And the Emmy goes to… a Brooklyn construction worker who found it in the trash!
Ismael “Smiley” Cekic, 40, was walking on his Bensonhurst block in September when he spotted a “cool looking” statue amid boxes of discarded items on the curb outside a recently-sold neighboring house, brushed it off and took it home.
A few weeks later, as Cekic and wife Tonimarie were watching the 2013 Emmys on TV, he realized the awards show statuette looked just like the one now sitting in his living room.
“It’s definitely the real deal,” a source familiar with the venerable award told The Post after looking at a detailed photo of Cekic’s find.
“It’s very old — likely from the Ed Sullvan era in the 1950s.” The Emmy was issued by the New York-based arm of the awards, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS).
The statuette is missing the gold band at its base that would have identified the awardee.
“It could be that a family member of the award winner took the band off as a keepsake and then tossed the Emmy,’’ said the source.
The floored Cekic, who is also a musician, just wants to return the Emmy to its owner.
“I would really like to just get it back to the family that it belongs to,” Cekic told The Post.
“It might be an heirloom that has been forgotten. And as an artist I just think it needs to go back to the original owner or their relations.”
The son of the now-deceased former owners of the home where Cekic said the Emmy had been tossed said Friday the award did not belong to anyone in his family, and he’d never seen the statuette.
While some famous Emmys have gone for thousands on the auction block, the statuettes are not meant to be sold or “monetized’ according to Emmy brass.
Emmy rules require a winner who no longer wants the award to return it to NATAS or the LA-based Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS) .
Both groups stringently monitor Ebay, Craigslist and brick-and-mortar auction houses for Emmys that are put up for sale, and routinely order them taken off the selling block.