How was your Spring Break? Did you get arrested? If not, you’re doing better than William Scott, a freshman defender on the Drew University (N.J.) lacrosse team, who was arrested by federal officials in front of his whole team. His crime? Being a freshman.
Seriously though, Scott worked part-time at the Drew archives, and as an employee, he was given a key to a storage area containing rare documents too valuable to share openly with the public.
So, with no grasp at all of the meaning of “paper trail,” Scott stole numerous documents and sold them online for thousands of dollars, including original compositions by U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, William McKinley, F.D.R., Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He also stole works penned by Robert F. Kennedy, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and United Methodist Church founders (Drew is a Methodist institution) John and Charles Wesley. FBI Agents found most of these documents just sitting in a folder in Scott’s dorm room. Yeah, I’d say you’re guilty, pal.
Inspired by Scott, I too went hunting over Spring Break to recover Marquette’s most cherished documents whilst campus lay barren. You’re thinking of the J.R.R. Tolkien papers, right? Nope. Tomorrow’s history exam. And for 50 bucks, you can have it, too.