BOCA RATON, Fla. — A year after having his priceless comic book collection stolen, Randy Lawrence is putting it up for auction.
"Everybody will know they're buying these books that were stolen and recovered and has a story behind it," he said.
Estimates have his stockpile worth about $2 million.
"If you have the best copy in the world, the sky's the limit," he said.
Just to sell off his comics, Lawrence said he's been to hell and back. In January 2019, his storage facility in Boca Raton was broken into. It's where he kept his collection. Hundreds of comics were taken.
"I don't wish it upon anybody," he said. "It was just a horrible thing that went down."
A Royal Palm Beach man was later caught in Arizona trying to sell five of the comics at a store.
To get the rest of his collection back took more than a year. The FBI, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office and a lawyer by the name of Wayne Schwartz applied pressure to get the rest of the comics back.
"When the Palm Beach state attorney, with our assistance, agreed that they wouldn't charge here in Florida if they gave the books back, the whole set, all of them, and it worked," Schwartz said.
The entire experience is bittersweet.
"It was so emotional to lose them all and then so emotional to get them back and then so emotional to say goodbye to them because I knew I was never going to get them back," Lawrence said. "Now I was giving them for sale."
The collection is going up for auction in two separate events through Heritage Auctions.
The first sell-off starts Thursday.