Lost Loot

Auteur
Jim Willis earned his master’s degree in theology from Andover Newton Theological School, and he has been an ordained minister for over 40 years. He has also taught college courses in comparative religion and cross-cultural studies. His background in theology and education led to his writing more than 20 books on history, the apocalypse, and the mysteries of the unknown. His books include Visible Ink Press’ American Cults, Hidden History, and Lost Civilizations. He lives in the woods of South Carolina.

Texte du rabat

Legendary treasures. Mythical robberies. Lost riches. Buried plunder and fabulous wealth. Hidden dangers. Ancient curses and deathbed jinxes. Captivating tales of lost fortunes, hidden caches, the eternal allure of wealth, and the heartbreak of mysterious curses!



Read about the pursuit of riches turning to grief in this mesmerizing story collection! A thrilling exploration of the world's most intriguing and dangerous treasure hunts, Lost Loot: Cursed Treasures and Blood Money collects dozens of fascinating stories of reward, riches, greed, and ruin, including … 

 Curses, deaths, and centuries old treasure on Oak Island

Searchers hunted down and killed before finding a gangster’s stolen riches

The eternal quest for D. B. Cooper and his hijack ransom

Elaborate booby traps protecting ill-gotten gains

Cursed Aztec wealth lost as it journeyed to Spain

Mysterious caves holding secrets in the Grand Canyon

Montezuma’s revenge

The train-robbing Robin Hood myth of the Sam Bass Gang

Jean Lafitte and the Galveston Hoard

The lost Dutchman mine

Civil War coins hurriedly stashed after a brutal reign of terror

The missing Fabergé eggs

John Dillinger’s suitcase

King Kamehameha’s burial chamber

Captain Kidd's buried treasure

And more stories of doomed pursuits of plundered riches.



Tales of bewitching riches and hunts gone wrong, yet hope springs eternal. Lost Loot unfolds like a treasure map—but beware of the hidden, deadly obstacles!




Résumé

A pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Buried plunder and deathbed curses. Jinxes and fabulous treasures. The hunt for mythical or ill-gotten gains has a long history. Yet, the result is often not wealth but rather something terrible. Read about the pursuit of riches turning to heartbreak in this mesmerizing story collection!



While some of these tales of treasure hunts might seem the stuff of legend, could there be more to them? 32 stories of reward, riches, greed, and ruin are collected in Lost Loot: Cursed Treasures and Blood Money, including … 

 Curses, deaths, and centuries old treasure on Oak Island

Searchers hunted down and killed before finding a gangster’s stolen riches

The eternal quest for D.B. Cooper and his hijack ransom

Elaborate booby traps protecting ill-gotten gains

Cursed Aztec wealth lost as it journeyed to Spain

Mysterious caves holding secrets in the Grand Canyon

The train-robbing Robin Hood myth of the Sam Bass Gang

Daniel Boone and the lost silver mine

Civil War coins hurriedly stashed after a brutal reign of terror

**And the stories of dozens of other doomed pursuits of plundered riches.




Tales of bewitching riches and hunts gone wrong, yet hope springs eternal. Lost Loot unfolds like a treasure map—but beware of the hidden, deadly obstacles!

Échantillon de lecture

The Missing Fabergé Eggs



How would you like to find a lost treasure without having to pick up a shovel or follow a faded map into the mountains? Surprisingly, you might be able to do just that.



In 2015, a man visited a Midwestern antique store and spent a whopping $13,000 for a trinket that he thought he might be able to make a profit on if he disassembled it, smelted it down and sold the rest for scrap. He figured he could clear about $1,000 on the project but was bitterly disappointed. No one was interested. All his potential buyers told him he had overvalued the item by many thousands of dollars. 



Just about the time he decided he wasn’t going to break even, he went online and Googled “gold egg.” Only then did he realize what he had. It was an Imperial Fabergé Egg, lost since 1922, and worth about $33 million. It is now thought to be one of the most valuable works of art in the world. 



That’s not to say that all Fabergé Eggs are worth that much. Another sold in 2007 for a paltry $8.9 million. 



So – what’s in your attic? Are you interested? Here’s the story.



For more than 30 years, from 1885 until 1916, Peter Carl Fabergé was one of the most famous jewelers in the world. He was catapulted into fame because Czar Alexander III of Russia began an Easter tradition. Every year he commissioned Fabergé to make a jeweled Easter Egg for his wife. They were built with the finest gold, silver, diamonds, rubies, other precious gems, and expensive lacquers. Each took a whole year to create, and they all contained hidden surprises when opened. Over a period of three decades, many of them were made for a variety of costumers, but the most famous were known as the Imperial Easter Eggs. They came to symbolize Russian royalty and the splendor of an age.



Then came the Bolshevik revolution of 1916. First they assassinated the Romanovs. Then they came for the House of Fabergé. That’s where the money was. The Bolsheviks confiscated every egg they could fine – a total of 50 of them.



Fabergé managed to escape to Switzerland but died only a few years later. Most say that what killed him was a long depression that began when he had to flee his beloved homeland.



The Fabergé company of today, although not nearly as splendid and opulent as their spiritual ancestors, describes the Imperial Eggs as "deeply imbued with the spirit of their age." They were "the swan song of a dying civilization." The modern company has no direct connections with the old one. They have no Russian roots and had to buy the rights to the name. But they did hire Peter Carl Fabergé's great-granddaughter in 2007, to maintain the ties.



Meanwhile, what did the Communists do with their stolen Fabergé Eggs? The answer is right out of Indiana Jones and the lost Ark. Their new owners considered them a decadent reminder of an opulent era, stored them in a crate in the basement of the Kremlin, and forgot about them. 



That brings us to the story of Armand Hammer and his close ties with the Soviet Union. Hammer was an American businessman who ran Occidental Petroleum from 1957 until he died in 1990. Besides being a multimillionaire in business, he was also a philanthropist and art collector. 



Newspaper reporters, however, labeled him "Lenin's chosen capitalist." His father was one of the founders of the American Communist Labor Party, and he made much of his fortune through deals he negotiated with nations who were sometimes open enemies of the United States. He maintained such close ties with the Soviet Union that Leonid Brezhnev provided a Hammer a luxurious Moscow apartment as a home-away-from-home, and lobbied President Ronald Reagan to appoint him ambassador to the Soviet Union.



The nomination never came because, as one unidentified U.S. official put it, ''We simply don't know which side of the fence Hammer is on.'' 



After Hammer successfully negotiate…