By Dan Rosenberg
My good friend Gabe, a resident of Warren, asked me to take a day trip to ski with him. It would be on his birthday, and he insisted on doing the driving back and forth to Elk Mountain, about 275 miles roundtrip. I couldn’t refuse an offer like that. With about four hours of driving together, we had ample opportunity to shoot the proverbial sh[*].
At one point I told Gabe about some writing I was doing. I asked if he had ever read my column in this magazine. He hadn’t and rarely looked at The Connection. I told him what this column was about, at which point he conveyed the following story.
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Many years ago, he lived in Matawan, at the end of a quiet street on a cul-de-sac. Gabe and his family returned from a trip and began to unpack. When he opened a closet, he noticed a suit was missing. That prompted him to search for other missing items. There wasn’t much jewelry missing. However, Gabe was missing a pair of downhill Lacroix skis.
For those of you who have been skiing a long time, you will likely know the name Lacroix, a manufacturer of high-end skis, first introduced in 1967. The distinctive logo is visible on many of its products, including ski tips.
Six months after the heist, Gabe arranged to ski with a friend at Bromley Mountain in Vermont. After setting up the meeting, his friend, a ski patroller, moved to another venue, the Magic Mountain Ski Area, ten miles from Bromley. Gabe joined him there instead. They skied for the morning and when they stopped for a lunch break, Gabe spotted a pair of Lacroix skis, very similar to the ones that were stolen from him.
Here Gabe was, 250 miles from his home in Matawan, skiing among thousands of people on a 135-acre property with thirty-nine trails. With most of the skiers on the slopes, there may have been, at most, a hundred people having lunch in the lodge, leaving their skis outside.
Gabe went to inspect the skis. Fortunately, when Gabe bought the skis, he had the foresight to etch some unique scratches on a part of the skis not normally seen, between the toe insert and heel insert on the ski’s boot bindings. Gabe verified his markings on the skis and reported his findings to the ski area management.
The police were called, and Gabe’s skis were returned. The suspect claimed he paid cash to acquire them. However, he did not put up a fuss, returning the skis to Gabe, when the police suggested he was either the thief or willingly bought stolen property.