The other answers should have fixed your problem, but for future debugging refrence, print is your friend.

When things don't work, start throwing print statements into your code. I woiuld have just printed "found it\n" when the conditional tested true. But you could have gone as far as to do something like..

sub wanted {
  print '.';
  if ($_ eq "$item.dat")(
    print "\nfound it!\n";
    found = $File::Find::name;
  }
}
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Which wold have shown you each iteration though \&wanted. I always find it easier to validate that the code is doing what I think it's doing when I'm getting unexpected results.

Hope this helps..
Rich