These wartime burglars, shown in the July 1944 issue of Radio Craft, know where the good loot is, and it’s inside the radio, in the form of the tubes. Much to the consternation of radio owners and servicemen, many needed tubes were hard to come by.

The prices were reasonable, if you could get them. This is because of wartime price caps, as shown in this table in the same issue of the magazine. The 12SA7 that these crooks were about to nab had a maximum price of $1, but they knew that it would fetch more on the black market.