The buyer who found the Action Comics No. 1 in his purchased storage contents falls into the unusual category of someone who acquired unexpected treasure. His inability to identify the specific locker he had purchased—among, presumably, multiple units he had bought in auction purchases—is consistent with how such buyers typically operate, moving through multiple auctions and multiple units in a relatively rapid sequence.
What happened to the contents of this locker between 2000 and the point at which it was auctioned—whether the locker was rented by someone connected to the theft, whether it changed renters, whether the comic was stored there immediately after the theft or arrived there through some chain of subsequent transactions—is not established by the public record. The storage locker is a physical location at the end of a chain of custody that cannot be traced from the theft report date forward. It is the recovered endpoint, not the documented intermediate stage.
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MARK BALELO: THE INTERMEDIARY
Mark Balelo’s role in the recovery chain is that of the knowledgeable intermediary—the person who knew enough about the market to recognize that the object required expert attention and who had the connections to bring it to Stephen Fishler. He is described in contemporaneous reporting as a collectibles expert and the owner of a liquidation company in Simi Valley.
Simi Valley is a city in Ventura County, just west of the San Fernando Valley, accessible via the Ronald Reagan Freeway. It is a largely residential community that became nationally known as the location of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and as one of the communities affected by the 1994 Northridge earthquake. That a collectibles expert based there served as the intermediary between a storage locker buyer in the San Fernando Valley and a major New York dealer reflects the somewhat informal network of the collectibles industry, where regional experts with specialized knowledge can serve as nodes in the information network connecting sellers to buyers and, in this case, stolen property to its appropriate authorities.