“I thought it was a joke”, Italian man reunited with moped stolen 42 years ago

A man from Saluzzo, in Italy’s Piedmont region, said he thought police were playing a prank on him when they called to say they’d found the moped stolen from outside his home back in 1984, when he was just 16 years old.

The vehicle, a Garelli 50cc moped, now grey with age, resurfaced when Carabinieri officers in Volpiano, near Turin, pulled over a 64-year-old rider during a routine roadside check. The man wasn’t displaying a number plate, which immediately marked him out, since plates have been compulsory on 50cc mopeds in Italy since 1994. The bike itself had never carried one because it was stolen a decade before that law came in, but riding it without a plate today was exactly the kind of irregularity that prompts officers to take a closer look.

But something about the stop didn’t sit right with officers. “This guy was riding this scooter without a licence plate and so he was stopped,” Volpiano Carabinieri commander Americo Celani explained. “This gave us an indication that something was wrong.”

A check of the moped’s chassis number against old police records turned up a theft report dating back 42 years, to a disappearance from Vado Ligure on Italy’s Ligurian coast.

That led investigators to the original owner, now 58 and living near Cuneo, who had bought the moped in August 1984 as a 16th birthday present to himself, funded by money saved from bar work and odd jobs. It was stolen from outside his house just months later.

He told Italian newspaper La Repubblica he immediately assumed the call from police was a joke.

The 64-year-old rider was not responsible for the original theft but has been reported to prosecutors in Ivrea for handling stolen goods.

Other lengthy stolen property reunions

Long-delayed reunions between owners and stolen property are rarer than most thefts, but they do happen. In the UK, an Aberdeen woman, Audrey Hay, was reunited with her handbag 30 years after it was stolen and thrown into the River Don, after it washed up and was found by an 11-year-old girl walking nearby. In the US, a South Carolina man spent two decades searching for his stolen 1971 Dodge Challenger before federal investigators helped track it down through a car-dealer fraud case.