Lost Loot: Cursed Treasures and Blood Money

by Jim Willis

Overview

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!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781578598670
Publisher:	Visible Ink Press
Publication date:	10/22/2024
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

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 negotiated deals with Muammar el-Qaddafi that led to the growth of OPEC, Qaddafi made Hammer a major beneficiary of Libya's oil wealth.

Thus it was that when the fifty Imperial Fabergé Eggs were finally discovered in the basement vaults of the Kremlin, Hammer was in a unique position to buy ten of them and bring them home for his personal collection. He then began to sell some of them.

In the process, although no one knows how, eight of them disappeared. One, as we already related, was found in a Midwest antique store. But the eggs made for the Easter seasons of 1886, 1888, 1889, 1897, 1902, 1903, and 1909 are still missing. Presumably, they are either hiding in plain sight, their owners unaware of how much they are worth, or they reside in someone’s private collection. No one knows.

They could be anywhere in the United States by now, worth untold millions of dollars, unclaimed and unacknowledged, as some of the most valuable pieces of art in the world.

Sometimes treasure isn’t purposefully hidden away in the earth. Sometimes it is just ignored. In this case, thanks to the ineptness of Bolshevik armies, a shady American entrepreneur with ties to the Soviet Union, and an art public who didn’t know enough to be curious, there is a fortune to be found without having to get dirty or lift a shovel.

Who will find it? Maybe you.

The Mysteries of Oak Island

We’ve saved the most popular, and maybe the biggest lost treasure, for last. Due to the History Channel’s blockbuster series, The Curse of Oak Island, there are very few people who have read this far who are not familiar with the mystery of what transpired on a small island off the coast of Nova Scotia in the shrouded mists of long ago. Since 2014, a growing audience of viewers has tuned in to see what the Lagina brothers, Rick and Marty, along with metal detection specialist Gary Drayton, Oak Island historian Charles Barkhouse, heavy equipment operator Billy Gerhardt, and a host of fan favorites such Jack Begley, Craig Tester, Alex Legina, and many, many others, will dig up next. The island has been the subject of a mysterious treasure hunt since 1795, and the Lagina brothers, along with the team they call “The Fellowship of the Dig,” in honor of J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous phrase, are determined to be the ones who finally hit paydirt.

Never have so many spent so much, and found so little, but generated such excitement. Historical figures such as Sir Francis Drake, William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Bacon, Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, and Marie Antoinette are all associated with the treasure. President Franklin Roosevelt and famous actors Errol Flynn and John Wayne have contributed to the search. Everyone from ancient Aztecs to The Knights Templar might have originally buried it.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction

Part 1. Pirates’ Plunder
1. The Curses of Charles Island
2. Captain Kidd’s Buried Treasure
3. Blackbeard’s Boast
4. Jean Lafitte and the Galveston Hoard
5. Around the World with Captain Thomas Cavendish

Part 2. Shipwrecks
6. The Wreck of the SS Central America, the “Ship of Gold”
7. The Plate Fleet of 1715

Part 3. Caves and Mines
8. Daniel Boone and the Dry Indian
9. The Lost Dutchman Mine
10. The Old Spanish Treasure Cave
11. Mystery of the San Saba Mine

Part 4. The Treasures of Kings
12. Montezuma’s Revenge
13. Seven Cities of Cibola
14. Hidden Cities of Egypt
15. The Burial Chamber of King Kamehameha

Part 5. Mobsters, Gangsters, and Robbers
16. A Stagecoach and a “Blood-Soaked Treasure”
17. Beyond Jesse James and the Knights of the Golden Circle
18. The Hidden Loot of Sam Bass, a Texas Entrepreneur
19. The Lost Loot of Dutch Schultz
20. John Dillinger’s Suitcase

Part 6. Hunting Down Mysteries
21. Meriwether Lewis and the Missing Documents
22. The Mystery of the Beale Treasure
23. Long Tom’s Treasure
24. The Story of Frank from Pennsylvania
25. The Treasure of Cahuenga Pass
26. The Missing Fabergé Eggs
27. The Mystery of D. B. Cooper and the Highjacked Ransom
28. Forest Fenn and the Thrill of the Chase

Part 7. Mysteries of Oak Island
29. Nolan’s Cross
30. The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar and the Curse of Jacques de Molay
31. The Curse of the Holy Grail
32. The Ark of the Covenant

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"The first treasure in your hand, should be this book! This book may give you a clue to where some hidden treasure might be!" — Unexplained-Mysteries.com

From the Publisher