‘Maltese Falcon’ replica stolen from S.F. restaurant

SAN FRANCISCO – Call in the coppers, get Sam Spade on the case: The Maltese Falcon’s gone again.

In a missing bird caper reminiscent of the one that perplexed Dashiell Hammett’s fictional sleuth, the owner of a landmark restaurant here is offering 25 Gs ($25,000) for a replica of the famed Maltese Falcon taken from a locked display case over the weekend.

John Konstin, the owner of John’s Grill, a century-old restaurant with a museum dedicated to the crime novelist, said the purloined plaster statuette and 15 stolen rare books by and about Hammett were emotionally priceless.

“The statue had historical significance to this restaurant and to the city,” said Konstin, as he sat in a dining room decorated with movie stills and Hammett mementos. “People came from all over the world to see that bird. And we want it back.”

Hammett used to frequent John’s – and the falcon has been housed since 1995 in a wooden display case just upstairs from booth 21, where, as the story goes, he wrote parts of the 1930 novel that introduced readers to Spade, the womanizing, sly-talking gumshoe.

“He came here a lot, he drank a lot, hung out a lot,” Konstin said of Hammett, who died in 1961. “Sam Spade ate here as well. One scene was set at the restaurant.”

In “The Maltese Falcon,” a missing statuette that has been stolen again and again over the centuries leads Spade on a trail of murder, intrigue and a dame named Brigid O’Shaughnessy.

During the shoot of the 1941 film version starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston, plastic replicas were made after Bogart complained about the weight of the two original lead statues, which weighed 50 pounds apiece. One of the plastic models is at the Library of Congress. Other plaster copies are available at gift stores, for about $60 apiece.

In December 1994, Konstin bid $150,000 at an auction in New York for one of the two original statues, which sold for $398,500 – then one of the highest prices paid for a movie prop.

The following year, Elisha Cook Jr., at the time the last surviving actor in the film, gave Konstin an autographed Maltese Falcon replica.

Konstin noticed that the statuette and books were missing Saturday. On Monday, he called police. And he called Julie Rivett, Hammett’s granddaughter, a regular at the eatery, which opened in 1908. “The whole thing is just a rotten shame,” said Rivett, an Orange County resident.