No matter what snafus may occur at Sunday's Academy Awards (hello, Oscar-winning film Moonlight, likely none will be quite as grand as the case of the missing trophies.
A 24-hour tip line was set up, the FBI was called in to assist with the hunt and Roadway's director of security made a March 14 plea to dock-workers to come forward with any information, eventually sweetening the deal with a $50,000 reward.
It was right around this time that forklift operator Anthony Hart and truck driver Lawrence Edward Ledent, both 38, were looking for an out. Ledent,'s Mark Seal from prison, insisted it was Hart who initiated the haphazard sting. He had a habit of letting things"fall off the truck", Ledent claimed, and on the morning of March 8, according to police reports, Hart informed his friend that he'd placed something on his truck that he intended to steal.
According to Ledent's account, shortly after Harris got home from his work as a garbage truck driver, he pulled up, opened a box and pulled out an Oscar to show him. Harris freaked, telling him to get them away from his house, then demanding money for having unknowingly stored them in the first place. By the next day they were gone. , Hart came up to him that same morning of March 9 with an address where the trophies were to be delivered.
Though Roadway had the cashier's checks drafted, they never paid out the ransom. Instead detectives did their thing and on March 18, police arrested Ledent and Hart at their respective homes. As Ledent was driven downtown, a detective informed him that Hart had confessed and alleged that Ledent had three missing Oscars, a successful ruse that got the driver to sign a full confession and plead no contest to grand-theft charges.
A quick Internet search led him to the case of the missing Oscars and the promised reward. And as his son Allen cheered about the $50,000 they would pocket, Fulgear called up, first, the local TV station and then the police. The latter brought him downtown for a lengthy interrogation and polygraph, after which the camera crews took him back to the dumpster to pose with the trophies he found.
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