The NY Times has an interesting article on the rise in collectibility and values of items which are connected to famous felonies. As appraisers, we have seen items connected to famous people or events bring in very large value premiums. Criminal act artifacts seems to be a growing segment of the market.
The NY Times reports
Source: The NY Times
The R R sale is part of a torrent this fall of exhibitions and sales of artifacts connected to felonies.
The public clearly has a taste for the material, given the longstanding popularity of prison museums, including Alcatraz on an island in the San Francisco Bay and Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. New high-profile displays in Las Vegas, the Mob Museum and Mob Attraction Las Vegas, opened in the last year, and the normally unflashy Library Company of Philadelphia filled galleries this year with theft and prostitution documents for a show, “Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of 19th-Century America.”
“Moonshine,” a show opening on Friday at the Gaston County Museum in Dallas, N.C., contains about 75 pieces covering three centuries of illegal distilleries and police crackdowns. Lenders offering their families’ bootlegging equipment did not mind having their names mentioned on the wall labels.
On Staten Island new facsimiles of a Prohibition-era diner and a gas station frequented by fictional criminals have been on view for months amid colonial and Victorian buildings at Historic Richmond Town. Film crews constructed the buildings for HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” and the historic site hopes to make them a permanent attraction.
Entire properties where real outlaws holed up have come on the market.
Woodside, a 707-acre ghost town in eastern Utah along Butch Cassidy’s thieving trail, is on the market for $3.9 million. Bridge Realty’s online ad for Woodside notes that some form of local government could be reinstated, with the new owner in charge: “Your chance to be the mayor the sheriff the judge and the executioner!!!”
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