Over 50 Year Philatelic Mystery Gets a Clue

This month a mystery that hasn’t had any leads in a very long time has gotten its newest evidence. The mystery would remind people of the great bank heist or master thief movies where the main character is always several steps ahead of the police. Well, the philatelic world has just gotten a new piece of evidence to a theft that happened in a convention in 1955. The coveted Inverted Jenny stamp that has been America’s favorite rare stamp for a long time stolen from a collector’s convention in 1955. The thief actually got away with a block of four of the print. In this article we will go over the initial thievery, the breaks, and the recent find of this philatelic mystery.

The block of four inverted Curtis Jenny set had been on loan to the American Philatelic Society in 1955. They displayed the set at a collector’s convention in Norfolk, Virginia which is common practice for any philatelic society or stamp company. The thief is reported to have somehow gotten the display case door open so quickly and quietly that he just walked off with the block of four. At around 9:30 am it is reported that a group of philatelist were expecting to find the block displayed but couldn’t find it. This all happened with armed guards in the room. There was a FBI investigation started for the theft of this inverted four block. Before recently, only two of the four block had come up since their theft.

The first one to surface was in 1958. It had somehow gotten into the hands of a stamp dealer named Louis Castelli. Philatelic experts came in to evaluate the copy to see if it was from the stolen four block and determined that it was indeed one of the stolen four. The FBI didn’t pursue because the price of the item would have to exceed $5,000 for them to be involved. But when Castelli put it up for auction again twenty years later, the FBI seized the copy. Castelli was not charged for a crime in the end. The second surfaced in the hands of another Chicago stamp dealer. He donated it as a tax-deductible gift in 1980. The FBI started another investigation but it eventually ran cold. Now, another 36 years and a third copy has been found.

The third copy has been found in the hands of a man in his twenties living in the UK. He said that he inherited the piece from his grandfather and knew very little about it. Along with the stamp was a letter recovered that was about a loan from a stamp dealer to an auctioneer that was well known at the time. Both of whom, however, are now dead. This piece of evidence could possibly have nothing to do with the case but Philatelist everywhere are hopeful that this could be a missing piece of the 1955 mystery. If anything, the American Philatelic Society has three down and one to go.