Two men plead guilty to stealing, selling $8 million in rare books from Pittsburgh library

Two men have pleaded guilty to stealing more than $8 million worth of rare books from a Pittsburgh library and selling them to collectors — an inside job that spanned 25 years, and marked one of the world’s largest losses to date, according to a new report.

Greg Priore, 63, who worked as the sole archivist and manager of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s rare book room, took the books — and other items — from the inventory and gave them to John Schulman, 45, the owner of Caliban Book Shop Warehouse in Wilkinsburg, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, citing investigators.

Schulman would, in turn, sell them to collectors through his store and online, according to the report.

Priore, who admitted to police his involvement in the crime, pleaded guilty to theft and receiving stolen property — both first-degree felonies, the paper reported.

Schulman has pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property, theft by deception and forgery, according to the report.

Both face as little as probation and as much as 16 months behind bars at their sentencing April 17, the outlet reported.

The scheme began in 1992 and wasn’t discovered until a 2017 audit by Pall Mall Art Advisors — which determined that some 300 items were gone and another 16 were vandalized from the library’s Oliver Room, Deputy District Attorney Brian Catanzarite told the judge, according to the report.

Forty-two of those items were recovered from the Caliban Book Shop Warehouse during a nine-day search, he said.

Stolen items included a 1615 Breeches Bible, as well as Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” worth a whopping $900,000.

The entire estimated loss was $8,066,300, according to Pall Mall.

Library spokeswoman Suzanne Thinnes called the thefts “devastating” in a statement obtained by the Post-Gazette.

“The shock, the anger and the hurt we feel that individuals who were close to us, who were trusted by us, who were considered friends and colleagues to many of us at the library, would abuse the faith we had in them for personal gain will be with us for a very long time,” the statement said. “We are hopeful that the sentences given to these two individuals will reflect the significant damage done not only to Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, but to the literary community near and far.”

Priore admitted to investigators that he removed individual plates — or illustrated pages — as well as maps from the room in manila folders, according to a complaint obtained by the paper. He confessed to removing books and other larger materials by rolling them up and walking out.

“Priore stated, ‘I should have never done this. I loved that room, my whole working life, and greed came over me. I did it, but Schulman spurred me on,’” the complaint said. “Priore alleged that Schulman ‘goaded’ him on and that Schulman made significantly more money than he did in the sale of the items from the Oliver Room.”

In a statement obtained by the paper, Schulman’s attorneys said he pleaded to a “substantial reduction in charges,” and accepted “responsibility for his association with books under circumstances whereby he should have known that the books had probably been stolen.”

“Mr. Schulman has dedicated much of his life to contributing to the bookselling trade and regrets that today’s guilty pleas negatively reflected upon the antiquarian book industry, his family and clients,” the statement said.

Priore was fired from his library position in June 2017, and both he and Schulman were arrested a year later, CNN reported.