FBI Seized John Lennon’s Fingerprint Card from an Auction

Added by Elivia DeVries on October 11, 2010

Fingerprints of John Lennon, the Beatles singer, in a 1976 application for U.S. citizenship, was being auctioned at ‘GOTTA HAVE IT!’ at $100,000, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized it saying that it was a government official document and was not meant to be a commercial item.

James Margolin, spokesman from FBI told Reuters that “We’re investigating how the item came to be in a private collection”.

The application signed by John Lennon was the center of attraction in the auction sales, which was being hosted around the time of John Lennon’s 70^th birthday, among 850 other items on sale.

There were 90 other Beatles items from among which the FBI seized the fingerprint card. The FBI had investigated Lennon for anti-war activity in the early 1970s.

Co-founder of the auction shop, Peter Siegel, found the FBI action and interest from Homeland Security bewildering as John Lennon had passed away 30 years back and he deemed that the card could not be a matter of national security. Moreover, Siegel said that the card was bought from a reputed promoter who himself had bought it 20 years ago.

Leon Wildes, John Lennon’s attorney for the immigration case of 1970’s, claimed that the fingerprint card went missing from papers owned by him after appearance in a television show in 1976.