Selo "Inverted Jenny" Reaparece 60 Anos Após Ter Sido Roubado, Estados Unidos

Selo "Inverted Jenny" Reaparece 60 Anos Após Ter Sido Roubado, Estados Unidos
Selo

Os selos “Jenny” podiam ser apenas mais um dos milhares de selos que existem no mundo, se os aviões do desenho não tivessem sido impressos ao contrário e se o roubo de quatro exemplares não tivesse sido um dos roubos da história da filatelia.

Os selos originais foram impressos, em 1918, para homenagear o lançamento do serviço postal aéreo dos Estados Unidos da América. Alguns selos foram impressos com o biplano Curtiss JN-4H “Jenny” ao contrário, e um cliente comprou um conjunto de 100 selos antes dos criadores detectarem o erro.

Os selos rapidamente chamaram à atenção dos colecionadores e tornaram-se dos selos mais cobiçados do mundo. Anos mais tarde, em 1955, um bloco de quatro, que pertencia a Ethel Stewart McCoy, foi roubado durante uma convenção da Sociedade de Filatelia Americana, em Virginia.

Mais de 60 anos depois, um dos “Jenny Invertido” reapareceu. Foi submetido na casa de leilões Spink USA, por um homem de 20 anos do Reino Unido, que assegura que recebeu o selo de herança do seu avô e que não sabia muito sobre o assunto, segundo George Eveleth, diretor do departamento filatélico da casa de leilões de norte-americana.

Depois de uma análise rigorosa, foi possível concluir que se trata do selo nº76 do conjunto de 100, e que pertence à tira de quatro que desapareceu em 1955. Depois do roubo, o bloco foi divido em quatro individuais, e cada cópia foi alterada para disfarçar a sua aparência, dificultando identificação.

Em 2014, a American Philatelic Research Library ofereceu uma recompensa de 10 mil dólares a quem tivesse informações que levassem à descoberta do 76º selo, que estava desaparecido na altura, e outros 10 mil dólares por outro “Jenny Invertido”. Na mesma altura, um negociante de selos, Donald Sundman de Nova Iorque, ofereceu recompensas de 50 mil dólares pelas duas peças.

“É um dos crimes mais notórios na história filatélica, e agora há uma nova peça do puzzle no sítio”, diz Scott English, administrador da American Philatelic Research Library, que agora possui o selo.

A biblioteca filatélica está a trabalhar em conjunto com a Spink USA e as autoridades federais para recuperar o selo.

Com um valor original de 24 cêntimos, os selos valem agora milhares de euros. Por exemplo, o selo nº58 vale entre 525 mil a 1.6 milhões de dólares.

No entanto, existem outros mais raros que os “Jenny Invertidos” mas estes são dos poucos reconhecidos mesmo por quem não é colecionador.

O roubo dos selos Jenny Invertido é um dos maiores crimes no mundo da filatelia. Num episódio da série norte-americana The Simpsons, é referenciado como um dos objetos mais raros do mundo, quando o patriarca Homer Simpson os encontra juntamente com uma cópia original Declaração da Independência e um violino Stradivarius original.

Working swiftly and silently, someone cut the rope securing the leg of the display case and inched it forward. A sheet of protective glass was slid back, and four rare stamps were plucked from their display frame.

Minutes later — around 9:30 on a September morning in 1955 — a delegation of esteemed philatelists strolled down the row of display cases, looking expectantly for the star item of the collection: a block of four famous 24-cent stamps with the airplane in the center printed upside down in error. The stamp is known to collectors as the Inverted Jenny, after the nickname of the Curtiss JN-4 biplane.

But the block was gone. The Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed the armed guards and others in the room and came up empty, unable to even name a suspect.

In the nearly 60 years since that theft, two of the stamps have been recovered, but the other two remain lost. Now, a prominent stamp dealer is offering a $100,000 reward to try to help close the case.

Donald Sundman, the president of the Mystic Stamp Company, a mail-order firm in Camden, N.Y., announced Saturday at an annual gathering of airmail stamp collectors that he was putting up $50,000 for each of the two missing Inverted Jennies.

Separately, the American Philatelic Research Library in Bellefonte, Pa., which was given ownership of the stolen stamps in 1980, is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to their recovery.

“It would be a great thing for the library if these stamps were recovered,” Mr. Sundman said. He made headlines in 2005 when he was involved in a swap involving a different block of four Inverted Jennies valued at nearly $3 million.

The stolen block belonged to Ethel B. Stewart McCoy, one of the most prominent philatelists of her day. Ms. McCoy was a New Yorker and the daughter of Charles Milford Bergstresser, a journalist who with Charles Dow and Edward Jones was a founder of Dow Jones & Company. Her inherited wealth allowed her to happily indulge her collecting passions, which included airmail stamps of the world and stamps depicting palm trees, of which she had three albums full.

Her Inverted Jenny block was one of just a half-dozen surviving intact from the original sheet of 100 misprints, bought over a post office counter in 1918 by a lucky broker’s clerk who quickly resold them to a prominent collector. That collector dispersed the sheet, mostly as single stamps, after numbering each one on the back in pencil.

Ms. McCoy’s foursome had been a gift in 1936 from her first husband, so its sentimental value to her greatly exceeded the $15,000 she insured it for before lending it to the American Philatelic Society to exhibit at its Norfolk, Va., convention in the fall of 1955.

What happened afterward is described in detail by George Amick in his 1986 book, “The Inverted Jenny: Money, Mystery, Mania.”

In 1958, the first of the four stamps resurfaced, separated from its siblings, in the possession of a Chicago stamp dealer named Louis Castelli. Experts, comparing details like the perforations around the stamp’s edge and flyspeck variations in its printing to photographs of the stolen block, were in no doubt as to its identity.

How Mr. Castelli had obtained it was not adequately explained, but the F.B.I. declined to pursue the matter, unsure whether the single stamp’s value at the time passed the $5,000 threshold allowing it to investigate.

Twenty years went by, and Mr. Castelli offered the stamp for sale again. This time, the F.B.I. seized it, but Mr. Castelli was not charged with any crime.

When Ms. McCoy had collected her insurance money after the theft, she stipulated that she could buy back the stamps if they ever turned up. By the late 1970s, though, she could not remember the insurance company’s name, and the firm never came forward.

She donated the recovered stamp to the American Philatelic Research Library, of which she was a supporter, and it was auctioned for $115,000.

Shortly after Ms. McCoy died in 1980 at the age of 87, a second so-called McCoy invert reappeared in the hands of another Chicago-area stamp dealer, who offered it to the library as a tax-deductible gift.

The F.B.I. investigated again, but after a quarter century the trail was cold. A federal court in New York affirmed the library’s ownership, and the second McCoy stamp remains on display there.

The last two of the stamps are still at large.

“It’s possible that the two remaining missing stamps were innocently acquired by collectors decades ago who did not realize they had been stolen,” Mr. Sundman said. “With the passage of time, the heirs of those collectors may not realize they’ve inherited stolen property.”

Like the recovered stamps, the remaining pair may have been altered in an effort to obscure their identity. The little penciled numbers marking their original positions in the sheet — 66 and 76 — are likely to have been partly erased. Nevertheless, experts are confident they would be able to authenticate them.

Five other examples of the Inverted Jenny have been sold at auction in 2014, at prices ranging from $126,500 to $575,100 each. But anyone trying to sell a missing McCoy stamp would be in for a rude surprise: Still considered a stolen good, it would have to be forfeited.

Rob Haeseler, a library official in charge of efforts to recover the McCoy inverts, said anyone who thinks he or she might have one should reach out to the library or to the American Philatelic Society, with which it is affiliated, for information on how to submit the stamps and claim the reward.

Although the F.B.I. declined to comment, Roger S. Brody, the library’s president, said the library had no interest in pressing charges for the theft or possession of the stamps.

“We just want the stamps back,” Mr. Brody said.