Posted on 02/20/2023 3:41:12 PM PST by TigerClaws
The court-ordered release of a trove of government photos, videos, maps and other documents involving the FBI’s secretive search for Civil War-era gold has a treasure hunter more convinced than ever of a coverup — and just as determined to prove it.
Dennis Parada waged a legal battle to force the FBI to turn over records of its excavation in Dents Run, Pennsylvania, where local lore says an 1863 shipment of Union gold disappeared on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. The FBI, which went to Dents Run after sophisticated testing suggested tons of gold might be buried there, has long insisted the dig came up empty.
Parada and his advisers, who have spent countless hours poring over the newly released government records, believe otherwise. They accuse the FBI of distorting key evidence and improperly withholding records in an apparent effort to conceal the recovery of a historic, extremely valuable gold cache. The FBI defends its handling of the materials.
Parada’s dispute with the FBI is playing out in federal court, where a judge overseeing the case must decide whether the FBI will have to release its operational plan for the gold dig and other records it wants to keep secret. The judge could also order the FBI to keep looking for additional materials to turn over to the treasure hunter.
“We feel we were double-crossed and lied to,” Parada said in an interview at his cramped, wood-paneled office, where huge drill bits and high-end metal detectors compete for space with rusty miners’ picks, Civil War-era cannon parts and other odds and ends he’s dug up over the years.
“The truth will come out,” said Parada, co-founder of the treasure-hunting outfit Finders Keepers. Solving the mystery is not his only goal — he had hoped to earn a finder’s fee from the potential recovery of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold.
An FBI spokesperson declined to answer questions about the agency’s gold dig records or respond to the coverup allegations, citing the ongoing litigation. Last year, the FBI released a statement publicly acknowledging for the first time that it had been looking for gold in Dents Run. The statement said the FBI did not find any, adding the agency “continues to unequivocally reject any claims or speculation to the contrary.”
There is little evidence in the historical record to suggest that an Army detachment lost a gold shipment in the Pennsylvania wilderness — possibly the result of an ambush by Confederate sympathizers — but the legend has inspired generations of treasure hunters, Parada among them.
He and his son spent years looking for the fabled gold of Dents Run, eventually guiding the FBI to a remote woodland site 135 miles (220 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh where they say their instruments identified a large quantity of metal. The FBI brought in a geophysical consulting firm whose sensitive equipment detected a 7- to 9-ton mass suggestive of gold.
Armed with a warrant, a team of FBI agents came in March 2018 to dig up the hillside. An FBI videographer was on hand to document it, at one point interviewing a Philadelphia-based agent on the FBI’s art-crime team who explained why the FBI was in the woods of one of Pennsylvania’s most sparsely populated counties.
“We’ve identified through our investigation a site that we believe has U.S. property, which includes a significant sum of base metal which is valuable … particularly gold, maybe silver,” the agent said on the video, his face blurred by the FBI to protect his privacy.
Calling it a “155-year-old cold case,” he said the FBI had corroborated Parada’s information about the location of the reputed gold through “scientific testing.” He stressed the test results did not prove the presence of gold. Only a dig would help law enforcement “get to the bottom of this story once and for all,” the agent said.
Parada obtained the video and other FBI records through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, hoping they would help answer lingering questions about what took place at Dents Run five years ago. Parada was mostly kept away from the dig site while the FBI did its work.
He suspects the agency conducted a clandestine, overnight dig between the first and second days of the court-authorized excavation, found the gold, and spirited it away. Residents have previously told of hearing a backhoe and jackhammer overnight — when the dig was supposed to have been paused — and seeing a convoy of FBI vehicles, including large armored trucks. The FBI has denied it conducted an overnight dig.
Parada and a consultant, Warren Getler, have focused on a handful of FBI photos and an accompanying photo log that have them questioning the FBI’s official gold dig timeline. At issue is the presence or absence of snow in the images and the timing of a storm that briefly disrupted operations. For example, an FBI image that was supposed to have been taken about an hour after the squall does not show any snow on a large, moss-covered boulder at the dig site. That same boulder is snow-covered in a photo that FBI records indicate was taken the next morning — some 15 hours after the storm.
They accuse the FBI of altering the sequence of events to conceal an overnight excavation.
“We have compelling evidence a night dig took place, and that the FBI went to some large effort to cover up that night dig,” said Getler, co-author of “Rebel Gold,” a book exploring the possibility of buried Civil War-era caches of gold and silver.
There are other seeming anomalies in the records, according to Finders Keepers’ legal motion. Among them:
— The FBI initially turned over hundreds of photos, but rendered them in low-resolution, high-contrast black-and-white, making it impossible to tell the time of day they were taken or even, in some cases, what they show. The treasure hunters went back and requested several dozen of the photos in color, which the FBI provided.
— The agency did not provide any video of the second and final day of the dig. Nor did it produce any photos or video showing what the FBI’s own hand-drawn map described as a 30-foot-long, 12-foot-deep trench — which the treasure hunters claim could have only been dug overnight. Government lawyers acknowledged these gaps in the photo and video record but did not elaborate in a court filing last week.
— The consulting firm hired by the FBI to assess the possibility of gold produced a report on its findings, but the version given to the treasure hunters seems to be missing key pages.
— The FBI did not provide any of its agents’ travel and expense invoices, which could shed further light on the dig timeline.
The records released so far “cast doubt on the FBI’s claim to have found nothing and raise serious and troubling questions about the FBI’s conduct during the dig and in this litigation, where it has gone to great lengths to distort critical evidence,” Anne Weismann, a lawyer for Finders Keepers, wrote in a legal filing that seeks records, including the FBI’s operational plan, that she says were improperly withheld.
The Justice Department did not address the treasure hunters’ most explosive claims of a possible coverup in its latest legal filing. The government instead told a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that the FBI had satisfied its legal obligation to the treasure hunters to search for its records of the dig, and asked for the case to be closed.
The judge has yet to rule.
Parada said he will keep asking questions until he gets satisfactory answers.
“I will stick at this until the end, until I know everything that happened to that gold,” he said. “How much, where it went to, who has it now. I gotta know.”
When I find a horde of gold, I’ll keep my mouth shut. How in the world do you liquidate millions of dollars of gold without drawing all kinds of attention to yourself? How would you liquidate even hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold and stay on the down low?
Same question for old currency. How do you fence it?
Legend has it that the gold was on its way to the Philly mint to be coined so Union soldiers could get paid around the time of Gettysburg in 1863. Good yarn, but soldiers on both sides were paid in script. Shame Alistair MacLean is not around to write a story about it, as it would lend itself to multi layer of betrayal.
Because if he was the one that found it, they owe him 10%, which would be roughly $45 million.
And just like Jimmy Conway from “Goodfellas”, it makes the government sick to have to share the money with the guy that found it.
44 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.
(Before the FBI can confiscate that wealth!)
Find it....Never declare it.
In Panama, if people found treasure, they knew better than to inform the government. They knew the government would steal it, and they would get nothing.
But, in the USA, we know our government officials are totally honest, and would never steal treasure which was unaccounted for and maybe, even belonged to the government in the first place. /S
I know of someone with that same problem
A relative ran a vending business and pocketed a large sum of undeclared money from the 70s to 2019.
That’s a lot of small denominations dollar bills to explain. His children have quite the problem.
A hoax? No. I could be wrong. But I seem to remember reading that the Union paymaster was shifty guy named Archibald Biden. So, yeah. I think something really did happen to all the gold.
🤔
Even bigger than Lubyanka, but better appointed.
They can lie to us all they want.
Why the hell would I declare it?
If I found it I would just keep it, gold is fungible.
If it was in minted coin it is very valuable being auctioned off a few at a time, if it was in bullion form a simple blow torch will change it’s shape enough to be sold on the jewelry market!
He should have asked an Indian, first.
😂😂😂
"Don't buy anything!"
Shovel, shut up and sell off slowly.
BS on this. Why wasn’t there a search way back in 1863? Who were those “Confederate sympathizers”? They just magically appeared, stole the gold, and then just left it right near the crime scene? 7 tons of Gov’t gold just disappears and there is no outcry? No investigation? No Congressional hearings?
First, pay cash for everything you can, from restaurant bills to any purchase under $5,000. It should be easy to use $20,000 to $40,000 a year that way.
Second, make a habit of depositing cash into savings account, in the order of a thousand a week or so. Use the account to pay off credit cards.
Third, take trips, take along under $10k in cash, and spend it.
There are a number of cash based businesses. Start one up.
I hate when that happens.
Heh. Did he want 10 percent as well?
Seems like the FBI decided to acquire the gold “off book” so maybe they can tap into those resources to pay for having things done clandestinely.
In other words, it’s their slush und to use to do things they want to have done but will not leave a formal record so they can maintain Plausible Deniability.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.