Former employee admits stealing recordings from National Archives

[KansDem]

A former longtime National Archives employee admitted in federal court Tuesday that he stole nearly 1,000 audio recordings that he stashed at his Rockville home and sold some of them on eBay under the user name “hi-fi_gal.”

Among the audio pilfered by Leslie C. Waffen was an original master copy of a recording of baseball great Babe Ruth hunting on Dec. 10, 1937. Waffen sold it for $34.74, according to court records.

Waffen, 66, who was chief of the Archives’ audiovisual holdings, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt to embezzlement of government property.

It was unclear how many recordings Waffen sold or how much money he made, but federal authorities said he had been stealing for about a decade. Records found in Waffen’s home showed that he had “offered, sold and shipped” items belonging to the Archives since at least August 2001, they said. He sold items on eBay in September and October 2010, they said.

The stolen items include some gems of U.S. entertainment history: episodes of “Gunsmoke,” a western radio drama; “Dragnet,” a crime show about Los Angeles police detectives; and jazz shows broadcast by the American Forces Radio and Television Service to U.S. troops serving in World War II, a source familiar with the case said.

--more--
WP

Ain't nothin' sacred! :grr:

[SheilaT]

1. Such a shame. Clearly there weren't very good

measures in place at the archives to stop this kind of thing.

Many years ago I worked for the Army Archives in Washington DC, and I was aware of a fellow employee taking home records he had no business taking home. In this case these were high school records of students who'd attended high school on military bases overseas, and said records at this point were about thirty years old. We were actually trying to neaten them up somewhat, and I can't recall if they were slated for destruction or what. But this other person found reading them very interesting, and took some home.

I have no idea if he returned them or what ultimately happened. But there was no supervisor of any kind actually monitoring what we were doing in that back file room. I suspect it is much the same at the national archives themselves.