Busted over a nickel

Jim Dwyer has an article in The New York Times about a Soviet spy ring:

The newsboy Jimmy Bozart (photo) knew that the two schoolteachers who lived on the sixth floor of 3403 Foster Avenue in East Flatbush were reliable tippers: every week, they paid him fifty cents for their Brooklyn Eagle subscription; actual cost, thirty-five cents. For a thirteen-year-old boy in 1953, that was money worth having. “You didn’t get many fifteen-cent tips,” Bozart, now 75, said this week.
One of those weekly tips would turn out to be the stuff of a vivid chapter in the history of international espionage gimmickry and dramatic Cold War diplomacy that played out across the front pages more than a half-century ago, and that is the subject of an acclaimed film by Steven Spielberg released last month.
That same tip would also be the source of a rich piece of Brooklyn folklore, untold in the movie and nearly all official histories, but passed along over the years with great relish: that Jimmy Bozart, a newsboy of modest background, had shrewdly turned a private reward for helping catch a Cold War spy into a series of successful businesses, including investments in restaurants, discothèques, and resorts during the gay liberation era. “That got me my start,” Bozart said.
The story begins on the evening of 22 June 1953, as he walked downstairs, counting coins from the teachers. He stumbled. The money clattered onto the steps. He quickly recovered forty-five of the fifty cents, then kept hunting.
“I found the wafer-thin back of a Jefferson nickel, the Monticello side,” Bozart said.
Somehow, the back of the nickel had detached from the front, which rolled a few feet away. The front still had the side rim, and a tiny piece of black microfilm was nestled into it.
Back home at East 43rd Street and Avenue D, Jimmy, with his father, a baggage handler for the New York Central Railroad, held the microfilm to a lamp and looked at it with a magnifying glass. “It seemed to be a file card, with columns of eight- or ten-digit numbers,” Bozart said.
A girl in his eighth-grade class at St. Therese of Lisieux was the daughter of a detective in the 67th Precinct. Jimmy took the nickel to her house, but the detective was not home, so he went out to play stickball.
On hearing about Jimmy’s strange find, the detective and other officers scrambled to find him. “They went up to the church and impounded the bingo money, in case I gave the nickel to my mother and she spent it there,” Bozart said. “Then they grabbed the Good Humor guy and took his money, in case I bought an ice cream with it. Then they found me on the street. ‘You Bozart? What did you do with the nickel?’ ” He handed it to the detectives and heard no more about it. More than four years later, in the fall of 1957, arriving home for the weekend from his first semester at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he was greeted at the top of the stairs by his father. There were news reporters in the house.
“We had a very humble house, lived above a bar,” Bozart said. “No one was ever in it. Springs were coming out of the sofa.” Unknown to the Bozarts, the hollow nickel with the microfilm, bearing a coded message, had been identified by a Soviet defector, who had led the authorities to Colonel Rudolph I. Abel, a Soviet spy arrested in June of 1957. (The defector apparently had mistakenly spent the nickel years earlier, sending it on an unmapped journey across the city to the newsboy.) Bridge of Spies, the new Spielberg film, tells the story of James B. Donovan, a lawyer who defended Abel as a matter of dogged principle. In one arresting scene, a hollow nickel is opened with a razor.
Bozart testified briefly at the Abel trial, but the nickel, while a mesmerizing prop, was not essential to proving the case.
Still, the story of the newsboy and the hollow nickel grabbed people. One private citizen bought Bozart an Oldsmobile as a reward. A year later, Bozart felt the upkeep of the car wasn’t worth it and sold it. He used the money to buy stock options in a mining company called Texas Gulf Sulphur. “We had a tip that they had discovered the largest sulfur deposit ever, in Canada,” he said. “It turned out to be true, and we made a bunch of money.” He was eighteen.
Over the years, he went into many businesses, some of them quite big. They included an electronics manufacturer; vending machine companies; the Ice Palace disco on Fire Island; the Long Island strip club Sinderella; a restaurant in the Hamptons; the Red Parrot disco on West 57th Street; and hotels, resorts, and restaurants in Florida. (He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in a business dispute over the strip club. Among his partners was a venerable bookmaker and money launderer.)
Successful as Bozart has been, he is still looking for more. “I want the nickel,” he said. Fat chance, as it is on loan from the FBI to the Newseum in Washington, DC.
Remember: if you see a hollowed-out nickel filled with a microfilm cryptographic message, say something. Just don’t count on getting it back.

Rico says more history that people don't remember until they see the movie...