Not from a 'buy-back' - but from a tip.
Sixteen years after it went missing, a pistol that Teddy Roosevelt carried during the Spanish-American War returned to Sagamore Hill.
The Colt revolver, which disappeared in 1990 from a display case that police said had been jimmied open at Sagamore Hill National Historical Site, was returned to the museum Wednesday.
It was recovered by the FBI after someone called the museum with a tip in September, said Robert Goldman, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Philadelphia who led the Justice Department's investigation along with the FBI's art crime unit.
The Colt was originally issued to a Navy officer and salvaged from the wreck of the USS Maine, whose mysterious sinking in Havana's harbor fueled the public outrage that led to war.
Roosevelt got the .38 caliber revolver from a brother-in-law who served as a Navy captain, and carried it with him when he rode to war with the Rough Riders, a volunteer regiment he helped form. He purportedly had it with him during the Battle of San Juan Hill.
Roosevelt's legendary bravado during the conflict aided the rise of his political career, which culminated in the presidency. The pistol became a valued family heirloom, and was later given two inscriptions noting its origins on the USS Maine and its use by Roosevelt, then a colonel, at San Juan Hill.
Federal prosecutors have charged a man with pilfering the weapon from the late president's former Long Island home.
Anthony Tulino, 55, was named in a misdemeanor criminal information filed in U.S. District Court in Central Islip, New York.
Tulino, a postal worker, was charged with the theft of the antiquity, a Colt revolver that disappeared in April 1990 from the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site.
Tulino is a former New York resident who relocated to DeLand, a central Florida city. It was in DeLand that FBI agents recovered Roosevelt's pistol, after a tipster reported being shown the weapon by Tulino's wife, who reported that her husband kept the weapon hidden in a closet.
Vaya,
Scouts Out!
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