FBI Facts

In 2006, a woman farted on a plane and tried to cover the smell by lighting matches, causing an emergency landing and an FBI investigation.

J. Edgar Hoover liked to fire FBI agents whose palms were sweaty when shaking hands.

In 1971, a man named Dan Cooper hijacked a plane, extorted $200,000, parachuted into a stormy night, and vanished without a trace. The only clue ever found was $5,800 of the ransom, rotting on a riverbank years later.

A Virginia woman bought a napkin-sized landscape at a West Virginia flea market in 2009 for $7. She wanted the plastic cow and the doll in the same box. Two years later she learned the little painting was a genuine Renoir worth $100,000. Then the FBI showed up. The museum had reported it missing in 1951.

A mob-connected thief broke into the Judy Garland Museum in 2005 and took Dorothy's ruby slippers, convinced by an associate that the $1 million insured shoes were set with real rubies. A fence told him they were glass. He got rid of them in under two days. The FBI recovered the slippers 13 years later in a 2018 sting. In December 2024, they sold at Heritage Auctions for $32.5 million - a record for movie memorabilia.