A 63-year-old historian named Barry Landau pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiracy and theft of historical documents from museums in four states and to selling the documents for profit, bringing an partial end to a strange case involving a semi-famous collector and his 24-year-old co-conspirator, Jason Savedoff.
The Justice Department said in a news release that Landau admitted that he and Savedoff “visited numerous museums posing as researchers, accessed collections of documents which they had determined to be of significant value, reviewed the documents from the collections and used various techniques to steal documents.”
They allegedly concealed documents “inside sports coats and other outerwear, which had been modified to contain hidden pockets, as well as distracting museum curators to disguise their actions.”
A profile on Landau from The New Republic has more background on the case, as does this piece in The Wall Street Journal.
