Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
I’m not bragging or anything, but I’m pretty ingenious.
In the story of the Guinness World Records-certified most prolific book thief in world history, Creighton University just keeps popping up. First, a Creighton alumna aided the detective trying to catch the thief. Then, a group of Creighton librarians worked with the FBI to return thousands of stolen books to their rightful homes.
Here’s the tale of the Iowa man who swiped somewhere between 23,000 and 26,000 rare books and papers from at least 300 university libraries across the U.S. (and Canada), and the FBI investigation (code name: “The Omaha Project”) that turned 10 Creighton librarians into a makeshift team of academic detectives working out of a secret warehouse. It’s also the story of the recent Creighton class that led to a priceless manuscript making its journey back to an Oregon library more than 35 years after it was stolen.
You can read all about that class and the returned library items here. You can also check out a fantastic new online exhibit the students made about the book bandit and listen to our Weird Creighton History podcast interviews with Creighton archivist Pete Brink and assistant professor Trish Ross, PhD (all episodes located at the end of the article).
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Stephen Blumberg, book bandit
By Micah Mertes
Late one night in March of 1990, in the town of Ottumwa, Iowa, FBI agents rolled up to the three-story, 17-room red brick home of Stephen Carrie Blumberg, a 41-year-old collector of books and antiques. Inside, they found more than 23,000 rare books and manuscripts.
Some of the books were valued at tens of thousands of dollars each: a first-edition copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a handprinted Bible from 1480, a first edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, a 15th century world history that preceded Columbus’ discovery of the new world.
Book-packed shelves stretched from wall to wall and floor to 12-foot ceiling in most rooms. Even the bathrooms and closets. Shelves lined each side of the hallways, too, making for narrow passage. Despite the scale of the collection, it didn’t look like clutter. Books were organized neatly and (mostly) according to geography, since the bulk of the collection revolved around Blumberg’s interest in 19th century Americana.
A room on the northeast side of the house, for instance, represented New York and all its associated books. The top of the staircase was home to Ohio. Head west and one would arrive in California (this is the room where Blumberg slept, on a worn black leather chaise lounge). The second-floor bathroom served as an interstate cataloging area or sorts. It’s also where Blumberg got most of his reading done.
At the time the FBI discovered Blumberg’s library, it was one of the most impressive private collections of books in the U.S. And almost none of it belonged to him.
Over the previous 20 years, Blumberg had traveled the country many times over, stealing thousands of irreplaceable historical books and papers from an estimated 300 or more university libraries, along with museums and private collections.
He stole from Harvard University, Claremont College, the University of Oregon, the University of Southern California, Duke University, Washington State University, the University of Iowa, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and many others. (As far as anyone knows, Blumberg never stole anything from Creighton. Though he did threaten to pull a heist of Reinert-Alumni Memorial Library. More on that later.)
By the time the FBI caught Blumberg, he’d amassed a collection worth an estimated $20 million, with another estimate as high as $40 million. (Later, during his trial, the collection was negotiated down to $5.3 million, as the value of the collection determined the length of his prison sentence.) And mind you, this was in 1990 dollars. Whatever the collection’s true value, it would be worth more than twice as much today.
“Statistically, there has not been anyone who stole more books of such obviously high quality from more libraries than Stephen Blumberg,” said William Moffett, then the director of libraries at Oberlin College in Ohio. “For sheer quantity and total value, everyone is quite insignificant stacked up against what Stephen brought together.”
Guinness World Records seconded this claim, deeming Blumberg the “most prolific book thief” in world history. His closest rival is Guglielmo Libri, a 19th century academic who had a distinct advantage over Blumberg: He was the chief inspector of French libraries.
After Blumberg’s arrest, the FBI set about packing up the evidence. All 19 tons of it. It took 17 people two days and 879 packing boxes to get all the books and papers out of the house. (Here's a Des Moines local news video of them doing so.) It took two 40-foot tractor-trailers to haul it all to Omaha, where agents of the Iowa-Nebraska FBI headquarters had secured a secret warehouse to store and sort through the collection.
At the time of the case, W. Dennis Aiken was the assistant agent in charge of Omaha’s FBI headquarters. In 1990, he said: “What went through my mind was … how are we going to deal with the books?”
The FBI needed librarians. Here’s where Creighton comes in.
The Omaha Project
Around 40 people from 16 Nebraska libraries volunteered to assist the FBI’s investigation, including employees from such institutions as the College of Saint Mary, the University of Nebraska Medical Center and Iowa Western Community College.
Most of the libraries volunteered one or two people each. Creighton’s Reinert library provided 10. They ended up working about half the total volunteer hours dedicated to the effort. The University let them spend part of their workweek at the secret warehouse, essentially subsidizing a public service. Though some of the Creighton librarians also donated their own nights and weekends to the cause.
They had a tall task before them: more than 23,000 books and documents (perhaps not all stolen) that needed to go back to at least 300 university libraries. Making the job even more difficult, Blumberg had used razor blades and sandpaper to remove the identifying library stamps or bookplates from almost every item, in many cases writing or stamping his own personal mark into the pages. (He also used his tongue, sometimes spending hours licking off a single book’s library stickers and catalog pockets, to the point of making himself sick.)
Identifying the books’ provenance would turn the librarians into de facto detectives in a case the FBI had codenamed “The Omaha Project.”
One Creighton member of the Omaha Project was the Rev. Gregory Carlson, SJ, who employed his knowledge of foreign languages to help with the more difficult-to-understand titles.
“It was all incredibly secretive,” Fr. Carlson says now. “The FBI had security checks run on all of us. I wonder if they found out that my brother-in-law was in the CIA!”
Fr. Carlson recalls his sense of awe upon entering the Omaha Project warehouse. (He doesn’t remember the address, but others recalled it being located somewhere along 84th Street.) Here was a collection of extremely rare books, so vast that it stretched across 3,500 feet of plain metal shelving (the shelves alone cost $11,000). The scope of it overwhelmed Fr. Carlson, who is something of a bibliomaniac himself. Over many years, he has amassed — legally! — a collection of more than 9,000 fable books and 4,000 fable-related objects (cataloged online by the Creighton Archives).
“I recognized in Blumberg a fellow book lover, though I hope in slightly different ways,” Fr. Carlson says, laughing. He couldn’t help but keep his eye out for fables while he and the librarians worked their way through the stolen books. He never found any.
Here’s how the Omaha Project worked: The FBI set up 10 terminals with access to the Online Computer Library Center, which at the time was the largest online bibliographic database in the world — 22 million items and 10,384 libraries. Using the terminals, the librarians combed through the books and papers, typed titles and descriptions into the terminals and attempted to match each item with its record.
They often had some idea of where to start. Because while Blumberg had removed the identifying markers from most of the books, he’d also kept the markers as trophies. In his collection, the FBI had found several scrapbooks full of bookplates and catalog pockets from many of the looted libraries.
(Another helpful asset in the investigation: Blumberg himself. While the Omaha Project was underway, Blumberg was out on bail awaiting his sentence. Seeking to gain some good will with the court, he continually came to the Omaha warehouse to help the librarians identify the stolen items’ proper homes. Blumberg was, of course, under the close supervision of FBI agents the whole time.)
Slowly but surely, the Omaha Project inventoried thousands of items. Focusing first on the collection’s most valuable books, volunteers were able to match much of the collection’s origins, contact the owners and eventually get most of the materials back to the right place. That summer of 1990, the FBI threw a thank-you party for Omaha Project volunteers at the Reinert library. Everyone got an “Omaha Project” T-shirt.
The FBI offered university libraries a long window to claim their items from the stolen collection. “Every institution we called, without exception, either had no idea what they lost or didn’t understand the extent of their losses,” FBI agent Aiken said at the time. “I couldn’t tell you how many people came in (to the warehouse) and said the very same thing: ‘I know the shelf this is supposed to be on.’”
The Blumberg thefts ended up being a wakeup call for libraries and their near-universal lack of adequate security and inventory methods. It was later estimated that 95% of what Blumberg stole hadn’t even been missed.
Even after the Omaha Project’s exhaustive search, many of the books’ origins remained a mystery. By 1993, about 4,000 items were still unclaimed. As a token of gratitude for the Creighton librarians’ many hours on the case, the FBI gave those books to the Reinert library.
Creighton librarians archived the collection, then donated about 3,000 of the books to surrounding local libraries. Books and manuscripts thought to hold special value for Creighton were distributed between the stacks and the Rare Books Room. Some materials remained uncatalogued in boxes, awaiting rediscovery.
One unintended consequence of the FBI’s gift: Creighton was now on Blumberg’s radar. In March 1994, Blumberg wrote the University a letter from the federal penitentiary where he was being held. It read:
“I am writing this to notify you that I am intending on taking actions to regain books taken from my home in Ottumwa, Iowa, and subsequently given to your institution. None of the books found in my house could be claimed by your institution.
“My current circumstances have me constrained, whereby I can't effectively (reclaim my collection). But in the future, this I intend to do, and it is only fair to notify you.”
In response, Creighton stepped up security measures in the library’s Rare Books Room. Michael LaCroix, Reinert library director at the time, told the Creightonian: “We have every reason to expect Blumberg will show up.”
The Book Bandit’s 20-year crime spree
So who was Stephen Blumberg and why did he do what he did?
Just as relevant a question: How was he able to accomplish such a feat? That answer, at least, is a simple one. He had a lot of time on his hands because he didn’t have to work for a living.
Blumberg was the beneficiary of generational wealth, courtesy of a great-grandfather who’d started his fortune selling horses and provisions during World War I and by buying then-worthless land that later became valuable Twin Cities real estate. By the late 1960s, Blumberg was drawing a $72,000 annual income from a family trust. (Which came in handy when he wanted to buy a 17-room house, in a centrally convenient state, to store his library of more than 23,000 stolen books.)
Because he never wanted for money, Blumberg never stole for profit. He just really — really — liked collecting things. He once described himself as a “rescuer of the past.”
“Part of his obsession with books grew out of an obsession with old things,” says Trish Ross, PhD, an assistant professor at Creighton who taught an honors class about Blumberg this spring. “He seemed to imagine himself as a misplaced Victorian man who wanted to live in the 19th century. Most of his collection came from that time. He was fascinated by Americana and the American West.”
Blumberg’s obsession first emerged during his childhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. It started not with books but the fixtures of old Victorian houses — stained glass windows and ornate doorknobs. In his early years, he would pluck pieces off condemned houses. His hobby eventually escalated to breaking and entering, which led to the first of many arrests.
At some point, Blumberg started reading and collecting books about the antiques he was stealing, which opened up a whole new avenue of obsession — bibliokleptomania, an uncontrollable impulse to steal books. His first arrest relating to stolen library materials dates back to 1974, in Fort Lupton, Colorado. (It’s worth noting that this newfound love of old books didn’t impede his passion for stealing home fixtures, as well. At the time of his arrest, his Ottumwa home also contained about 50,000 antique brass doorknobs.)
Since money was no obstacle — especially since the thrifty Blumberg wore the same clothes all the time and opted to eat at soup kitchens instead of paying for his meals — he could hit the road (often with accomplices) for as much as six months at a time.
During these extended sprees, he would rent apartments in other states so he could linger as long as he wanted. He’d also rent local storage spaces to squirrel away his newly stolen books before taking them back to his private library. (He hadn’t purchased the house in Ottumwa until 1988, having previously lived in an old brick mansion in Minneapolis.)
Blumberg’s heists were targeted and meticulous. He sometimes spent weeks scouting a single location, getting a sense of the library security and triggering alarms to clock the guards’ response times. He became a proficient locksmith and lock-picker. Sometimes, he would steal the key to a rare book room from a custodian’s key ring, get a duplicate made and return the original before anyone knew it was gone.
Blumberg used his small, thin frame to get into the tightest of spots — crawling through ventilation ducts; climbing up metal grates to squeeze through the eight inches of space between grate and ceiling; shinnying up a dumbwaiter elevator shaft used to transport books.
One time, he later told reporters, his lithe (5-foot-9, 130-pound) frame saved his life. Late one night, he was climbing up a library’s elevator shaft to get to the special collections room on the seventh floor. He didn’t think anyone else was in the building. Then the elevator started moving. He darted into the nook of a small service platform to narrowly escape the elevator crushing him.
He could also, reportedly, scale buildings. Testifying at Blumberg’s trial, one of his accomplices referred to him as “Spiderman.” Others noted his talents as a master of disguise.
Blumberg would often befriend and recruit teenagers in his schemes. For libraries with lax security, he would find ways into the special collections, wait until the library closed, then throw books out a window to his accomplices.
One of Blumberg’s most effective methods was pretending to be someone else. One day, while visiting the University of Minnesota, Blumberg found the faculty identification card of a professor named Matthew McGue, with whom he shared some resemblance. From that day on, Blumberg identified himself as McGue at every library he visited, claiming to be doing research in whatever collection he intended to plunder. To further the ruse, he later forged a birth certificate and had five driver’s licenses made with McGue’s name.
Posing as a legitimate academic gave Blumberg greater access to the library buildings where special collections were kept, and he grew even more brazen. His exploits at Harvard University offer a prime example.
Using McGue’s faculty ID, Blumberg paid for a 90-day access pass for Harvard libraries. Day after day, he went to the libraries wearing a huge overcoat, into the lining of which he’d sewn oversized pockets that allowed him to hide and remove books with relative ease.
Another time at Harvard, Blumberg snuck in a pair of horseshoe-nail-pullers and used the tool to pluck out the lock cylinder of a library door and replace it with the blank he’d brought with him. He then went all the way to Montreal to get a locksmith to make him a master key for the Harvard lock (using the cover story that he needed a master made for the locks in an apartment building he owned). Blumberg then returned to Harvard and replaced the blank cylinder with the real one. He now had a master key that worked across campus.
Years later, while awaiting his trial, Blumberg told journalist Nicholas Basbanes:
“The chase really is something, isn’t it? It just gets worse, especially when you get so close to achieving the ultimate. It’s agonizing. Sometimes you wish you hadn’t started.”
Catching the Book Bandit
In 1988, Washington State University library staff discovered that highly valuable papers and books were missing from their collection, and campus police detective Sgt. J. Stephen Huntsberry was sent to investigate the case that would profoundly change his professional life.
Huntsberry — a Navy veteran and former lounge singer — had no experience with rare books or libraries, but he took the case seriously and sought to learn as much as he could from the university’s librarians. One of those librarians was Eileen Brady, BA’65, a Creighton history alumna whose first library job was at Reinert. (She remembers a Creighton Jesuit teaching her how to read call numbers and shelve books, though she can’t remember his name.)
“I didn’t help Steve Huntsberry so much with his sleuthing, but I did help broaden his understanding of libraries and the weird people who sometimes worked there,” says Brady, now retired, from her home in Moscow, Idaho. Huntsberry noted Brady’s “extensive knowledge of the inner workings of library facilities, including a wealth of statistical knowledge about library theft.” The investigation and their ensuring friendship ended up setting Brady’s career down a slightly different path.
Brady had always had eclectic interests. Before becoming a librarian, she worked as a researcher assisting the artists, engineers and architects who made Disney World in Orlando. She also worked as a fact checker for golden-age TV series like Mission: Impossible, Star Trek and The Wild Wild West. (Read more about Brady and all the unexpected things a Creighton history degree can prepare you for.) But it wasn’t until Brady met Huntsberry that she really started digging into the field of library security, eventually becoming a nationally renowned expert on the subject.
Years after Blumberg’s trial, Brady, Huntsberry and a friend founded a quarterly publication called Focus on Security. In her research, Brady discovered that libraries had 3% to 15% of their materials stolen each year, very little of it ever recovered.
Huntsberry and Brady were later invited to speak at the Smithsonian’s National Conference on Cultural Property Protection. The same year, 1996, they testified as expert witnesses for the prosecution during Blumberg’s probation hearing. It was the only time Brady ever saw Blumberg in person.
“I remember the prosecution put me on the stand and said, ‘Why does what Blumberg did make any difference? They’re just books,’” Brady says. “I said, ‘Well, we get very upset when art objects are stolen because they’re representative of a particular time in history. We should be just as upset at the loss of these books. Because it’s the loss of human thought at a particular moment in time. It’s the theft of our shared cultural history.”
Back in 1988, with Brady and other librarians’ assistance, Sgt. Huntsberry determined that the items known to be missing from Washington State University’s libraries added up to almost 400 books and about 2,500 manuscripts, valued at roughly $500,000. Huntsberry, who died last year, left behind extensive documentation of the case, along with his personal account.
“There were no leads or evidence on which to begin the investigation,” he wrote in 1991. “All persons remotely associated with the library were instantly placed on the suspect list … but from the early stages of the investigation, I believed that outside players were responsible.”
His investigation led him down a few false trails, each one more sensational than the last. He looked into:
1. A team of book thieves whose methods resembled “something between the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers.”
2. The homicide of a rare books dealer in Texas.
3. A master forger and bomb-maker in Salt Lake City who murdered two people with explosives.
Huntsberry didn’t know it yet, but by the late ’80s, a few university libraries had begun to notice some very important rare books missing from their collections. He sent out warning flyers to other institutions he thought might be vulnerable to similar thefts — mostly colleges, universities and public libraries on the West Coast. He heard back from two: the University of Oregon and California’s Claremont College were missing similar materials. Huntsberry also heard from an LAPD detective, who said that libraries in the area had taken note of a suspicious character named Matthew McGue.
The big break in the case came a few minutes shy of midnight, April 18, 1988, when a custodian at a library at the University of California at Riverside found Blumberg sneaking around a restricted area that had closed several hours earlier. The library called campus police, who found in Blumberg’s possession a briefcase containing long, thin dental picks, clippings of a student newspaper article about the lack of campus police officers and another that listed library hours.
Blumberg was arrested for trespassing and possession of burglary tools and booked under his alias of Matthew McGue. A police officer who found a Washington State University library schedule card among Blumberg/McGue’s effects contacted Huntsberry.
“My elation was quickly subdued when I was informed that McGue had been released,” Huntsberry wrote. “I was convinced that McGue would go underground, assume a new identity and continue as before.”
Fortunately, Riverside police had photographed and fingerprinted McGue, and later sent the images and prints to Huntsberry. He teletyped every state in the U.S. asking for info about “McGue.”
(Huntsberry had already ruled out the real Matthew McGue, the University of Minnesota professor whose faculty ID Blumberg had stolen and who, incidentally, would end up testifying for the prosecution at Blumberg’s trial. McGue described his frustration and confusion at people repeatedly asking him about the research he was supposedly doing at libraries he’d never visited.)
A few weeks after he sent the McGue documents to “all 50 states,” Huntsberry got a hit on McGue’s print. The Minnesota State Criminal Investigation Department identified McGue as Stephen Carrie Blumberg, an individual with a long record of trespassing arrests. Huntsberry had his man.
“From that point on, it was just a matter of tracing Blumberg’s steps during his 20-year history of theft,” Huntsberry wrote. He compiled a comprehensive dossier on Blumberg and sent it to the FBI. And from there … the case went nowhere.
It’s unclear why it would take another two years for the authorities to roll up to Blumberg’s private library in Ottumwa, Iowa. An FBI agent who later arrested Blumberg admitted that they could have done more with Huntsberry’s tip, but they just didn’t think the pieces of his investigation fell into place.
For all Huntsberry’s meticulous detective work (and Creighton alumna Eileen Brady’s assistance), in the end, Stephen Blumberg was caught because a friend turned him in.
Kenneth J. Rhodes — Blumberg’s regular accomplice of 15 years — received a $56,000 reward for the tip. It was Rhodes, in fact, who led FBI agents to Blumberg’s door that night in 1990.
United States vs. Stephen Carrie Blumberg
Blumberg had stolen millions of dollars worth of books and stashed them in his Iowa library. It was undeniable. So his defense lawyers had to try a
