BURIED TREASURE, UNBURIED

The tale began in 2009, when two men from Brooklyn, Vincent Bova and Damien Eckhardt-Jacobi, hid a chest filled with 10,000 one-dollar coins and released eight videos featuring Muppetlike creatures playing pirates who dropped hints about where the loot was. Mr. Bova and Mr. Eckhardt-Jacobi said that whoever found the money could keep it.

Despite the best efforts of treasure hunters who searched for almost three years, no one did.

“We definitely didn’t make it easy,” Mr. Bova said. “I had the feeling it would take time for somebody to find it, and from what I’ve seen on the Internet, people got close.”

After Hurricane Sandy devastated communities not far from their own Brooklyn neighborhoods, Mr. Bova and Mr. Eckhardt-Jacobi decided the money in the ground could be put to better use, and made plans to donate the coins to a group in Far Rockaway, Queens.

Digging up the booty was trickier than it would have been before the hurricane, because the storm had remade the landscape in the woods where they had stashed it. Some of the trees and trails that figured in the video clues were gone, Mr. Bova said. And that was before he took a couple of wrong turns and had to do some backtracking.

Spoiler alert: The next paragraph will tell where the treasure lay untouched even as some dismissed the project as a hoax.

It was next to Floyd Bennett Field in southeast Brooklyn, not more than 300 yards from a parking lot now used by National Guard soldiers assigned to the recovery effort. The spot was marked not with an X but with a skull and crossbones that Mr. Bova and Mr. Eckhardt-Jacobi nailed to a tree.

Once they finally found the spot the other morning, there was the noise of shovels stabbing deep into damp soil. That was followed by the slot-machine-jackpot sound of 10,000 one-dollar coins being lifted out of the ground and poured into backpacks.

That, in turn, was followed by some huffing and grunting as the two men discovered, all over again, that 10,000 one-dollar coins weighed an awful lot.

To read the complete article, see: Buried Treasure, Unburied for a Greater Good (cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/buried-treasure-unburied
-for-a-greater-good/)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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