Comic book theft leads to multiple felony charges
By Nick Bohr
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HARTLAND, Wisconsin (WISN) — A Milwaukee man is accused of stealing a comic book collection worth more than $10,000 from a Hartland storage unit, including a rare X-Men issue valued at $9,000.
Even in the age of e-readers and digital books, paper comic books haven’t lost their allure. Mitchell George at The Turning Page comic book store in Milwaukee said Monday he can only imagine the shock a Hartland man is feeling after his comic book collection was stolen from his storage unit in Hartland, including the first issue of X-Men, No. 1, from 1963, valued at $9,000.
“Yeah, that’s a big one,” George said, noting the special place X-Men hold in the hearts of many comic book collectors.
“The X-Men was one of the first comics to touch on, like, social issues a little bit, all the X-Men, they get their powers being born different,” George said. “A lot of the older stuff like the original X-Men and stuff, that was the first appearance of those characters, people really didn’t take care of them because they didn’t know they were going to be valuable or anything in the ’60s and ’70s, so a lot of them were destroyed, lost to time, so now all those books end up being a hundred to a thousand, to many thousands of dollars.”
The victim in the Hartland case called police when he realized 20 of his valuable X-Men comics and the first five issues of Firestorm were missing after he retrieved his collection from FreeUp Storage on Highway 83.
According to the criminal complaint, he was able to identify them in listings on Facebook and eBay, which led to the storage unit manager, 32-year-old Justin Hefter Wieloch.
According to the criminal complaint filed in Waukesha County Circuit Court, when confronted by police, Wieloch said, “Burglary? Burglary? I didn’t burglar anything!”
The complaint maintains he went on to say, “Don’t you have to break in for it to be a burglary? Like, that unit was open!”
He’s now facing felony burglary and theft charges.
According to the complaint, detectives found many of the missing comics at Wieloch’s Milwaukee home — but not the crown jewel, X-Men No. 1, which had already been sold.
Due to the high value of the stolen comic books, he could face more than 20 years in prison if convicted.
When reached by WISN 12 News Monday, FreeUp Storage’s director of operations, Randy Trapanick, released a statement reading in part, “When we were alerted to the accusations against and arrest of Mr. Weiloch over a year ago, he was terminated as a FreeUp Storage employee effective immediately. Our team cooperated with local law enforcement. We cannot provide further comment on this ongoing investigation.”
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