Monday marked the 40th anniversary of Operation Flagship.
What is Operation Flagship?
Well, unless your a law-enforcement historian, a sports fan in the Washington area, or know the connection to Al Pacino's 1989 movie "Sea of Love," Operation Flagship is probably lost to time.
But it's worth remembering because on Dec. 15, 1985, the U.S. Marshals Service pulled off one of the most incredible criminal roundups of all time.
With only a $22,000 budget, federal officials apprehended an astounding 144 criminals in a single sting operation.
The concept was simple.
In the 1980s, Washington's NFL team was one of the hottest tickets in America.
The scheme: Send an invite to the last known address of wanted criminals, saying if they showed up at a party announcing a new TV station, they would get a free lunch and two free tickets to the Cincinnati-Washington game that day. The invite also included the chance to win tickets to Super Bowl XX the following month in New Orleans.
When the respondents showed up, they were ushered into a single room decorated as an elaborate party for Flagship International Sports TV, complete with balloons and cheerleaders.
The law-breaking fans didn't know that F.I.S.T. was also an acronym for the Fugitive Investigative Strike Team.
With operatives all around them, the attendees were swarmed, handcuffed and brought to jail.
The "sports ticket as a sting operation" concept was so clever, it was recreated in Pacino's "Sea of Love," with Yankees tickets used as the bait to lure law-breakers.
There is very little memorabilia from Operation Flagship, though the invitation and a Flagship hat is in the U.S. Marshals Museum in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Although game tickets were never given out to the criminals in attendance, tickets from that Cincinnati-Washington game, slabbed by PSA as the "Operation Flagship" game, experienced a decent bump in value to roughly $200.
PSA has graded just four tickets to that game, compared to 14 from the infamous game the month before when Washington quarterback Joe Theismann's leg was broken in a career-ending injury after a sack by Lawrence Taylor.
Perhaps with more fans learning of the "Operation Flagship" story, more tickets will come to light.
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Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.