A former Postal Service worker admitted this week that he stole valuable sports collectibles, including Michael Jordan trading cards, an autographed photo of the tennis star Rafael Nadal and a Mickey Mantle card, while he was working as a sorting clerk at a post office in New Jersey, federal prosecutors said.
The items, collectively estimated to be worth more than $100,000, were taken from parcels destined for an auction house in Clifton, N.J., and sold to individual buyers or sports collectibles stores, prosecutors said.
The former clerk, Shelby Dozier, 34, of the Bronx, pleaded guilty to a charge of theft of mail by a Postal Service employee, the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of New Jersey said in a statement on Tuesday.
The Postal Service hired Mr. Dozier in August 2022 as a sorting clerk assigned to its post office in Clifton, about 15 miles west of New York City, prosecutors said. He was one of four to eight clerks who sorted mail and packages on the day shift, they said.
While he was working there, “numerous parcels destined for a consignment auction house located in Clifton went missing,” according to a court filing in the case.
The auction house, which was not identified in court documents, specializes in the sale of trading cards and sports memorabilia that it receives from customers around the world, the U.S. attorney’s office said. Customers would typically send parcels containing trading cards or other sports memorabilia to the company’s post office box.
Between September 2022 and December 2022, prosecutors said, Mr. Dozier stole at least 10 parcels that contained “valuable trading cards and sports memorabilia,” which he then sold. Around December 2022, Mr. Dozier abruptly stopped showing up for work, prosecutors said.
The items that were swiped included more than two dozen Michael Jordan trading cards, some of which were graded for their condition and valued at thousands of dollars each, prosecutors said. One such graded card from 1991 shows an image of Jordan leaping to dunk.
Investigators said they used phone and sales records, which they matched to dates when the items went missing, to trace the card sales back to Mr. Dozier. Text messages from Mr. Dozier to a buyer included images of about 40 collectible cards, prosecutors said.
In one instance, investigators identified calls that were placed in early October 2022 from a phone number associated with Mr. Dozier to a sports collectible store in the Bronx. That was about the time that two Jordan cards and one Mickey Mantle card, with a combined value of about $4,500, went missing after being scanned at the Clifton post office. The Bronx collectible store, which was not identified, purchased those cards and quickly resold them, prosecutors said.
Several trading cards featuring current N.B.A. players, collectively worth as much as $5,000, were also stolen, as were an autographed photo of the Hall of Fame baseball slugger Hank Greenberg and cards related to the popular videogame, film and animated series Pokémon. The signed Nadal photo, included as an exhibit in the court case, shows the tennis star hugging a trophy and biting its handle.
A review of employee attendance records showed that Mr. Dozier had been working at the post office on or around the dates when the parcels with the collectible items went missing, prosecutors said.
Several postal employees also told the authorities that they saw “several opened and empty parcels” that had been addressed to the auction house in the men’s locker room at the Clifton post office.
As part of his plea agreement, Mr. Dozier agreed to pay $108,692.49 in restitution, prosecutors said. A public defender who was listed in court records for Mr. Dozier did not immediately respond to an inquiry for comment on Wednesday.
Mr. Dozier faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced on April 22.
