The Great Library Heist of 2000

This is the first installment of a three-part series for Gulf Coast Reads, HCPL’s shared reading program. This year’s selection, The Librarians by Sherry Thomas, is a cozy mystery set in an Austin library, making this the perfect time to revisit our own real-life library mystery.

Somewhere in northeast Harris County in the year 2000, a reference book went missing from a library shelf.  It was a heavy, expensive volume, the kind that might sit on a library shelf untouched for weeks, and in a room with thousands of books, one gap is easy to overlook. But it happened again, and then again at another branch, and then again at another, and another... 

Over ten months, someone quietly walked out of several Harris County Public Libraries with hundreds of reference books worth tens of thousands of dollars.  This is the story 

The Headline 

I learned about the theft by accident. I was doing routine research for our podcast, Civic Curiosity, when a headline from the September 19, 2000 edition of the Houston Chronicle caught my eye: "Constables recover 428 books." 

I've worked for Harris County Public Library for over eight years, and I thought I knew most of our history, but as I read on, I realized I'd stumbled across a lost chapter of our past, one no one had ever mentioned to me. 

The reported loss was around $38,000, which is more than $75,000 in today's money.  Additionally, the crime resulted in an arrest, conviction, and a five-year jail sentence.  Granted, that isn't a tremendous amount of money for a public library budget, but a five-year prison sentence seemed like a lot of time for a non-violent offense. 

It also surprised me that I couldn’t find any co-workers who had even heard about the story.  I later learned that 25 years is about the limit of institutional knowledge. Anything beyond that, stories are lost.  Sadly, most people who worked at the library at the time of the Great Library Heist of 2000 (as I was now calling it) are no longer with us, or they are enjoying a well-deserved retirement. 

I had so many questions. Why would you steal a book you can use for free?  How does someone leave a public library with thousands of dollars in reference books without setting off alarms?  And how is this story not told in break rooms whenever the subject of crime or misdeeds in the library comes up? 

I couldn't let it go. What started as a casual search for podcast topics became a full-scale investigation.   

Was everybody doing it? 

I started with HCPL’s collection of news databases.  I wanted to see whether other articles covered the theft. There were a lot of results. It turns out stealing from libraries was in vogue in 2000.  That year, in St. Petersburg, Russia, a man casually walked out of the Academy of Sciences Library with a rare manuscript under his coat.  The book was Nicolaus Copernicus's 1543 work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and it was never seen again.  Although irreplaceable, it was valued at $400,000 at the time.  In November of the same year, the British police recovered a book by the Italian Renaissance astronomer and mathematician Galileo, valued at $65,000, and returned it shortly thereafter to the prestigious Krakow University. 

Around the same time in the U.S., staff at the National Archives in Philadelphia realized it had been the victim of a string of thefts of some of America's greatest treasures.  In what was later discovered to be an "inside Job," hundreds of items had been funneled to a black market of collectors.  Although many items were ultimately recovered, some remain missing, including priceless pieces like presidential documents signed by Abraham Lincoln and original photographs taken by Apollo astronauts.    

Obviously, those crimes weren't connected to our story, but they illustrate two important facts: books can have substantial monetary value, and institutions like libraries, dedicated to sharing these materials for free, can become targets for thieves and unscrupulous collectors. 

At HCPL, these books weren’t historical artifacts; they were the library's everyday workhorses.  In 2000, before online databases took over, branch libraries were the physical home of specialized knowledge, with multi-volume encyclopedias, medical dictionaries, and literary criticism sets waiting on the shelves, free for anyone to use.  They were strictly non-circulating, so you could count on them being there when you needed them. 

Institutional Knowledge 

After failing to find all the facts online, I reached out to the one person I knew who was at HCPL in 2000: retired branch manager Nancy Agafitei.  I began my own library career at the Barbara Bush Branch (formerly Cypress Creek), one of the locations named in the original news coverage. Nancy managed this branch and remembered the incident, but as she pointed out, twenty-six years is a long time, and the details had blurred.  She pointed me to Rhoda Goldberg, who had been HCPL's Deputy Director in 2000. 

It was a BIG deal 

“It was a very big deal, and we were limited in what we could do.” Goldberg recalled, “These buildings are over 15,000 square feet or more, and there just wasn’t enough staff to monitor the whole building.”  As standard practice, Rhoda held monthly meetings with the Branch Managers, and missing reference books had become a frequent topic of discussion.  

As the months progressed, a pattern became obvious: nine branches, mostly in Northeast Harris County, had reported missing reference books. Of those, the North Channel Branch was hit hardest.   

Of course, books go missing from libraries all the time.  They get checked out, accidentally kicked under beds and forgotten, dropped in bathtubs, and left on airplanes.  It's just one of the costs of doing business as a public library.  But libraries rarely lost non-circulating reference books.  The missing books were an odd assortment.  At one branch, copies of Ancient Writers, Vol. I & II were not on the shelf. At another, the World Wildlife Fund Guide to Endangered Species had disappeared.  They all shared one trait: they were expensive and valuable exactly because they served niche users.   

Reference books don't get pulled off the shelf every day or even every month, so in a room filled with thousands of books, you can imagine that a missing volume might be easy to overlook.  However, by the beginning of the summer of 2000, HCPL staff were on alert and watching closely. 

How do I know all of this? 

I enjoyed talking with retired library staff, and their help was invaluable to this research, but I knew I was missing a big piece of the story.   I had hoped that one of these retired staff members had kept a diary describing the events exactly as they happened, or I would find a few key people who were actual witnesses to the crime, but the real break came when I remembered a coworker's blog: “How to file a Freedom of Information Act Request.”  I took a chance and requested information from the Harris County Precinct 4 Constable's Office, and a couple of weeks later I received an email with a 63-page PDF describing the full sequence of events in the investigation.  It didn't answer all my questions and raised a few more, but the level of detail and the information it provided started to bring the incident into sharper focus.   

Calling in the Law 

Obtaining the police report was a turning point for me, but the turning point in the heist story came when Atascocita Branch Librarian Andaiye Reeves called the Precinct 4 Constable's Office.    

As she started her Monday morning shift, Reeves noticed a few empty spaces on the reference shelf.  Missing were the high-value sets of Biographical Dictionary of Mathematicians and the Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences. They weren't the first books stolen from the library, but now, confronted with the undeniable pattern, she got the authorities involved. 

Captain Larry Shiflet of the Harris County Constable's Office, Precinct 4, sent Deputy Gary Bailey to take the initial report, which became Case No. 0006050882.  Soon after, Deputy Joseph "Mike" Lacher was assigned as lead investigator and he, as Rhoda Goldberg described it, “Really did the yeoman’s work and not only caught the thief, but brought home the books.” 

The Break in the Case

A few weeks later, and eighteen miles south at North Channel Branch Library, patrons witnessed a theft in progress.   Library staff immediately reported it to the police, but the responding Constables were from Precinct 3 Division, so they didn't immediately connect the crimes at the two branches.   

Not to get too deep in the weeds, but Harris County uses a decentralized law enforcement system with eight elected Constables, each responsible for serving a specific precinct. While the precincts operate independently with separate leadership and jurisdictions, they also regularly coordinate with other agencies such as the Harris County Sheriff's Office and local police departments.  In 2000, communication and information sharing between precincts was not always as immediate or seamless as it is today.  The inability to connect the two incidents immediately could have cost the investigation valuable time. 

But the staff at the Harris County Atascocita Branch Library did make the connection. 

On Monday, June 19th, 2000, Deputy Lacher arrived at the Atascocita branch to pick up a list of stolen reference volumes that staff had assembled, and they told him about the incident at the North Channel branch.  Immediately, Deputy Lacher traveled to North Channel to investigate.  According to Lacher's notes, the events unfolded as follows. 

On Sunday afternoon, June 18, at the North Channel Branch, a patron noticed a man pulling a heavy duffel bag out of a smaller pack and filling it with reference books. The patron alerted staff, and Branch Librarian Pat Lippold approached the man as he was heading for the exit.  According to Mrs. Lippold, the man was neatly dressed, slender with short hair and very calm.  When she inquired about the duffel bags full of books, he simply told her they were his own schoolbooks and then walked out the front door. 

The next day, Precinct 4 Deputy Lacher called Precinct 3 Captain Ken Jones to link the two cases.  The joint investigation now had its single most vital piece of evidence because Pat Lippold hadn't just watched the suspect walk away—she had followed him into the parking lot at a safe distance.  She had watched him climb into a small purple car.  She then pulled out her pen, and with true librarian precision, she wrote down the car's license plate number. 

For the first time in ten months, the investigators had something the thief hadn't planned on: a number on a piece of paper. 

Coming in Part Two: where that plate number led, and the day the case came together. 

Join HCPL and Gulf Coast Reads for An Evening with Sherry Thomas

October 30, 6:30 p.m.
West University Branch Library

Harris County Public Library and the Gulf Coast Reads Committee invite you to a special evening with Sherry Thomas, author of the 2026 Gulf Coast Reads selection, The Librarians. Registered attendees will receive a free copy of The Librarians while supplies last.

This is a FREE event but space is limited. REGISTER NOW