Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
FBI sought Civil War-era gold at Pa. dig, emails say
Go for the gold?
The U.S. government went for it.
FBI agents were looking for a cache of fabled Civil War-era gold — possibly tons of it — when they excavated a remote woodland site in Pennsylvania three years ago, according to government emails and other recently released documents in the case.
On March 13, 2018, treasure hunters led the FBI to Dent’s Run, 135 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, where legend has it an 1863 shipment of Union gold was either lost or stolen on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia.
The FBI has long refused to confirm why it went digging, saying only in written statements over the years that agents were there for a court-authorized excavation of “what evidence suggested may have been a cultural heritage site.”
In any event, the FBI says, the dig came up empty.
But the father-son duo who brought a small army of federal agents to the site remain convinced the FBI uncovered something there — and their lawyer, Bill Cluck, is still pressing the case, successfully suing for access to government emails about the dig.
Those documents show that federal law enforcement was after buried treasure.
Since the Elk County site was on state-owned land, the FBI had to secure a federal court order to gain access. The legal maneuvering generated emails between K.T. Newton, an assistant U.S attorney in Philadelphia, and Audrey Miner, chief lawyer for the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
On March 13, as FBI agents clambered up a hill to the target, Miner asked Newton: “Can you please provide the basis upon which the Office of the United States Attorney asserts that the gold, if found, belongs to the federal government?”
Newton replied that a federal affidavit in the case was sealed.
Dennis and Kem Parada, who co-own the treasure-hunting outfit Finders Keepers, had spent years looking for the long-lost booty before going to the FBI with their evidence in January 2018, saying their sophisticated detector had registered a hunk of metal they suspected was the gold of lore.
Within weeks, the FBI hired geophysical consulting firm Enviroscan to survey the hilltop site.
Enviroscan’s gravimeter also indicated a large metallic mass with the density of gold, according to Warren Getler, who worked with the Paradas and the FBI.
An FBI agent told them the location of the mass was “one or two feet off Denny’s sweet spot,” recalled Getler, author of “Rebel Gold,” a book exploring the possibility of buried Civil War-era caches of gold and silver. “Then I went to ask how big is it. And he said, ‘7 to 9 tons.’ And I literally said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ ”
That much gold would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars today — and, assuming it was there, would almost certainly touch off a legal fight over how to divvy up the spoils.