9 months, museum staff could breathe a little easier knowing that those items were back safe within the collections. 

Then, in May 1982, the museum announced that the lower plate of Washington’s dentures - the one made of ivory - had been found in a Museum storeroom. To this day, however, the upper, gold, plate of Washington’s dentures has never been recovered, more than likely it was melted down. Unfortunately for the thief, according to Smithsonian spokesman Lawrence E. Taylor, the value of the gold plate “would be miniscule compared to the historic value of the teeth.” 

Good luck stealing from the Smithsonian now

And should you take this as inspiration to try to pull off a Smithsonian heist of your own, rest assured that security at the Smithsonian was significantly reformed in 1981, boosting the budget of its Office of Protection Services (OPS) to over $2 million that year. With state-of-the-art display cases, cameras, and other security measures, nothing of worth has been stolen from any Smithsonian Institution museum since the 1990s. Today, the OPS functions as the Smithsonian Institution’s private security force, working to insure that another Smithsonian heist never happens again. Unlike the people who stole the upper plate of George Washington’s dentures or Benjamin Franklin Gates as played by Nicholas Cage in the National Treasure films, you probably won’t get away with it. 

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