Photo by geraintwn.

In this morning’s roundup, we noted that Leslie Charles Waffen, a former National Archives employee, was scheduled to appear in a Maryland court on charges that he stole almost a thousand “sound recording items” belonging to the federal government. Today, Waffen admitted he stole the items, but that really isn’t the most interesting part of the story.

Turns out that, after lifting the artifacts, Waffen was turning them around on eBay, some for insanely small sums.

According to the Post, Waffen — who as the former chief of the Archives’ audiovisual collection had easy access to the materials — admitted in court to flipping things like the master copy of a voice recording of Babe Ruth as part of a collection of recordings that, in total, the government believes is worth as much as $70,000.

Turns out Waffen was selling ’em on the online auction site for around 30 bucks a pop.

Suffice it to say, we’d expect a guy who once worked on restoring the only known audio recording of John F. Kennedy’s assassination might have a better grasp of how much he could have gotten for these kind of things.