SPANISH FORT, Ala. — A phone call on a Friday afternoon from a woman looking to sell baseball cards led to the unraveling of an alleged theft of an autographed sports and music memorabilia collection worth an estimated $150,000 to $200,000 from a storage unit in Semmes, and ended with the woman being arrested on an unrelated warrant at the Spanish Fort shop where she tried to make the sale.
Nathan Carraway, the owner of Big Hit Sports Cards in Spanish Fort, said the woman arrived at his store at about 6:30 p.m. Friday with Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron baseball cards. He said he examined the cards and concluded they were genuine, then asked if she had anything else. According to Carraway, the woman answered, in his words, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got this, and I’ve got that, and I’ve got a complete set of 1972 Dolphins jerseys.”
That detail is what stopped him cold. The 1972 Miami Dolphins remain the only team in NFL history to finish a season undefeated, including the Super Bowl, and complete sets of autographed jerseys from that roster are rare in the memorabilia market. Carraway said the moment he heard the description he knew who owned a complete set: Chase Harrison, a Semmes resident who had been working with him to try to sell part of a collection he had inherited from a relative who had passed away.
How the alert went out
Carraway said he kept the woman talking long enough to confirm his suspicion. He said he found an envelope inside the garment bag holding one of the jerseys that had the name of his friend’s deceased relative on it, and that he used his phone to text Harrison and ask, point blank, whether he had been the victim of a theft. Harrison, he said, was not even aware anything was missing but headed straight for Colony Storage on Moffett Road, the facility where the collection had been kept. What he found there confirmed the worst.
“The lock had been replaced with a different lock, and the latch that you use to open the roll-up door had been cut with a grinder blade,” Harrison said. The unit’s metal roll-up door, he said, had been forced in a way that suggested a battery-powered angle grinder, and the padlock that had secured the unit’s hasp was gone, replaced with a different lock. He said he immediately called the Semmes Police Department, which sent officers to take a report and dispatched a detective to Carraway’s store on Monday to follow up.
Carraway said he stalled the woman at his store long enough Friday evening for officers to arrive. Police determined that she had an active warrant in an unrelated case and took her into custody on the spot. She was booked into the Mobile County Metro Jail on no bond, and remained there as of the most recent public records. Because she has not been charged in connection with the missing memorabilia, she has not been publicly identified by investigators.
The collection that vanished
Harrison said the collection he kept at Colony Storage was, in his estimate, worth between $150,000 and $200,000. He had been working with Carraway to try to sell parts of it for the family of the relative from whom he had inherited the pieces, and the two had developed a working relationship that, in the end, was the only reason the alleged theft came to light as quickly as it did.
The 1972 Dolphins jerseys, all of them autographed, are tied to the only perfect season in NFL history. Beyond the jerseys, Harrison said, the collection included a substantial music-memorabilia component that he had not initially realized was missing until he walked through the unit with a list. There were, he said, scores of guitars — about 100 in all — many of them signed by major touring and recording artists. The list he ticked off included Jimmy Buffett, Hank Williams Jr., John Mellencamp, the Eagles, James Taylor, and Kris Kristofferson, among others he described as “really, really noteworthy musicians.”
There were also signed helmets and signed footballs, baseball cards and football cards going back decades, and a wide range of other keepsakes tied to specific athletes, performers, and events. The size of the collection, Harrison said, is the main reason it had been put into a storage unit in the first place: “It took me a U-Haul to get it all there,” he said. He added that he hoped investigators would be able to pull surveillance footage from the storage facility to identify who had entered and exited the unit, and what vehicles were involved. “So I would think you’d either see it on camera in the back of a truck or multiple trips of the same vehicle,” he said.
What Carraway did next
Carraway said he has been in the business of buying, selling, and trading sports cards and memorabilia for years, and that he has, on prior occasions, turned away people who tried to sell him items he suspected were stolen. What made Friday different, he said, was the certainty. The envelope inside the garment bag carried a name he recognized, and the description of the items matched what he knew to be in his friend’s collection.
“This was the first time that I, like, knew-knew that that, for sure, wasn’t these people’s stuff,” he said. “Like, I a hundred percent knew that — hundred percent.” He added that the only reason he was able to act on that certainty was the relationship he had built with Harrison while helping the family liquidate parts of the estate, a relationship that began as a transaction and ended up being the thread that allowed police to recover at least some of the items.
Harrison said he was able to get back the one Dolphins jersey that the woman had brought into the store, along with a small number of the baseball cards. The rest of the collection, he said, is still missing. He did not put a specific dollar figure on the recovered items, but he said the unrecovered portion is by far the larger share of the value the collection had represented.
The investigation
Semmes Police Chief Todd Freind confirmed that his department took the original report and said his investigators are working the case. Freind said he did not know how long it will take for police to decide whether to pursue charges in connection with the missing memorabilia, and he stressed that the determination will depend on what the investigation turns up. “It depends on where the investigation takes us,” he said.
The case has several strands. The first is the alleged theft itself, which would unfold in the Semmes Police Department’s case file and, if charges are brought, in Mobile County District Court. The second is the recovery of the items, which depends on what police are able to learn from surveillance footage, from the woman’s statements, and from any other evidence that surfaces in the days ahead. The third is the broader question of whether anyone else was involved, which investigators will work to answer before any charging decision is made.
Under Alabama law, theft of property valued at more than $2,500 is generally charged as second-degree theft, while theft of property valued at more than $25,000 is generally charged as first-degree theft, which is a Class B felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $30,000. A collection worth $150,000 to $200,000, if a court accepts that valuation, would clearly fall into the felony range. Whether any defendant is ultimately charged at that level will depend on the evidence investigators develop, the cooperation of any witnesses, and the decisions of the Mobile County District Attorney’s Office, which would prosecute the case if charges are filed.
Why the recovery angle matters
Even when stolen-property cases produce an arrest, recovering the property is often the harder problem. Memorabilia, by its nature, is portable, easy to break into smaller lots, and easy to move across state lines through private sales, online marketplaces, and card shows. A signed guitar or a graded baseball card can be sold quickly and quietly, and the value of the collection, while high in aggregate, comes from many small individual items that can be unloaded one at a time without attracting attention.
Harrison’s hope that surveillance footage will be useful is the same hope police express in most property-theft cases. Storage facilities, like the one on Moffett Road, generally maintain camera coverage of their drive aisles, gate entries, and exit lanes, and that footage can sometimes identify the vehicle or vehicles used to remove property. Even partial footage can be enough to narrow the universe of suspects considerably, especially in a case where the alleged thief has already been identified and questioned.
What the case means for the area
Spanish Fort, where Big Hit Sports Cards sits, is a retail-and-suburban community on the east side of Mobile Bay, just across the bay from Mobile proper. Semmes, where the storage unit was, sits to the northwest of Mobile along the U.S. 98 corridor in western Mobile County. The geography of the case — Semmes, Spanish Fort, the bay — is the geography that residents along the I-10 and I-65 corridors in southwest Alabama live in every day, and a case that begins with a phone call to a small business in one town and ends with a police report in another town has the kind of local resonance that brings together neighborhoods that don’t often have occasion to overlap.
For the memorabilia business itself, the case is a reminder of the role small specialty shops have always played in authenticating and appraising collectibles, and of how those shops can become a kind of informal last line of defense against the fencing of stolen property. Carraway said he had been suspicious of items brought to him before, and that he had walked away from deals he was not comfortable with. This time, he said, he did not walk away — he stalled long enough for the police to arrive, and the outcome, at least in the short term, was an arrest and the recovery of some of the items.
Freind’s investigators are continuing to work the case. Anyone with information about the theft or about the whereabouts of the missing memorabilia is encouraged to contact the Semmes Police Department.