The ‘Memorabilia King’ who supposedly robbed Hollywood blind for years: “John Gotti of movie props”
In November 1996, David Elkouby was awoken at six o’clock in the morning by armed police pounding on his front door. As he stumbled down the stairs and padded, bleary-eyed, to the door, he heard the cops yell that they would break it down if he didn’t open up. In shock, he opened the door and soon found himself frog-marched out of the house in handcuffs, right in front of all his neighbours. It turned out the police believed he was the ringleader of a series of thefts of movie props around Hollywood, claiming he had stolen $150,000 worth of proprietary material.
To Elkouby’s horror, he was charged with felony theft on January 14th, 1997, and almost 300 items were seized from his home. The list of props reads like a walk down memory lane of 1980s and ’90s blockbuster cinema. He had an Ewok costume from Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, Mr Freeze’s ice gun from Batman & Robin, the fangs Tom Cruise used as Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, a Jurassic Park sign, a plaque from Dead Poet’s Society, and a host of different Star Trek props including a Klingon head.
For his part, though, Elkouby insisted that none of these items came his way through illegal means. He owned a number of memorabilia shops dotted all around Hollywood, and he serviced the growing market of like-minded nerds who wanted to own little pieces of movie history. He would buy props that were brought to his stores, or purchase them in silent auctions, before selling them on – but he was adamant he never stole them directly from the studios.
Instead, Elkouby claimed he was set up as a fall guy by a less-than-salubrious client who regularly sold him items at the store. This person was supposedly a relative of a very prominent director who had been reported to the Burbank Police Department for stealing props from the Warner Bros lot, and when the police questioned them, they claimed Elkouby was the brains of the operation.
“That’s how they ended up coming with a search warrant to my house, and that’s when the whole nightmare started,” an exasperated Elkouby told The Hollywood Reporter. “This guy’s saying I’m the big fish, that I live up in the hills and am calling all the shots. I’m like, ‘What are you, nuts, with all this craziness?’ I buy things from people! That’s the way it is.”
It turned out Elkouby had become the target of Fabian Ospina, an LAPD detective who effectively became the first harbinger of a movie industry cracking down on something it had previously ignored as the domain of niche collectors. After all, over the years, the selling and displaying of memorabilia has become a huge business, with Elkouby claiming that items like the Shakespeare bust from the Batman ’60s TV show are great examples of how the market can inflate. He purchased it for $800 back in the day, but now, it would fetch as much as $200,000. Back in the mid-90s, though, the movie industry was only beginning to see what was right in front of its face.
Once Hollywood realised it was leaving money on the table by not keeping its props under lock and key, it knew action needed to be taken. Nowadays, every studio in town rakes in cash by loaning out props for display at Comic Cons and other specialist events, but back in 1996, they had only begun to grasp how valuable these pieces were. As hard as it was for the studio executives to grasp, Mr Freeze’s prop gun – the disappearance of which prompted Ospina’s entire investigation – wasn’t just a piece of junk that should be consigned to a vault when the movie was finished shooting. It meant something to people.
Ospina had little time for Elkouby’s claims that he hadn’t stolen anything, and even claimed that the ‘Memorabilia King’ ran a network of lowly Hollywood crew members who pilfered props for him or funnelled him information on how to get them. “I think he minimised it — rationalised it — that he wasn’t really committing a crime,” Ospina said. “That he was just hoarding historical artefacts that people would appreciate at a later date. That he was saving Hollywood.” Elkouby was bemused by Ospina’s theory, and shook his head in dismay at how the detective “felt that I was some warlord of memorabilia; a John Gotti of movie props.”
In the end, Elkouby decided he couldn’t fight the machine and pleaded guilty to one count of receiving stolen property. He served three nights in jail, plus 18 months at a halfway house. During this period, he could only leave to run his shop. To this day, he maintains that he was simply the most readily available scapegoat for a movie industry that had finally cottoned on to the value of its materials. He grumbled, “For their first 80-something years, they didn’t care. It was a very grey area.”
As for whether Elkouby truly did rob Hollywood blind for years, that much is up for debate. Was he simply a movie fan and businessman who spotted a growing market long before Hollywood paid any attention to it? Or was he a criminal who weaponised the love fans have for the movies they watch and then lied about the true methods he used to attain some of his valuable pieces? The answer is still unclear, although one thing is for sure: Elkouby was returned some of the props that were taken from his home, as he proved he came by them through legitimate means.
However, to his chagrin, the police acted like Hollywood had for so many years, and took very little care of them. He was horrified to discover, for example, that the three Marty McFly jackets he owned from Back to the Future were “so badly damaged and scrunched and tattered” that they were rendered almost worthless.
A crestfallen Elkouby admitted, “I put them in a box and sold them to a guy for a couple hundred bucks”.
