The "Inverted Jenny" and Tamaqua, Pennsylvania

This is another interesting story (mostly unknown) about Tamaqua and its relationship to other more famous stories and history. Moreover, it involves the father of one of my best friends in Tamaqua (Ron Gerber) so I knew the subject of this story personally.

Background

The Inverted Jenny is a United States postage stamp first issued on May 10, 1918 in which the image of the Curtiss JN-4 airplane in the center of the design appears upside-down; it is probably the most famous error in American philately. Only one pane of 100 of the inverted stamps was ever found, making this error one of the most prized in all philately as indicated by the following recent sales:

The Inverted Jenny Air Mail Issue of 1918

• On 15 November 2018, the position number 49 stamp was auctioned for a price of $1,350,000, with a buyer's premium raising the total cost to $1,593,000. [Healey, Matthew. "Nov. 15 Jenny Invert sale sets record". Linn's Stamp News.] 
• On 11 November 2023, another Inverted Jenny stamp was auctioned for a price of $1,700,000, with a buyer’s premium raising the total cost to $2,006,000. ["US stamp sells for a record-breaking $2m". BBC News. 2023-11-13.] 

Eighty-two of the US’ rarest postage stamps, including an “Inverted Jenny”, went missing from the New York Public Library in May 1977. The stamps, worth about $1 million (at that time), from the Benjamin K. Miller collection. Miller's sharp legal mind made him a lot of money at an early age. But the quiet Wisconsin bachelor left the bar for his first love. philately. He retired young and devoted his life to collecting what many stamp experts believe to be the 

Benjamin Kurtz Miller, whose Inverted Jenny, position 18 on the sheet, was stolen in 1977 was one of the early buyers of inverts, 10 in all, bought the stamp for $250. 

finest collection of rare U.S. stamps ever assembled. Miller moved to New York City to personally supervise the massive collection, which was on display in the New York Public Library, until he died in 1928 of a heart attack while sitting in the lobby of the University Club. Miller willed the stamps to the library on one condition, that they be displayed publicly "forever."

Police were clueless as to whodunit, until another Inverted Jenny was reported stolen in 1982.

From New York to Tamaqua

On Monday, May 9, 1977, someone walked into the basement office of Lambert W. Gerber's home on East Broad Street in Tamaqua and offered numerous rare U.S. stamps for sale. The same day, Gerber's records showed a $60,000 disbursement to a person who used a fictitious name.

What the tall, distinguished-looking Tamaqua man, an internationally known and respected dealer who had sold stamps to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and actor Adolphe Menjou, apparently didn't know was that the stamps had been stolen from the New York Public Library only days before during the weekend.

Mr. Gerber was rated as one of the top 10 philatelic auction specialists (stamp brokers) in the United States back in in the 1960s/1970s. Gerber got his start in the business in 1930 when he was a student in Tamaqua High School and sold/carried newspapers in Tamaqua.  Once after delivering papers he found he had an outstanding bill of $9 he owed the publishers. $9 was hard to come by and he placed an advertisement in a magazine noting he had stamps for sale. He said it wasn't long until he had mail coming in from people in distant places who were interested in purchasing the stamps for collections.

Gerber soon raised the money to pay off his bill and additionally, now found himself in the stamp business. In 1964 he noted that "I have been in the business more than 30 years and devote all my time to it today." Millions of stamps have passed through his hands during this time. Gerber classed the stamp broker business as "the Tiffany end of the trade." The Tamaqua man said there were 35 divisions in the stamp broker business. He deals with the advanced collectors, with people who need scarce items.

In this same interview (1964), Mr. Gerber talked about an inverted Jenny stamp, "one of the stamps in his possession" and his "plans to sell his inverted air mail stamp in the fall". This was obviously not the stolen stamp (1977).

Lambert W. Gerber examining in 1964 an inverted Jenny which had been consigned to him by a client and was later sold for about $11,000

Gerber's daughter has theorized that the thief or an intermediary came directly to Tamaqua from New York and sold the stamps to her father before the news of the robbery had been publicized. She also contended that it would have been foolish of her father to advertise the stamps in his catalogs, sent to 20,000 collectors around the world, if he had known they were stolen. Moreover, the stamp itself had been altered (perforations cut off) to appear to be from the top row of the original sheet.

She pointed out that her father was himself a victim of theft in 1953, when a briefcase containing stamps worth $35,000 was stolen from his room in the Hillsboro Hotel in Tampa, Fla. She recalled that her father had carried the briefcase everywhere, but left it in the room hidden under clothes in a bureau drawer while the family had breakfast on the final day of the Philatelic Americans Convention. When they returned, the room was as it had been left, except the stamps were missing.

FBI Breaks the Case

In December 1982, while working on another stamp theft case, Special agent Earl Sumner came across the photograph of a rare "Inverted Jenny" stamp in one of Gerber's auctions then current catalogs. Sumner took particular notice of the stamp in Gerber's catalog because, like another he had seen, it seemed to have a defect on the "2" in the lower left corner. It turned out that the stamp taken from the Miller collection had an identical mark, a defect in the paper. The agent, a specialist in stamp theft who works out of the FBI Cleveland office, then researched Gerber's old catalogs and found photographs of 81 more of the stolen stamps.

In January 1983, more than five years after the theft, a New York grand jury subpoenaed Gerber's inventory. Instead of moving the thousands of stamps to New York, a team of FBI agents and philatelic experts went to Tamaqua and discovered that 82 of the stamps had been in Gerber's inventory at one time. The FBI seized the 69 remaining stamps, valued at $500,000. The other 13, including the "Inverted Jenny," had been sold. The FBI still isn't certain what happened to the remaining 71 stolen stamps taken in the May 1977 heist, that were not traced to Gerber.

The FBI investigation revealed Gerber sold the inverted Jenny stamp to John W. Kaufmann, a Washington dealer, who featured it on the front page of a 1979 auction catalog (See below.). Lawrence A. Bustillo of Suburban Stamp, Inc., of Springfield, Mass., subsequently purchased the stamp from Kaufmann for $51,700, according to Linn's Stamp News. Sumner said Bustillo surrendered the stolen stamp, which was listed in the then current Scott's Stamp Catalog as being worth $110,000. 

it is not uncommon for stamp dealers, who sell more than collect stamps among the premiere dealers in the country, both bought the "Inverted Jenny" without knowing it was stolen. Linn's Stamp News reported that Kaufmann had the stamp reviewed by an expert at the Philatelic Foundation in New York before he bought it from Gerber. The expert found the stamp to be legitimate. The FBI said (according to experts) the top perforations were cut off the stamp, which was No. 18 of a block of 100, to make it appear it came from the top row of the sheet. Agent Sumner said he did not know whether it was altered before or after Gerber purchased it.

"No way would I know Miller material if it was put in front of me," said William R. Weiss, an Allentown stamp dealer, one of two major Lehigh Valley PA stamp auctioneers. Weiss said the thief or thieves were smart enough to know that they could not pass them into philatelic circles without altering them. Some stamps, like a block of four 1909 stamps printed on blue paper valued at about $50,000, were broken up to disguise them.  Weiss who knew Gerber before his death in 1981 said he felt Gerber was not knowledgeable enough about stamps to mastermind such a theft. "He was a very honest guy. My gut feeling is that he didn't know he was handling stolen merchandise."

Epilogue

Even the FBI concedes that a thorough examination of Gerber's records showed no illegalities in a career that spanned more than 50 years. But there is no denying that Gerber had possession of many of the stamps taken in what was one of the largest stamp thefts in history. And the recovery of those stamps, the largest such case in FBI history, has focused attention on the quiet man who devoted his life to cataloging and selling collections of rare stamps at auctions and by mail.

It also casts light on the inner workings of big-time stamp collecting, which contrary to its low-keyed exterior often involves high-stakes business where single stamps can now bring more than one million dollars. Furthermore, the FBI never issued indictments in the case, which broke after the five-year statute of limitations had expired. The actual perpetrators of the robbery were never named.

A color photograph of the actual stamp appeared on the front cover of Kaufmann’s May 5, 1979, Official NAPEX Auction catalog, which drew widespread attention to the stamp, and gave experts who had not seen Gerber’s price list their first opportunity to study it. Clifford C. Cole Jr. and Calvet Hahn, using different analytical techniques, concluded that the stamp was really position 18, the stolen Miller copy. Cole had sketched the stamp when he viewed it in the frame at the library in 1966, noting the usual plating features such as perforation anomalies and placement of the vignette in relation to the frame. Hahn had developed a technique for identifying the horizontal row from which each stamp originated based on the height and tilt of the vignette, which eliminated the possibility of a top row position.

 

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