John Lennon’s Fingerprints, Seized Before Auction, May Have Been Lawyer’s Lost Property
The FBI seized a 1976 card displaying John Lennon’s fingerprints on Wednesday before a memorabilia shop was able to auction it off.
The owner of the Gotta Have It! shop in New York City had hoped to get at least $100,000 for the card’s owner, the New York Times reports. Lennon gave his fingerprints and signed the document in an effort to attain citizenship.
Store owner Peter Siegel told the Times that the card was owned by a private collector who bought it at a Beatles convention some 20 years ago. A lawyer who represented Lennon on immigration matters, Leon Wildes, “offered a theory about the document’s provenance” that reaches back before that time, the story says.
Wildes had the fingerprint form and other documents from the musician with him when he was making a television appearance in 1976. “When I returned to where I was, from New York, it turned out it was missing,” Wildes said. “I was very upset. We called about it, and nobody seemed to know where it was.”
FBI spokesman James Margolin told the Times that the seizure of the card was part of an “investigation into how that item came to be up for auction.”
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