Newsday missing Pulitzer medals

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Yahoo reports that they apparently were sold at an auction Friday in California for $7,000, $4,500 and $4,000, respectively.

The key to the lockbox in the safe where the medals were, had been lost, so officials enlisted a locksmith Tuesday to drill into the smaller box.

The medals were in fact missing, but so was a silicone mold used to make reproductions of the awards. So now they are asking former executives for info.

"We have contacted the police and we are talking to our attorneys to pursue all legal avenues available to us," Newsday spokeswoman Deidra Parrish Williams said in a statement. "We are naturally disheartened and disappointed to discover that our medals are not in our possession. We are consoled by the fact that the medals are not the prize itself."

Chairman of the Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries, Jim Halperin, told newsday that the consigner who sold the medals was a coin dealer. The dealer had purchased them at an estate sale in Nassau County in 2001, but he refused to give the man's name.

Newsday's revenue accounting manager oversees the office where the safe was. He says some of the safe's contents like petty cash are routinely catalogued, but there was no regular check for the medals.

They don't know if the items that sold at auction were reproductions or the original medals.

One thing is for sure, in some fashion, to some degree, it is an inside job. Perhaps even unintended. But it all began in that safe.