Secret under house in LA worth a pretty penny
John Reyes’ unwitting treasure hunt started with one roll of pennies that he spotted last year while cleaning out the basement of the house where his late father-in-law had lived with his brother in Los Angeles.
After the father-in-law died and his brother vacated the house, the property went to their three children, including Reyes’ wife. For about a year, the families would spend a couple days a month there hauling out a half-century’s worth of belongings. But they had avoided the basement until last summer, when Reyes finally trudged down the rickety steps, eventually finding the roll of pennies. And then another, and another.
As Reyes followed the rolls like breadcrumbs, he found boxes of them. Those led to plastic milk cartons filled with more pennies. And, finally, the milk cartons led him to bank bags, some still sealed, all filled with a trove of pennies that would make Scrooge McDuck’s eyes bug out in dollar signs if they weren’t the least valuable form of U.S. currency.
Reyes, a 41-year-old real estate agent in Southern California, originally estimated there were about a million of them. Nearly a year later, no one has counted them yet, but after weighing samples of the loot, he estimates there are a bit more than 800,000.
The house near downtown Los Angeles has been in Reyes’ wife’s family for nearly 50 years. After her father, Fritz, died about a decade ago, his brother lived there alone until old age forced him out. Fritz’s two children and their cousin took over, deciding to develop the property for their descendants.
But first, they needed to clean it out.
A running joke developed in the months they spent cleaning about who would end up tackling the basement, a task everyone had avoided until it was the only room that remained. Reyes and his wife’s cousin bought full-body Tyvek suits to brave the rickety stairs and wade through the cobwebs.
Then they started hauling stuff out. Nearing the end, they began tackling especially unpleasant jobs, like tunneling into and clearing out crawl spaces under the house. Reyes found a “super heavy” rolled-up commercial carpet that, in hindsight, he suspects Fritz put there to block what his son-in-law was about to find. Once removed, Reyes spotted the first roll of pennies. When he grabbed it, the paper disintegrated in his hands.
“And so I thought, ‘Oh, wow, okay, you know, exposed elements. These things must have been here for a while.”
Then they found the bank bags. Some were from Bank of America, while others came from out-of-state banks or institutions that no longer existed.
Reyes and his family believe that Fritz had stashed the pennies under the house for his children to find later. In 1982, the soaring cost of copper led the U.S. Mint to switch the composition of the penny from an alloy of 95% copper and 5% zinc it had used since the 1960s to mostly zinc with copper plating. News of the change led Fritz to hoard the old, more valuable pennies. Or at least that’s what his family believes.
In hindsight, they determined that he had dropped hints about the secret under his house over the years. He would tell his children to be patient when the time came to clean out his house.
“So it was kind of said without being said,” Reyes said.
Having stumbled upon Fritz’s buried treasure, a new problem emerged — what to do with it. Reyes immediately suggested Coinstar, more as a joke than a serious suggestion. Still, the family considered and dismissed it, unwilling to pay the company a cut for converting their change into cash. Plus, they thought their haul might overwhelm the company’s kiosks.
Reyes contacted the closest Wells Fargo Bank branch. The manager told him not to bring the pennies; they didn’t have enough room in their vault to hold them. No problem, Reyes thought. He had a great relationship with the branch near his home in Ontario, Calif. He went there penniless to float the idea. A banker initially scoffed when Reyes told her about another branch rebuffing him, saying they’d be happy to take the pennies. But as Reyes described the extent of his riches, the mood changed.
“I remember distinctly her looking at me with her mouth open, her eyes are wide open, and she’s like, ‘I don’t believe you,’” Reyes said.
He insisted, offering up photo and video evidence.
“She got so excited, and that’s actually, that’s the first time I think we felt excitement, because we were just thinking penny-for-penny value is what we were going to get.”
No, the woman told him. They needed to pore over their treasure, analyzing each penny to see if they had a rare coin that collectors would pay top dollar for.
“You probably have a million-dollar penny in there,” she told him.
So Reyes researched coin collecting. He found aficionados posting instructional videos on TikTok. He bought head-mounted, magnifying loupes for himself and his family members.
They tried to find a diamond in the rough precisely once, for about an hour one night. By the end of the session, they’d made it through about 300 pennies, unable to determine if any of them were a jackpot. They gave up, realizing there were too many distinguishing features to spot.
“We had no clue what we were looking for,” he said.
Happy they’d at least tried, they popped champagne, cracked open some beers and decided to sell the pennies to experts or aficionados who knew what they were doing. Reyes contacted local television stations to pitch the idea and, once a story about his “million” pennies ran, hundreds of inquiries poured in within days.
He said he’s talking with “a really serious buyer” about his offer to sell the pennies for $25,000 — more than three times their $8,000 face value. He’s warned them that they’ll have to pick them up and that, when the family moved the haul from Fritz’s house to an undisclosed second location, the load turned their pickups into lowriders.
Still, Reyes said he’s confident about his prospects. A collector would not really be buying 800,000 pennies; they’d be buying the chance that one or more of those pennies will be worth a small fortune.
“There are avid treasure hunters out there,” Reyes said, adding: “The value behind it … is the opportunity.”
Reyes, a 41-yearold real estate agent in Southern California, originally estimated there were about a million of them. Nearly a year later, no one has counted them yet, but after weighing samples of the loot, he estimates there are a bit more than 800,000.