Want to own a terrorist's hoodie?
Now's your chance. The infamous sweatshirt and dozens of other items that belonged to mail bomber Ted Kaczynski are for sale in an online auction that begins Wednesday.
The federal government is selling the Unabomber's stuff to raise money for his victims.
Kaczynski placed or mailed 16 bombs, killing three and injuring more than 20. He is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty in 1998 to three counts of murder and several other felony offenses.
U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell of the Eastern District of California ordered the sale in August 2010.
The U.S. Marshals Service had custody of the items, but asked the General Services Administration to sell them. The auction will occur on the GSA's website: www.gsaauctions.gov and run until June 2.
The auction includes Kaczynski's sprawling, 35,000-word manifesto, both the written draft and the typewritten version. The typewriter? Yup, it's for sale, too, along with his Harvard diploma, transcripts and even his birth certificate. Altogether, there are 20,000 pages of documents, plus household tools, such as a hammer and drill bits.
For some reason, the items were moved from California to Atlanta, and they'll be on display for reporters at 10 a.m. Wednesday, when the auction officially starts.
A U.S. Marshals Service spokeswoman couldn't say why the items were in Atlanta. She also couldn't say where they were being kept -- that's a secret. But the show-and-tell for reporters will occur at the Peachtree Summit Federal Building downtown, at 401 W. Peachtree St.
Officials have no estimate of how much the auction will raise, but a recent sale of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff's trinkets, furniture and other personal effects -- many of them with a bull motif -- netted about $1 million, said the Marshals spokeswoman, Lynzey Donahue. That sale didn't include homes, boats and other big-ticket items.
About 50 Unabomber items will be on display in Atlanta Wednesday. People can get an early peek on a Flickr website that the Marshals set up. The site includes photographs and descriptions of things like the hoodie and aviator-style glasses that appeared in an infamous "wanted" sketch of the Unabomber. The judge ordered that no items connected with the manufacture of bombs, including diagrams and recipes, could be part of the auction.
That still leaves a lot of potential collectibles. But one person who visited the Flickr site and looked at the hoodie left this comment: "What a creepy idea."
Donahue, the Marshals spokeswoman, wasn't authorized to give an opinion. But she did say that this may be the first time the agency has sold a terrorist's belongings in a public auction.
"This is unusual," she said. "I don't know if we can say that we never did, but it wouldn't be very often if we have."
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