Over 50 years after a brazen museum heist, the FBI has helped recover a stolen Revolutionary War musket, with an assist from an Antiques Roadshow expert.
“The theft of this musket from the museum kept countless visitors and historians from appreciating and studying it,” U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Jacqueline Romero said at a July 1 ceremony returning the gun to Philadelphia’s Museum of American Revolution.
“Today’s repatriation rights the wrong that was done so many years ago, reopening a window to the past,” she added. “It’s an honor to help recover and preserve a piece of cultural property that helps tell the story of our nation’s valiant struggle for independence.”
Joel Bohy, who appraises military objects for the PBS series Antiques Roadshow, spotted the stolen gun at a recent antiques fair. He was unaware of its tarnished provenance, but immediately took notice of the unique engraving on the brass butt plate identifying it as belonging to the Providence militia.
“There’s only two others known,” he told the FBI.
The engraved brass butt plate that helped the FBI Art Crime team recover a Revolutionary War musket stolen over 50 years ago. Photo courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Philadelphia.
Then, Upper Merion Township Police Department Detective Brendan Dougherty sent Bohy a link to an April FBI article listing 10 antique firearms still missing from a string of decades-old thefts. The appraiser immediately recognized the musket as the one he’d seen.
It was his tip to the FBI that led to the gun’s recovery. An antique firearms collector in Maryland who is believed to have had no connection to the original theft voluntarily turned over the gun to law enforcement.
The insurance company Chubb, which covered the insurance claim for the 1968 theft, ultimately donated it back to the Museum of the American Revolution. (The museum also played a role in the recent rediscovery of a piece of George Washington’s tent.)
“We’re thrilled to give it back to them, allow them to continue to study it, and make it available for the public to enjoy it,” Chubb executive Maria Thackston told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It’s our privilege.”
The Museum of the American Revolution opened in 2017, but much of its collection comes from its predecessor organization, the Valley Forge Historical Society. There were three significant burglaries of the society in the 1960s and ’70s.
The recently returned .78 caliber musket, made in the 1770s, would have seen combat during the American Revolution. The gun’s exact origins, such as its original owner and what battles it may have been involved in, remain a mystery—which is part of what makes it such a fascinating piece of U.S. history.
“It is an amalgamation of parts from a couple different types of weapons. They’re cobbling together what they can to get ready for this military conflict,” museum president and CEO Scott Stephenson told local news station WHYY PBS. “It has a lug on the front of the barrel that’s for fixing a bayonet. That’s one of the keys that we know this was intended for hunting people, not animals.”
The gun is back at the museum in part thanks to a 14-year-long law enforcement effort that begin in 2009. A senior citizen walked in to the Upper Merion Township police station outside Philadelphia with a tip on a cold case. He told detectives Andy Rathfon and Brendan Dougherty he thought he’d spotted a antique firearm stolen from Valley Forge Historical Society decades ago.
Assistant U.S. Attorney K.T. Newton of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, FBI Philadelphia special agent Jake Archer, detective Andy Rathfon of the Upper Merion Township Police Department in Pennsylvania, Museum of the American Revolution president and CEO Scott Stephenson, and Upper Merion Township Police detective Brendan Dougherty with some of the recovered Revolutionary War-era firearms. Photo courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Philadelphia.
The detectives, who hadn’t been born at the time of the original thefts, had no idea what the tipster was talking about. Even the museum had to go digging through its archives to find forgotten records of the stolen artifacts. The investigation had to start entirely from scratch.
Though it turned out the specific gun the senior citizen had seen wasn’t stolen, it did set law enforcement on the right track. A confidential informant later identified a possible suspect named Michael Corbett.
In 2017, the FBI’s Art Crime Team raided Corbett’s Newark, Delaware, home. They found 36 historic guns stolen and 14 other artifacts from 16 different small museums across the Northeast half a century ago, between 1968 and ’70. The FBI returned those pieces in March 23, at a repatriation ceremony at the Museum of the American Revolution.
Corbett and his brother Scott admitted to stealing the artifacts in a series of burglaries.
Due to statute of limitations, Michael Corbett was only charged with transporting stolen property across state lines. He was sentenced to one day in jail and three years’ house arrest.
One of the still missing stolen antique firearms, stolen from Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on October 24, 1968. This is a .69 caliber Army firearm. The pistol is 15.5 inches long, its barrel is 9 inches long, and its lock is 4 and 7/8 inches long. The pistol is made of walnut wood, and its furniture is made of iron. Its barrel is engraved with the text “CM 1763” and stamped with the number 93. Its lock is marked “LIBREVILLE” (possibly over “Charleville”), and its stock is marked “RR” over “O.”
The same investigation also identified a separate thief who had also targeted the Valley Forge Historical Society and other area institutions half a century ago. His name was Thomas Gavin, and in December 2021 the FBI held a ceremony returning 14 antique firearms and a silver Native American belt that he stole. (Gavin also served just one day in jail, and paid a $50,000 fine.)
But even after the two big restitutions, there were 10 weapons stolen in the same time period that were still missing. The FBI published a list of those firearms back in April. That’s when Bohy made his fateful tip.
“The assumption was,” Stephenson told CBS, “that these things were long gone and would never be seen again.”