The Great Oscar Heist: The Year Dozens of Oscars Were Stolen
The year 2000 was a chaotic one. We were still reeling from the barely defeated Y2K bug, there was all that hanging chad business and Santana was somehow at the top of the charts. It was amidst this madness that (at least) two small-time crooks managed to pull off the greatest heist in Oscar history, stealing 55 statuettes just two weeks before the ceremony.
You’d think such a score would require a team of criminal masterminds that would make Ocean’s Eleven look like the Bling Ring, but all it took was a truck driver named Larry Ledent, a forklift operator named Anthony Hart and a stroke of luck they presumably never experienced before or again. (At least, according to Ledent’s version of events, but we’ll get to that.)
Ledent later told police that he and Hart, who both worked out of the docks at Roadway Express in South-Central Los Angeles, had become quite the larcenous team in the six or seven weeks they’d known each other by the time in early March when it became hard not to notice the big Oscars sign on a pallet parked at the docks. It worked like this: Hart spotted a shipment worth stealing, usually designer shoes or purses, and loaded it onto Ledent’s truck for later recovery and general criminal activity.
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On March 8, 2000, Ledent claimed that Hart gave him the signal as usual, but when he later examined the shipment and realized what it was, he lost whatever shit he had. In a panic, he attempted to stash the Oscars at the house of a friend, John Willie Harris, who likewise freaked the fuck out and told Ledent to get lost, but not before paying him a few thousand dollars for his trouble and silence. At Hart’s direction, Ledent said he sold two of the Oscars to a guy at a Jack in the Box and another to a man who immediately demanded his money back after beginning to suspect this rando selling unmarked Oscars might not be on the up and up before giving in to fear and disposing of the rest in a dumpster behind a Food-4-Less, where we meet Willie Fulgear.
Fulgear was something of a professional scavenger, specializing in discarded auto parts, but he said he was simply looking for moving boxes when he went dumpster-diving behind the Food-4-Less that week. After stumbling upon what he initially thought were brass toys he could melt down, he called a news crew, followed by the cops. He said this was because “a Black man with that kind of stuff is automatically guilty,” which is fair enough, considering the police thanked him with a nasty interrogation and it took a public campaign to get him paid reward money and invited to the Oscars, but they also discovered that his half-brother was none other than John Willie Harris, sooooo that’s a weird coincidence. It didn’t work out terribly well for Fulgear, who said most of the $50,000 he was rewarded was stolen from him a few months later, so it doesn’t really matter.
Earlier, however, two lawyers representing anonymous clients contacted Roadway Express regarding the proffered reward money, one who was quickly discovered to be Hart’s brother-in-law and the other leading to Ledent. Police pulled the old “the other guy is talking” trick on Ledent, Ledent talked, and both men pleaded no contest, getting Ledent six months in jail and Hart five years of probation. Hart denied everything and sued the LAPD for wrongful arrest, but the lawsuit was dismissed on the grounds of come on, guy.
In the end, the 2000 Oscars went off without a hitch. All but three of the statues were recovered well before the ceremony, but nobody wants trash Oscars, so their manufacturer worked double time to replace them while they were cleaned and replated. (Another was found two years later at the site of a Miami drug bust, which must have been a wild journey.) The Academy has since adopted a policy of always maintaining a full backup reserve and shipping the statues by plane. This seems like only tempting the cinematic fates further, but no one’s pulled a Money Plane on the Oscar carrier — yet.
