Missing Property

The suit O.J. Simpson wore the day he was acquitted of murder charges hangs in the bedroom closet of a house south of Fresno. Or maybe it doesn't. It depends on the mood of the balding, bespectacled former sports agent who owns the house and maybe the suit. "I've had it in my possession since the morning after the verdict," Mike Gilbert declared at the start of a recent interview. Twenty minutes of circuitous conversation later, he backtracked: "When I told you that before, I wasn't under oath."

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has ordered a complete inventory of the nation's nuclear arsenal and all associated components after the discovery last week that four secret nuclear missile parts had been mistakenly sent to Taiwan, an error that went unnoticed for more than 18 months. Gates had already ordered a high-level investigation into how the four nose-cone fuse assemblies for U.S.

A police report was filed, insurance claims were settled and the "Ship of Oblivion," a sculpture that vanished about three years ago, seemed destined to live up to its name. Hence no one was more astonished than Laura Clemons of the Bill Lowe Gallery in Santa Monica when Peruvian artist Margarita Checa's sculpture -- valued at $95,000, Clemons says -- showed up on the gallery's doorstep last week. "In perfect condition," Clemons said.

The U.S. military said Wednesday that four helicopter engines worth $13 million are missing in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. U.S. spokeswoman Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green said the helicopters were being shipped overland from the U.S. base in Bagram, Afghanistan, to a seaport for shipment back to Ft. Bragg, N.C. Nielson-Green said the parts went missing sometime before May. She said the engines were being shipped by a Pakistani trucking company, but it is unclear where they disappeared.

The Transportation Security Administration suspended Verified Identity Pass Inc. from enrolling travelers in its pre-screening program after a laptop containing the records of 33,000 people went missing. The company, based in New York, lost possession of the laptop July 26 at San Francisco International Airport. The laptop contained unencrypted pre-enrollment records of individuals interested in joining the program, the Transportation Security Administration said Monday in a statement.

The company that runs an airport security pre-screening program said Tuesday that it had found a laptop containing the personal information of 33,000 people more than a week after it apparently went missing. The Transportation Security Administration suspended new enrollments to the program, known as Clear, after the unencrypted computer was reported stolen. Officials with Verified Identity Pass Inc.

More than 40 business executives and other professionals appointed as special reserve deputies by erstwhile Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona have reported their badges and IDs lost or stolen, including his chief political and legal advisor Michael Schroeder -- who lost two shields.

It's never a good feeling to lose your passport and all your credit cards in the biggest city in the most populous country of the world. It's an even worse feeling when you realize that your country isn't going to lift a finger to help you. Getting back to the U.S. from China, where I was traveling with friends in September, was a week-long saga of closed government offices, stubborn officials and airline personnel, and a constant refrain of "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do."

Cabdriver Osman Chowdhury said Wednesday that he never once considered keeping the 31 diamond rings he found inside a suitcase left in his Manhattan cab by a Dallas woman who had given him a 30-cent tip. "Why would I think I could keep it?" said Chowdhury, 41, of Queens. "It wasn't mine." Instead, Chowdhury did the right thing: He helped his supervisor track down the woman and returned the suitcase, a laptop computer and the rings.

It's been more than a month since the burglar broke into Mark Kashper's home and stole his violins, the ones worth a small fortune. Each day, Kashper hopes the phone will ring and it will be police with the good news that the instruments been recovered. But nothing yet. No word from the pawn shops. No tips from informants. Nothing. And the prevailing theory is that the crook who took them doesn't know that the violins are worth about $300,000.