'Newsday' Pulitzer Prize Medals Missing From Safe

By: Joe Strupp Is it an investigative story worthy of a Pulitzer Prize? Maybe not.

But word that someone has apparently stolen three Pulitzer medals from Newsday of Melville, N.Y., broke into a safe to do it, and sold them at auction, is raising concerns at the paper.

"Top officials at Newsday drilled into a safe at the paper's Melville offices yesterday and found three gold Pulitzer Prize medals missing, prompting an investigation by Suffolk police," the paper reported on Wednesday.

"The whereabouts of the medals, representing the Pulitzer Prizes awarded to Newsday for public service in 1954, 1970 and 1974, first became an issue Monday when it was learned that they had apparently been sold Friday at an auction in Long Beach, Calif., for $7,000, $4,500 and $4,000, respectively.??"

The paper went on to reveal that replicas had been displayed in Newsday's offices for years while the true medasl were in a safe.

"We have contacted the police and we are talking to our attorneys to pursue all legal avenues available to us," Newsday spokeswoman Deidra Parrish Williams said in the paper. "We are naturally disheartened and disappointed to discover that our medals are not in our possession. We are consoled by the fact that the medals are not the prize itself."

The paper said, "it was unclear whether the medals sold at auction were the same ones missing from the Newsday safe or were replicas. In 1984, the prize's Columbia University administrators gave Newsday permission to create reproductions of the three prizes for display at the paper's New York City offices."

The paper reported contacting Jim Halperin, co-chairman of the Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries, which sold the medals, who said that "if the medals sold Friday turn out to have been stolen, it is likely that the new owners - whom he did not name - would return them."

Newsday officials said they were unsure when the medals had disappeared, the paper reported: "No one had any memory of seeing the medals firsthand, and no one said they know who last saw them. ?"

"I was told they were in the safe," former Newsday publisher Ray Jansen, who oversaw the making of plaques, said about the paper's 19 Pulitzers.??