Sometime in the year 2000, a copy of Action Comics No. 1—the June 1938 comic that introduced Superman to the world, and one of the most valuable pieces of printed paper in existence—disappeared from Nicolas Cage’s home in Los Angeles. He filed a theft report with the LAPD on January 21, 2000. The theft was logged, the case was opened, and Detective Donald Hrycyk of the LAPD’s Art Theft Detail began what would become one of the longer assignments of his career.
Over the next eleven years, the comic was not found. False leads emerged and faded. In 2002, there was a tip that it had turned up in a safe-deposit box in Tennessee. It hadn’t, or at least it wasn’t recoverable through that tip. The years passed. Cage’s financial circumstances became difficult for unrelated reasons, and he sold much of his remaining collection. The stolen book remained missing.
Then, in the spring of 2011, a man in the San Fernando Valley bought the contents of an abandoned storage locker at auction through a company called American Auctioneers, based in Riverside, California. He later discovered, among the contents, an old comic book. He brought it to Mark Balelo, a collectibles expert in Simi Valley, asking Balelo to sell it. Balelo recognized the book or suspected what it was. He contacted Stephen Fishler, the New York-based dealer at Metropolis Collectibles and ComicConnect who had originally sold Cage the comic in the mid-1990s. Fishler knew the book had been reported stolen. He alerted the authorities.