Former Archives Employee from Rockville Gets Prison

A former National Archives employee from Rockville was sentenced on Thursday to 18 months in federal prison and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine for stealing audio recordings that included a report of the Hindenburg crash, a Babe Ruth interview and the first nationally televised World Series.

Leslie Charles Waffen, 67, who worked for the agency for more than 40 years, .

Over an eight-year period Waffen used eBay to sell historically significant audio recording discs. U.S. Marshals searched Waffen’s home in the 500 block of Saddle Ridge Lane in King Farm on Oct. 26, 2010. They seized 6,153 individual sound recordings, according to a plea agreement. Waffen admitted to stealing nearly 1,000 recordings that officials determined belonged to the National Archives, The Washington Post reported.

“Leslie Waffen was a high-ranking government employee who violated his duty to protect historical records of the National Archives and Records Administration,” U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said in a news release. “These items were entrusted to the National Archives to be used by all citizens, not to be auctioned for personal profit to the highest bidder.”

A radio historian from Connecticut who had met Waffen when the historian donated more than 10,000 recordings to the National Archives more than three decades ago uncovered Waffen’s scheme, The Post reported.

Click here to read the full article from The Post.

J. David Goldin, the radio historian who uncovered the thefts, attended Thursday's sentencing hearing, The Gazette reported.

Waffen testified during hearing in a Greenbelt courtroom that he began taking recordings home without permission about eight years before his June 2010 retirement as chief of the Motion Picture, Sounds and Video Recording branch of the archive's Special Media Archives Services Division, The Gazette reported.

“It became an obsession,” Waffen testified, according to The Gazette.

A hearing is scheduled for Aug. 13 to determine the restitution Waffen will be required to pay to the government and to the eBay buyers to whom he sold the stolen recordings, The Gazette reported.

“I would say, you take our history if you take the things that sustain our history,” U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte told Waffen, The Gazette reported. “And that’s what you’ve done; you’ve taken our history.”

Click here to read the full story in The Gazette.