Wanted: Owners of a Lot of Stuff

Locked in an electronically secured vault on K Street are a Cuban military medal on a blue-and-white sash, the cremated remains of a Chinese child, a stack of tattered Egyptian pound notes, colorful Disney stock certificates and more than $100 million worth of other odds and ends stored in cardboard file boxes -- all forgotten by their rightful owners.

The mounds of stuff have wound up in the Northwest Washington offices of the tiny D.C. Department of Unclaimed Property from banks, corporations, trading companies, hospitals and nursing homes, all required by law to send the city things whose owners have not come forward.

Most of the 17,000 people on the District's list of unclaimed property owners -- put together with whatever records are available -- are ordinary folks, but there are a goodly number of well-known names, as well. They include former U.S. attorney general Janet Reno, 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, the Washington Wizards, the National Rifle Association, the American Red Cross and the Ben and Jerry's ice cream shop on 19th Street NW.

The unclaimed property agency has about three years, by law, to unite the booty with the owners before it can sell the goods -- on eBay. The online auctions, which started last year, are a lucrative approach that has brought the department thousands of bids and sold some items for 15 times their appraised value, Elliott Kindred, the department's director, said yesterday.

It's an entirely different process from the three auctions a year the department used to have at the Weschler auction house on E Street NW, where fewer than 40 people would typically go to raise their paddles at each round of bidding.

Over the past 25 years, the District has amassed about $250 million in unclaimed property, going after it more aggressively since the city's 1995 fiscal crisis. About one-fifth of the owners are found each year. The money that the department makes on the unclaimed property is usually invested in other District agencies, Kindred said.

In the past nine months, the department has received $12.4 million worth of unclaimed property, adding to the more than $100 million in goods it already had.

Twice a year, the list of owners is published as a thick advertising insert in newspapers, including one today in The Washington Post that is the agency's first legal step toward trying to reunite owners with the latest load of forgotten property. Parts of the list can read like a who's who of Washingtonians too busy or forgetful to pick up salary checks, stock dividends, insurance money or treasures stashed in safe-deposit boxes.

Among the names: former vice presidential candidate Jack F. Kemp (a $131 salary check he never picked up), former Texas congressman Frank Ikard (stock royalties he never cashed), Janet Langhart, former broadcast journalist and wife of former defense secretary William Cohen (a savings account she never emptied), and Reno ($100 in an old savings account).

This year, Kindred tried to spare some members of Congress and the D.C. Council from publicity by contacting them before the list was published, he said.

"Washington is such a transient city. People coming and going, moving in and moving out. They leave a lot of stuff behind," he said.

Kindred, an accountant, is lanky and shy but dogged about trying to track down property owners. He drives to apartments, houses and office buildings searching for survivors of people who never cashed their stock options or never bought gifts with their Christmas Club accounts.