10 ms·
Man who stole $1M bucket of gold details escape from US
- jgh 9y agoI'm no criminal genius or anything but as a monday morning quarterback here i feel like he got too many people involved and screwed himself. Fencing the gold you can't do much about I guess but if you're able to just do it and gtfo. Don't go around giving people money to go on a road trip to LA with you. Don't give your shady-ass girlfriend the money to hold onto. Take it with you and ditch the car on the border and walk across to Mexico. And what's he telling everyone in ecuador he stole $1.6m in gold for anyway? Sounds like the guy's lucky he got caught and never received the money.
- IntronExon 9y agoIf he thought that way then he wouldn’t be a thief in the first place, or he’d be a thief in a suit. At the very least he’d commit crimes with a less risky profile and greater potential rewards.
- prawn 9y agoHow likely would it be that you could get that quantity over the border going South? Is luggage checked? Assuming they could identify him from camera footage, he'd have limited options to keep an existing car or buy a car and stay in the US? It'd be a risk even buying a car in a friend's name. Best bet might be to forgo a car, rent somewhere remote and informally with cash, and sit tight for a while.
- jgh 9y agoI think it depends on the border crossing. At San Ysidro you can walk across and probably not get checked. I've walked across into mexico there a number of times (visa runs for TN) and never been checked, not even my passport. Granted I didn't have a bag with me. They tend to have a couple of guards who seem to check people occasionally, but I suspect if you were to walk across with a backpack behind a group of old ladies with luggage you'd probably be ok.
- senorjazz 9y agoI drove over the border, perhaps Brownsville? I forget the name, but one of the last eastern border crossings. Drove over in a camper van with European plates, didn't even realise had left the US until got to the Mexican side and went and sorted papers for the vehicle. No search, no check, just passports
- umanwizard 9y ago> How likely would it be that you could get that quantity over the border going South? I've been to Mexico dozens of times and only once was anything checked at all.
- sjg007 9y agoThe Mexicans would've stopped him. That's why he didn't take the money with him. In his case he would've need to do a reverse coyote which I am going to guess is basically impossible with $1.2m. A boat to Cuba maybe with a flight but otherwise impossible. His best chance outside of friends or family was bitcoin.
- daveguy 9y agoYikes. Bitcoin: the best for illegal transactions. That's not a positive attribute.
- atwebb 9y agoMight be a good thing for bitcoin (heh) if that surprises you. That was pretty much it's public face for a long time thanks to the Silk Road and various mainstream pieces about money laundering.
- daveguy 9y agoActually it doesn't surprise me that much. Parents asked when bitcoin was around 10k on the way up if they should invest. I told them there will probably be value for a while because it is a money laundering Mecca, but definitely risky. For a while (up to 19k+) I thought I might have burned significant tech trust.
- celticninja 9y agomoney laundering via bitcoin, is overhyped and not as much of an issue as people make out. cash is always going to be king.
- modeless 9y agoIt's not though; it's really a misconception. It's much more traceable than cash. Monero would be what a criminal would use.
- maxander 9y ago
- rokhayakebe 9y agoI am sure he could have just mailed it UPS, FEDEX or something.
- sjg007 9y agoThat’s an interesting idea.
- manuelisimo 9y agoIf you arrive to México in a plane you can expect random searches. I get my luggage opened around 1 in 10 times. They also use x-ray for screening luggage on arrival. If you are driving or walking sometimes you just say hello and that's about it. But I also have gotten my car searched, specially if crossing by myself. It is a bit more relaxed on Christmas time, when a lot of people cross the border.
- rsync 9y ago"How likely would it be that you could get that quantity over the border going South? Is luggage checked?" I can only speak from personal experience, but ... As someone who has driven into, and through, Mexico many, many times (one trip was Colorado to El Salvador and back) I can tell you that it's all smiles and waves and thumbs up as long as you are driving south. As long as you're driving south, nobody cares what you're doing or what's up or where you're going or who you are. The moment you turn around and point north everyone cares.
- prawn 9y agoI assumed as much. I suppose he would've wanted to have done it quickly before his photo was out there. Maybe stash half and risk carrying the other half. Or, as I said, get to a more remote area, make friends, rent a room cheap, befriend the landlord and try to borrow their car for cash, and then slowly develop a lifestyle where you can make careful use of the money without divulging your identity too much.
- ogdoad 9y agoI think the point is that your life doesn't reach the point where you steal $1m worth of gold without a few ripples of insanity appearing here or there. It appears it takes a confluence of chaos for such a heist to manifest.
- icantdrive55 9y agoI get the insanity, but you don't need to no tell anyone anything--maybe mom, or dad if they have a rebellious streak in them, and most don't. The last person you tell is your girlfriend. I know it's difficult, but it always backfires. There's a book out there called "How do you Keep a Secret between three people? Kill the other two." The book is about law breaking Bikers, but the title goes to the extreme to tell the truth. There's just a huge biological need to tell people our fears. It makes sense. We're just monkeys screaming for help." There's a part of me that wants some bad guys to get away clean. I guess it's a FU to the system? A system that forgets some of us? I once had a girlfriend, and we were watching Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. She enjoyed the movie. And the end, she was glad they were shot. I looked over at her, and was astonished. To this day, I think about that night. She was a very conservative girl, but cheated in college. She's now a very powerful head of tech something.
- sjg007 9y agoShould've bought bitcoin.
- rokhayakebe 9y agoAnd what's he telling everyone 1) Ego 2) I have no scientific evidence for this but it feels humans want to confess and unless death find them first everyone will confess every crime they have done. It could be through a joke, or to a complete stranger or some other way.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoWhat's the name for this logical fallacy? You think people want to confess because you know people who have. You don't know of many who got away with a crime and didn't confess.
- jamornh 9y agoSounds like survivorship or selection bias to me.
- logiclion 9y agoWhats the name for assigning a logical fallacy to a post that starts with “no scientific evidence” and “it feels”?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- percival_krusen 9y agoHmm, availability heuristic? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
- razorunreal 9y agoYou don't have to tell anyone if your face is on the news.
- csomar 9y agoHere is the simple explanation: He is dump/stupid. You wonder why the guy would not handle himself better? Well, if he was smart, then he would never think of it. He has access to the US and countless opportunities. He'd have been probably better off financially. And he has access to NYC, he doesn't need a girlfriend.
- justboxing 9y agoCalling B.S. on his story that his fiance stole all the cash that he exchanged the gold for. Also, how come he wasn't arrested? The story starts with "he was in jail and now out". How? The crime happened in 2016 and it's less than 2 years later now.
- jgh 9y agoThey said he got 1 year because he had no criminal past in Ecuador.
- passivepinetree 9y agoDid you read the article? He was arrested in Ecuador, sentenced to a year in prison, and was out after 9 months for good behavior. There's no extradition treaty between Ecuador and the U.S., so he wasn't sent back to the United States (where he had a criminal record and the sentence which would have been much higher).
- justboxing 9y agoYeah I just saw the video, didn't read the related text story. Thanks for the info.
- atwebb 9y agoThanks for pointing out the text is different, I've gotten used to the article just being a transcription of the video on local news sites.
- tty7 9y agoWe should start a gofundme for him, what a horrible fiance!
- rokhayakebe 9y agoShe's the one with the real balls. Frankly I would be scared to steal from anyone who would steal a million.
- scoggs 9y agoI can't believe this guy has the nuts to act like he deserves a lick of sympathy. Nuts. I don't know what's worse, him acting that way or a news channel glorifying his actions. What a strange world we live in. I know we live in a world where this guy is going to make a better, more clickable story than somebody finding and returning somebody's purse but where do we draw the line. I guess if it weren't such a large quantity of gold plus being stolen from an armored vehicle in broad daylight it might have been seen as more of a terrible crime. As it stands it's almost more laughable that he was able to pull it off than anything. The dude was such an idiotic thief after he actually got away with the goods that there is a story in that itself.
- joemi 9y agoI'm not arguing that his actions should necessarily be glorified, but I'm completely unsurprised that they were, and I think there are some very clear reasons why (beyond just saying it'll get clicks): - First, I'm sure many people view it as a "robbing the rich" type situation, and it was completely non-violent. Those gold bars certainly were not from some small business owner making his nightly deposits. With economic disparity such as it is these days, I'm not surprised at all that people would find that amusing and root for the criminal in this case. (Of course, the problem with such "robbing the rich" situations is that the rich often recoup their losses at the expense of the not-rich. But many people either don't know or don't think about that when they see a "rob the rich" situation.) - Also, it was a pretty brazen broad daylight robbery itself, due to the weight of the gold, and the video of it was pretty amusing to watch, with all the effort and breaks needed. - Finally, this story is from an local NYC news channel, and NYC is the US metro area with the most Ecuadorians, by a long shot. That is not to say that Ecuadorians should or do necessarily feel pride when following this story, but it's at least a local (to a subset of NYC) interest piece because of his nationality.
- gumby 9y ago> "As soon as I saw the two guys, I did feel like that pail belonged to me" What an asshole. He deserves to be ripped off. If he wanted a career based on values like that he should have worked on Wall St.
- sctb 9y agoPlease don't post information-free, inflammatory comments like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- empath75 9y agohe should have just gotten the guy to send him bitcoin, and he’d have been set.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoI know it's wrong but.. I can't help but feel sorry for him and hope he got away with it.
- ImSkeptical 9y agoI know. That multiple time felon just can't catch a break! Didn't he work hard, to repeatedly flout the law, waste tax payer money, and the time of civil servants? Doesn't he deserve someone else's money for all his effort? Sarcasm aside, I think the proper result would be between what you hope - that he gets away with it, and what I hope - which is that he gets a bullet in the head. A good middle ground would be that he returns what he took, goes to prison, and finally learns the lesson he has resisted thus far.
- JackNichelson 9y agoI wonder what he does for a living now, besides interviews. Maybe working on a book or a movie?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vpribish 9y agowhat are gold details?
- tajen 9y agoA man, who stole $1m of gold, details his escape. Not gold details. He just provides details on his escape. Punctuation matters.
- jacquesm 9y agoIt's hilarious how he's upset that his fiance apparently stole the money from him, did he forget that it was never his to begin with?
- megablast 9y agoIs it the same? Someone you know and trust, is different to him stealing from someone he has no idea about, and is likely a rich company or corporation.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 9y agoThere is a nice proverb about this: 'there is no honor among thieves'. Besides that, the guy could easily be lying about the whole thing.
- awakeasleep 9y agoIt became his when he 'paid' for it with the skill he used and risk he took to obtain it. Otherwise it wouldn't be stealing.
- sebastian 9y agoThe story in not over yet. He should sell the rights of his story for a movie and make the 1.2m back, only this time, the legit way.
- giarc 9y agoNot a lawyer here but would that fall under "profiting from the proceeds of crime"? This article from Australia suggests it's illegal in that country, I wonder if it's the same in the US. >Orders may also be made to seize the proceeds of the commercial exploitation of a person’s notoriety from criminal offending, literary or otherwise (but often described as “literary proceeds”). http://theconversation.com/explainer-how-proceeds-of-crime-law-works-in-australia-78600 http://theconversation.com/explainer-how-proceeds-of-crime-l...
- colejohnson66 9y agoOJ Simpson wrote “(If) I Did It” and made money off that
- totalZero 9y agoI believe he was taken to court by the father of Ron Goldman, who won rights to the book. I'm not too familiar with the circumstances arouns the case, though, so this doesn't necessarily refute the idea that OJ could potentially have profited.
- dagw 9y agoMy understanding was that Goldman initially won a lien on the profits from the book, since Simpson owed Goldman money from the civil suit, and later the Goldman's where handed the book rights by the bankruptcy courts, when OJ failed to pay his debts. So in theory OJ could have profited if he didn't also, independently, owe the Goldman's a lot of money.
- dagw 9y agoOfficially OJ Simpson never commit those crimes.
- rosege 9y agoWhen I travelled through South America quite extensively I found the Ecquadorians were much more brazen about theft than people in some other countries. The moment I wasnt looking at a bag when on a bus they were going through it. I had an old laptop stolen while asleep even though the bag was right at my feet - think they must have come under the chair somehow - though they missed the cash in there. The next time I was on a bus I put my backpack above my head - the only thing in it was some spare batteries for the laptop - I just wanted to see if it would happen on this bus too - and sure enough it did - I could see them trying to be sly about it - but I just let them have those since they werent any good to me now anyway.
- username223 9y agoHaving just been to Ecuador, and ridden my share of buses, I saw nothing of the kind. The other bus riders just seemed to be people who were also hot, crowded, and wanting to reach their destinations. Then again, I kept my backpack on my lap, between my legs, or in the luggage compartment under the bus, just like I would anywhere.
- totalZero 9y agoDepends where you go, and how you act. In the Amazon part of the country and in Galapagos, it's hard to find crime, but in Guayaquil, it's sometimes unavoidable. Many Ecuadorian people are comfortable about stealing from Americans, or ripping them off, and there's a sense of "these Americans won't miss it." Partly, this idea is imposed by the government, which charges different prices for some services (including airfare) to Europeans, Canadians and Americans. I've encountered (and sometimes lost money to) attempted ripoffs by taxi drivers, laundry services, restaurants, and even a surgeon. Yet I haven't had much stuff stolen from me in Ecuador, and in fact a local acquaintance felt so bad to see me lose the only item that was stolen, she bought me a replacement.
- chatmasta 9y ago> and there's a sense of "these Americans won't miss it." To be fair, they’re probably right. Besides, if you’re traveling in Central America with any more than the bare necessities, you deserve to get robbed. At least you should assume all your belongings could be taken from you at any time.
- locusm 9y agoGuy sounds like a complete egotistic POS.
- paulcole 9y agoNot that different from a disruptive startup CEO. Took his shot, broke the law, paid a price.
- anonytrary 9y agoIt's funny how the reporters call this "the crime of a lifetime" when billion-dollar crimes run rampant in Wall Street and crypto (Enron, Bitconnect, etc.). I suppose a few million dollars is enough to guarantee a lifetime of middle-class living. Maybe that's what they meant.
- 5555624 9y agoOr maybe they mean a "physical" robbery. How often does someone physically walk away with over a million dollars? IN gold, jewels, currency, etc.?
- anonytrary 9y agoYeah I was overthinking it. They definitely meant the average period of this happening was about a lifetime, i.e. what you said.
- pc86 9y agoAt conservative withdrawal rates, $1.6 million is $64k a year without ever touching the principal. Definitely a solid middle-class life, and even more so in Ecuador. And that's assuming you want to die with $1.6 million in the bank. Pulling out $100k a year at the same return rates will still last you 25 years. But this all assumes you can invest it. If you've got $1.6 million in gold bricks and the police in the country all these investment figures are based off of know you have it, you're probably not going to be able to do that.
- narvind 9y agoWhat are the odds, that the fiancee story is fake and he's diverting the world's attention again, now that he has served time? Maybe he did receive the bitcoin... That'd be the bonus point after touchdown.
- drak0n1c 9y agoJulio Nivelo was a convicted felon prior to this crime and deported four times. Four times! Obviously something is broken. Perhaps improving border security isn't such a bad idea?
- chatmasta 9y agoYou hear stories like this all the time, it’s absurd. He was able to enter subsequent times because he used other people’s passports. Wtf?? Why is CBP taking pictures of our face, scans of our retinas, and fingerprints every time we cross the border, if they can’t even use that data to identify a felon coming into the country under a different name?? Sometimes I’m concerned about dragnet surveillance and the police state, but then I realize how incompetent the government is at doing its job. Honestly that might be the scarier part than the surveillance...
- onnoonno 9y agoIf you behave lawful, you'll create one single tracking history for everything tied to your real life person. If you don't, you apparently can get away with stuff like that AND on top of that you won't create a single, coherent stream of data for big brother. These are fucked up incentives.
- chatmasta 9y agoThat’s a good point. Surveillance is more likely to result in false positive identification of law abiding citizens than of criminals, simply due to higher availability of data.
- Spearchucker 9y agoHe had no strategy. Weirdly. Because he said he told himself he'd have a chance at one of those buckets some day. In which case I'd have expected he'd have thought of an exit. Some kind of plan to leave the country, maybe even a contingency, in case he ever struck it rich. Surely, it you choose a life of crime, you'd do that anyway? Kind of a burn the bridges get out fast plan, for when things go wrong. Which they will, eventually.
- juhq 9y agoWhy on earth is this on the frontpage?