Even before someone carefully removed a windowpane from a secluded Buckhead home here one rainy June night and slipped away with a 1734 silver mug that had belonged to George II, it was clear to detectives that a meticulous thief with a singular obsession was stealing the great silver pieces of the Old South.

For months, exquisite sterling silver collections had been disappearing, taken in the dead of night from historic homes in Charleston, S.C., and the wealthy enclaves of Belle Meade, Tenn. Nothing else was touched.

The police in different states did not at first connect the thefts, some of which initially went unnoticed even by the owners. But as the burglaries piled up, a retired New Jersey detective watching reports on the Internet recognized a familiar pattern.

He called an Atlanta detective and said, "Let me explain how your burglaries occurred."

Early Monday, outside an apartment building in the tiny northern Florida town of Hilliard, the police arrested Blane Nordahl, 51, the man they believe is connected not only to the recent Southern silver burglaries but also to 30 years' worth of antique silver thefts in several states.

He was charged with burglaries in Atlanta and will most likely face charges in other states.

In one of the biggest recent hauls in which Mr. Nordahl is a suspect, a thief disabled the alarm at the Cooleemee Plantation House in North Carolina and walked away with silver spoons forged by Paul Revere and a coffee and tea set that a slave had once buried for safekeeping when Union soldiers moved through during the Civil War.

Detectives who chased Mr. Nordahl for decades say he is responsible for crimes that have had him in and out of prison since the 1980s. He might ultimately be responsible, they say, for more than 500 burglaries that netted him several million dollars' worth of some of the best domestic silver pieces in the country.

To read the complete article, see:A Finicky Thief of the Finest Silver Is Arrested Again(www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/us/a-finicky-thief-of-the-finest-silver-is-arrested-again.html)