Pssst ... wanna buy a hot accordion? Website auctions off confiscated loot, lost jewelry, hovercraft

You have the right to remain silent — or to bid online for all kinds of genuine steals. PropertyRoom.com is an Internet auction site that sells wristwatches, computers and other swag the police found, received, or else took away from the bad guys in Arkansas and elsewhere.

The law recovers from crooked fingers jewelry, oil paintings and highfashion handbags, bicycles that can’t be matched to their rightful owners. Property Room unloads the loot for bids starting at $1.

Counting 2,800 clients nationally, the site reports handling sales on behalf of the Little Rock and Fort Smith police departments and a half dozen other law enforcement agencies in Arkansas. Little Rock Police Department spokesman Sgt. Cassandra Davis explains how the service works for police in the state’s largest city. Police auctions used to be held “in the garage of our property room with about 100 people in attendance,” Davis recounts. But for six years now, the police have called on Property Room to cart off, price, sell and ship the goods to the website’s 1.5 million registered bidders.

“We started using this service as a way of reaching more people as well as a way to create much needed space in our small property room,” she says. “A portion of the proceeds from the sale go toward the retired officers’ pension fund.”

She credits Property Room with having herded up and sold, for example, a team of 4-foot-high reindeer Christmas ornaments, complete with lights.

The Fort Smith police turn to PropertyRoom.com to sell belongings that have come into police custody, spokesman Sgt. Daniel Grubbs says. “It’s a plethora of different items. It could be electronics, it could be tools.”

The police look for serial numbers as one clue to where things belong. But some things can’t be traced to their owners by any “available means,” Grubbs says. Stuff piles up in storage, and they eventually have to get rid of it.

Property Room inquires “every once in a while,” he says, “to see if we have anything they could pick up.”

“We haul away headaches,” the website’s “Chief of Steals” PJ Bellomo says.

“And we send back checks.”

Started by former Long Beach, N.Y., police detective Tom Lane in 2001, the now Maryland- based company reports having paid its law enforcement and municipal clients $46 million.

Lane saw trouble piling up in his department’s property room, according to company lore. Confiscated booty crammed the storage space. On top of that, he saw a clutter of leftover evidence the court didn’t want, and on top of that, an array of onceprized belongings that nobody claimed.

By law, the police had to dispose of everything. Tradition called for a live auction in some hard-to-find parking lot, typically in the rain, attended by maybe a few junk dealers. Lane got the arresting idea of an eBay-like Internet auction, instead, where the sellers would be the police.

The client base has expended over the years to include fire departments, parks departments, municipal and county surplus, even one case of a city aquarium, Bellomo says. But still, it’s mostly police business, and the police sometimes wind up with some nefarious stuff.

Bellomo does like Sgt. Joe Friday: He lays down the law.

“Certain things, we don’t take,” the chief says. “We don’t take firearms or ammunition. We don’t take pornography. Every once in awhile, somebody will have a 50-year collection of Playboy, but we don’t even take that. We’re choirboys around something like that.”

They will take, for one thing, a hovercraft.

“I don’t know that I’ve seen one before,” Bellomo says of the new listing, although it would take more than a hovercraft to surprise him.

The time a Patek Philippe watch turned up in the same box as three Timexes and a Seiko, and the Philippe sold for $77,000 — that one, yes, he has to say, surprised him.

The time a $20 gold coin turned out to be so rare, the company’s resident coin expert nearly fell over, and the bidding went from $1 to $27,000 — surprise!

But still, the hovercraft raises a common question

But still, the hovercraft raises a common question about the listings in general: What’s

the story?

about the listings in general: What’s the story?

The robber made his getaway over land, sea and thin ice? And the police caught him, how? With skyrockets strapped to their feet?

Such things are mysteries. The website offers little or no detail, just the sense of a lot left unsaid. People may have cried over the loss of these belongings. Shots might have been fired. People could have gone to jail over this thing or that. Everything here could tell a story, except it doesn’t.

“We’d like to do so,” Bellomo says. But with thousands of new items going up for bids every week, he seldom knows the drama — just the price.

The exception is when Bellomo and his crew get to play detective themselves. Now and then, he says, a person will claim rightful ownership of some item for sale on the website. They investigate. If the testimony proves out, he says, they give the thing back.

One thing they returned was a trophy cup, he recounts. Somebody pilfered the prize from the winner of a boat race. When the owner was given back the award, Bellomo says, “he was just jubilant.”

And they gave back a stolen accordion. The squeezebox rightfully belonged to a Yugoslavian refugee in Montana, the chief says. The story is true, he says, even the part that might be hard to believe:

Somebody stole an accordion?

DOINK-DOINK!

In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate the crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.

And the bidders, who click on PropertyRoom.com 12 million times a month: They buy the proof that crime does not pay.

These are their inventories.