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John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon" opens with an unsolved mystery. The introductory text talks about a prized statuette of a falcon encrusted in rare jewels — a gift from the Knights Templar to Spain's Charles V — which was stolen by pirates and lost to history for years. After a string of murders and attempts to swipe a black bird statuette occur, private investigator Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is compelled to crack a mind-boggling case involving rogues with their eyes on the prized artifact. This bird statue, dubbed the Maltese Falcon, has since evolved into an unforgettable MacGuffin, where the value of the actual prop skyrocketed over the years, changing several hands while being sold at auctions at exorbitant prices.

According to Vanity Fair's 2016 Hollywood issue, the last-known auction for the falcon was held in 2013, where the official bidding kept soaring until it hit the $3 million mark and was sold for $3.5 million.

Just After Dawn on the morning of May 15, 2019, more than a dozen cops arrived at a home in the placid suburb of Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. Armed with a search warrant, they ordered a member of the household to sit down and denied her access to her cellphone. Similar searches took place at other properties in Woodstock, New York, and Brooklyn. When it was over, according to court documents, the police left with cellphones, Usb drives, iPads, 1,300 pages of “physical documents,” four Apple MacBooks, and files filled with banking records.

Prince’s “Blue Angel” Cloud 2 electric guitar — “the most significant Prince guitar that’ll ever come up for auction” — sold for a high bid of $563,000 Saturday, exceeding pre- auction estimates.

The 1984 custom-made instrument, long thought to be lost, was played by Prince on the tours in support of Purple Rain, Parade, Sign O’ the Times and Lovesexy, as well as television appearances in the second half of the 1980s.

“In a sea of Clouds — because there are a lot of them — the thing that brings a collectible guitar the most...

Truly historical objects are often palimpsests: repainted, refinished, refurbished — if you were to peel back the layers like the rings of a tree, that object’s history would be revealed.

The same goes for Prince’s second 1984 Cloud guitar: beginning its life as an entirely different instrument — the castoff from a defunct company — it has been nearly every color on the spectrum. White, peach, light blue, yellow and, finally, electric blue. The instrument — nicknamed the Blue Angel — is now set to hit the auction block next month as part of...