A former high-ranking National Archives and Records Administation official was sentenced Thursday to a year-and-a-half in prison for a decade-long scheme to steal Archives materials and sell them on eBay.
Leslie Charles Waffen was sentenced in federal court in Greenbelt after pleading guilty in October to stealing sound recordings from the Archives between 2001 and 2010.
“You take our history if you take the things that sustain our history,” Judge Peter Messitte said in announcing his sentence.
The sound recordings stolen included a 1937 Babe Ruth radio interview, an eyewitness report to the 1937 Hindenburg crash and a recording of a show featuring Joseph McCarthy.
In total, the items were worth more than $83,000, according to prosecutors.
Waffen said in court that the thefts were “fueled by a sense of self-importance” that rules “did not apply to me.”
