NEW YORK (AP) — Thirty-seven years after his Corvette was stolen, a man in California is getting it back.

The 1968 Chevrolet sports car was about to be shipped to a buyer in Sweden when U.S. Customs officials running a routine check on its vehicle identification number found it was stolen in 1969 in New York.

Alan Poster had bought the two-seat ragtop as an indulgence in late 1968 in the aftermath of a divorce, he told The New York Times for its Tuesday edition. A few months later, his blue sports car was stolen from a Manhattan garage.

“(It was) probably the only car I’ve ever really loved,” Alan Poster told the Times.

Adding insult to injury, the 1968 Corvette was a particularly valued car.

Its “Mako Shark” design was seen as ushering in the third generation of the Corvette. There were 18,360 of the convertibles made that year.

Porter, now 63, had long ago given up hope of getting his car back, and he moved to California, settling in a town near San Francisco.

His car also ended up in California. A collector in Long Beach, Calif., was selling to a buyer in Sweden when Customs officials discovered the car’s status in December. The collector isn’t suspected of any wrongdoing.

New York police had until Jan. 1 to find the car’s original owner before it was shipped abroad. They had no name or address for the owner, so they spent four days studying old records on microfiche before they found the information they needed.

“It was the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack, that report,” Detective William Heiser said.

It’s not known what happened to the car after it was stolen. Apparently no one tried to register it, because that would have tripped the same alarms that Customs agents found last year, police told the paper.

The once blue car is now silver, with a red interior, and it’s missing some parts. But the car Poster paid $6,000 for back in 1968 is worth anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000 today, a Florida classic Corvette dealer told The Times.

“It’s not getting away from me again,” Poster told The New York Post. “They’re going to have to kill me to get this car.”

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