A man accused of stealing a pair of pricey mandolins has seemingly returned the valuable instruments to a New Jersey music shop with a handwritten note that’s caught a bit of attention.<\/p>\n
Police in Teaneck said the man captured on store surveillance video took the instruments from Lark Street Music last week. <\/p>\n
Video shared by the store shows the brazen thief grab a mandolin off the wall, then stuff the instrument into his large winter coat. A few seconds go by, he looks around, then grabs another mandolin off the wall before walking out. <\/p>\n
“I like, especially when he took one, he’s checking to see if I’m looking or anything,” Bernard Levine said, laughing off the bizarre robbery. <\/p>\n
Levine took to Facebook and asked for help identifying the man in the video. After just a few days online, the same cameras that caught the theft, also captured the moment the mandolins were quietly returned. <\/p>\n
The mandolins have a combined value of $8,000-$9,000 dollars. <\/p>\n
“Some guy opens the door up front, stoops down and leaves,” Levine said Monday. “So I walked over there, and wow, there are the two shopping bags with the mandolin necks sticking out. And so I went outside and he was sort of trotting down the street.”<\/p>\n
“I started running after him,” but by then it was too late, and Levine decided to call police. <\/p>\n
When he returned to his shop and examined the mandolins, he noticed that one was slightly damaged. Also left with the instruments was a handwritten note. <\/p>\n
“Sorry, I been drunk. Merry Christmas. You are good man,” the note read. <\/p>\n
![\"Note](\"https:\/\/media.nbcnewyork.com\/2025\/12\/stolen_music2.jpg?w=900\")
“I thought if I was in that position, that’s what I would probably do too, try to get out of a bad situation. Try to make amends,” Levine said. <\/p>\n
But there was more. The owner also found chocolate tucked in the bags. <\/p>\n
Police say, so far, there have been no arrests. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nbcnewyork.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A man accused of stealing a pair of pricey mandolins has seemingly returned the valuable instruments to a New Jersey music shop with a handwritten note that’s caught a bit of attention. Police in Teaneck said the man captured on store surveillance video took the instruments from Lark Street Music last week. Video shared by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2217183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[23360],"class_list":["post-2217182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-new-jersey"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Lark-Street-Music-thief-returns-mandolins-to-Teaneck-shop-with.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2217182"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2217184,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217182\/revisions\/2217184"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2217183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2217182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2217182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2217182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}