Overview
Last week, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced that one of the world's rarest postage stamps has been returned to its rightful owner after 60 years. The "Inverted Jenny" stamp, printed in 1918 to commemorate the first airmail flight on a Curtiss Jenny biplane, was accidentally printed with the plane upside down. The single sheet of "Inverted Jenny" stamps was broken into pieces and sold, with this particular stamp sold as part of a block of four stamps in 1936 for $16,000 (roughly $275,000 today). The stamp was then stolen in 1955 during a convention of the American Philatelic Society, and had been missing ever since.
The successful return of the Inverted Jenny comes on the heels of the U.S. Attorney's successful return of a Tyrannosaurus skull to Mongolia.