A happy John Rogers watched with relief Monday as workers loaded dozens upon dozens of plastic crates containing photographs onto a flatbed truck behind the North Little Rock Courthouse.
The photos - more than 100,000 valued at $2 million - had been stolen from Rogers Photo Archive, one of the world’s largest collections of original images and negatives from newspapers and others.
The guilty pleas of two men to a federal wire-fraud conspiracy charge last week made it possible for the photographs to return to Rogers’ North Little Rock business after a two-year ordeal.
A theft from a business partner prompted Rogers to conduct his own internal audit, he said Monday.
Last May, the audit revealed that more than 100,000 photographs were gone from an archive that now totals more than 52 million original images amassed from newspapers, photographers and other organizations over the past ten years.
After Rogers contacted North Little Rock Police detectives, it didn’t take long to find the purloined pictures, he said.
They were being sold on eBay by a former employee, Christopher Jackson, who later admitted to accepting bids for the originals. Jackson was getting help from Steve Roby, a warehouse manager working for Rogers, according to North Little Rock detective Brandon Bennett.
Roby would take requests from Jackson, Bennett said, and Jackson turned around and sold them to the highest bidder in a scam that lasted more than two years, according to court documents.
The two men diverted funds from customers buying images from Rogers’ company into their own PayPal accounts, according to court documents.
The pair sold only about 8,347 of the stolen photographs, netting $138,605, Rogers said, adding that it could have been a lot more.
“At first [Roby] took one, two... 10 photos at a time. They took what they could when it was convenient,” Rogers said. “But then they really got brazen.”
The majority of the stolen photos were taken in one grab, which made the theft sizeable enough to be noticed.
“That’s what triggered them,” Rogers said. “Their greed.”
Bennett, who works on a task force with the Secret Service, is used to looking into internal theft, but this heist was definitely unusual, he said.
“[Rogers] is in a unique business; he’s got a market cornered,” Bennett said. “The suspects had to have a special knowledge [of the market] to do it.”
Rogers was thankful for the efforts of Bennett and federal investigators.
Roby and Jackson could each face up to 20 years in prison as well as fines reaching up to $250,000 when they are sentenced.
After their court appearance Friday, the two were released on their own recognizance pending sentencing.
“[Roby] was trusted,” Rogers said. “There was no rhyme or reason for [the theft].”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 02/19/2013