Patriots fan stole dozens of the Giants' Super Bowl XLII rings: ‘They don’t deserve them’
The New York Giants topped the New England Patriots 17-14 in Super Bowl XLII in 2008, marking the first of Eli Manning’s two Super Bowl wins in his career.
One Patriots fans apparently felt so robbed after that loss that he decided to take matters into his own hands.
According to Bloomberg’s Zeke Faux, career “cat burglar” Sean Murphy and an accomplice stole 27 of the Giants’ rings from a jewelry store simply because he didn’t think the Giants deserved them.
Murphy, who had watched the game “from his weed dealer’s couch,” was allegedly planning his next heist when he found an article about New York’s Super Bowl rings — which said they were being manufactured at E.A. Dion Inc, a jewelry store just outside of Providence, Rhode Island.
So, on June 8 that year, Murphy and a friend broke into the jewelry store.
“Inside the building, Murphy and his buddy found gold rings, gold necklaces, gold plates, boxes of gold beads and drawers full of melted-down gold. Unable to crack the safe, they lifted it onto a jack and pushed it through the loading dock onto their 24-foot box truck. Murphy was sweeping dust off the workstations when his accomplice came out of an office, his hands glittering with diamonds.
“There was a Super Bowl ring engraved ‘Strahan’ and a few others that read ‘Manning.’ By the time Murphy had finished loading up the box truck, he had more than $2 million of gold and jewelry and more than two dozen Super Bowl rings.
“‘F--k ‘em,’ he thought. ‘They don’t deserve them.’”
Murphy was caught a year later — thanks largely to his ex-girlfriend who he had given one of the Super Bowl rings to, as she told investigators about it and his other string of crimes. He was later sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for a different job, which was reduced to 13 years.
He claims he still has some of the Super Bowl rings that he stole, too, including one of them that was meant for Strahan — though the team claimed that all of the stolen rings were meant for staff members, not players, per the report.
While he told Bloomberg that he might wear one of them from time to time when he’s released in a few years, he plans to leave his life of crime behind him.
“There’s a lot of ways to make legitimate money out there,” Murphy told Bloomberg. “I’m just going to keep my hand out of the illegal cookie jar now.”
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