New York:
William John Scott is a freshman at Drew University. He studies political science. He plays defense on the lacrosse team. He describes himself on Facebook as a night person who likes to party.
But federal prosecutors say he is something else: a busy archives thief who stole famous letters written by a founder of the United Methodist Church and world leaders, including Abraham Lincoln and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.
Scott pilfered the letters while working part time at the university archives, the prosecutors said. He sold some of them for thousands of dollars, and left others sitting in a dresser drawer, where FBI agents found them after executing a search warrant of his dorm room on Saturday. (On Facebook, Scott says he likes to keep the room "not a complete mess.")
Scott was arrested on Sunday as the bus bringing his lacrosse team back from spring break rolled into Drew's campus in Madison, N.J.
"He looked utterly surprised, like we were," said Tyler Morse, a junior on the team who saw Scott escorted off the bus by the university's head of public safety, into the car of FBI agents.
On Monday, he was still wearing a blue hoodie when he was led handcuffed into U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., for a bail hearing. He was charged with one count of knowingly stealing an object of cultural heritage from a museum. He faces as much as 10 years in prison, if convicted.
Looking down as he was brought into the courtroom of Magistrate Madeline Cox Arleo, he twice replied, "Yes, ma'am," when asked if he understood his rights and if he had retained a lawyer. The judge authorized an unsecured $50,000 bond, on the condition that he surrender his passport and agree to be supervised by pretrial services while remaining in the custody of his parents, who live in Longmeadow, Mass.
Drew University officials and students were shocked to learn that one of their own might be behind the loss of some of the university's most prized possessions. Founded as a Methodist seminary in 1867, Drew has many important papers that shed light on the origins of the Methodist church and the Wesley brothers, who helped found it. It is also an official repository for the United Methodist Church itself.
According to federal prosecutors, Scott got a job in the archives in late October and was given a key to a storage room containing many documents considered too rare to share openly. Typical letters from John and Charles Wesley, for instance, can fetch $5,000 to $12,000 apiece on the market, according to the complaint.
The university became suspicious, according to an account provided by prosecutors, after an antiques dealer in England alerted officials in its library that he had been approached by someone offering to sell him original letters from the Wesleys. Ten of the letters arrived on March 3, via FedEx, according to the complaint, with two suffering some damage in transit.
Prosecutors said the unprofessional way the valuable documents were shipped did not sit well with the dealer, who then consulted Drew university officials, given their expertise and collection of Wesleyana.
After a quick search of its archives, the university estimated that 21 to 23 of its Wesley letters appeared to be missing and contacted the FBI. The missing lot included a valuable letter, worth more than $5,000, from John Wesley to a friend and supporter, George Merryweather, dated Dec. 20, 1766.
Searching Scott's dorm room, federal agents discovered a file containing six Wesley letters besides the ones that were sent to England. The file also contained roughly 11 other important and historical documents from the university archives, including letters from five United States presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, William McKinley, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. The file also had letters belonging to the university from Richard Nixon when he was vice president, Robert F. Kennedy and Madam Chiang.
University officials had not even been aware that the presidential letters were missing until the search of the dorm room. But they were optimistic on Monday that they would ultimately recover any lost items. "For Methodists, these are treasures and so we're hoping to get them back," said Christopher Anderson, the Methodist librarian at Drew.