Stolen Maltese Falcon

A copy of the Maltese Falcon statuette was stolen over the last days, writes John Koopman in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The busted cabinet doesn't look like much. It's old wood and is stained with the smoke of a thousand cigarettes. A piece of molding on the front dangles from a nail like the hopes and dreams of every tourist who ever fell in love with the foggy city on the Bay. It's the last place anyone ever saw the Maltese Falcon. Except for the weasel who took it.

John Konstin owns the joint. It's been in his family forever, or 40 years. That writer, Dashiell Hammett, used to eat at his place, called John's Grill over on Ellis. When he wrote the book, "The Maltese Falcon," he mentioned the place a couple of times. Said Sam Spade used to eat there. Chops, potatoes and sliced tomatoes, to be exact. And smoked there. So John's Grill is some kind of shrine to Hammett and Sam Spade and "The Maltese Falcon." The book and the movie with that actor, Humphrey Bogart.

Konstin likes the Maltese Falcon so much, he tried to buy it once. The real one. The one from the movie. Which wasn't worth anything, if you saw the flick, but everyone thought it was worth a fortune. "The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of," Spade says at the end of the moving picture show. The real one was made of lead and heavy like the stone you'd tie around a dead man's neck before you tossed him into the bay. They said Bogey dropped it on his toe and limped through the whole picture. The movie people made a couple others, for publicity, out of plaster. This was one of those..

Konstin misses the bird. It's a part of his spirit and soul. He looks at the empty shelves of that old cabinet like he can't believe his eyes. "At first I thought it was a joke, or maybe the waiters were playing a prank," he said, pouring a glass of sparkling water. The kind Spade would have spat on the already-spat-on sidewalk...Konstin showed off the Falcon in a corner cabinet on the second floor. The bird kept company with books. Lots of books. Old books by Hammett himself, and signed. Even a copy of a Herb Caen book. All gone now...Konstin wants the bird and the books back so much he's willing to fork over some cash. $25,000 in cold, hard for whoever brings the stuff back to his joint. "No questions asked," he said...

From BoingBoing: Maltese Falcon swiped