Staff at Newsday got a start when they saw three of the paper's Pulitzer prize medals listed on eBay (if you want to buy some as an alternative to earning them, they were going for a total of US$15,500).
The online listing had photographs of three gold medals that certainly looked like the ones won by the paper in 1954, 1970 and 1974, along with an extensive description of the medals as “three fabulously rare and never before offered gold Pulitzer Prize medals,” obtained “through an unlikely confluence of events” originating with a 2001 estate sale on Long Island.
This jolted Newsday officials and staff members. Their medals, they believed, had long been locked away in a safe at the paper’s headquarters (the medals mounted on a plaque in the executive offices were reproductions).
Still unsure if the medals listed on eBay were real or fake, company officials decided to look. The main safe was opened with a combination, but officials realized they no longer had a key to a smaller lockbox inside that held the prizes. A locksmith was called to drill into it, and when it was opened, the medals were indeed missing.
“They were in a secure area of the building, the kind of place you would keep something like that, and only certain people had access to it,” Newsday’s editor, John Mancini, said. The company had no leads and no idea when the medals disappeared, he said, but is “pursuing all legal means to recover them.”
The F.B.I. has been brought in, and the Suffolk County Police Department’s major case squad. Current and former Newsday employees were being questioned. The unusual theft has sowed equal parts intrigue, embarrassment and accusatory speculations in the newsroom and made for a couple of good scoops on its own story.
“It’s a made-for-newspaper story — the case of the purloined Pulitzers — but it’s also very embarrassing,” said Bob Greene, who led the investigative reporting teams that won the 1970 and 1974 prizes. “This is the highest award the Pulitzer committee gives, one of the most precious things you have as an institution, and we won three of them and they go and lose them?”