The following is the first installment of a weekly series that turns back the clock to celebrate a mostly-forgotten moment in Delaware County history.

The date was March 8, 1971, and the majority of the nation, if not the world, was tuned into what became known as The Fight of the Century.

There wasn’t a riper time to commit a crime, with the attention of millions focused on heavyweight boxers Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, who were slugging it out over 15 rounds at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

That night, burglars broke into the FBI’s satellite office in Media, across the street from the courthouse, and made off with nearly every document inside.

The perpetrators were never caught, and only in recent years have five of the eight participants in the crime broken their silence, due mostly to the fact that they can no longer be prosecuted.

“The group – originally nine, before one member dropped out – spent months casing the building, driving past it at all times of the night and memorizing the routines of its residents,” according to the New York Times.

“After stuffing the documents into suitcases, the burglars piled into getaway cars and rendezvoused at a farmhouse to sort through what they had stolen. To their relief, they soon discovered that the bulk of it was hard evidence of the FBI’s spying on political groups.”

The group identified themselves as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, and mailed select documents to several newspaper reporters. Two weeks after the burglary, Betty Medsger of The Washington Post wrote the first article based on the files … only after the Nixon administration tried unsuccessfully to get The Post to return the documents.

The crime was the brainchild of William C. Davidon, a professor of physics at Haverford College and a fixture of antiwar protests in Philadelphia.

The most damning documents proved that the FBI, since 1956, had been spying on civil rights leaders, political organizers, and suspected Communists.

“Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter FBI agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide,” according to the Times.

J. Edgar Hoover had assigned 200 agents to investigate the Media burglary.

All of them came up with nothing, and the FBI closed the case on March 11, 1976, exactly three days after the five-year statute of limitations for burglary charges had expired.

Medsger published a book, entitled The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, in 2014. In it, she revealed that only one of the burglars was on the FBI’s final list of possible suspects before the case was closed.

“It looks like we’re terribly reckless people,” one of the burglars said. “But there was absolutely no one in Washington — senators, congressmen, even the president — who dared hold J. Edgar Hoover to accountability.”

Click here to read more from the New York Times about the break-in at the FBI’s office in Media.