Buried Treasure, Unburied for a Greater Good

Photo
Three years ago, Vincent Bova and Damien Eckhardt-Jacobi buried $10,000 in gold coins and offered clues about how to find them as a way to promote their Web site. Nobody found the treasure, so last week, Mr. Eckhardt-Jacobi, center, Mr. Bova, right, and a friend, Jim Twerell, dug up the coins, which were in woods next to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

In an adventure about buried treasure (real), pirates (made up) and clues (too complicated, it turned out), the temptation is to talk like a matey and tell the world: The cap’n says to quit yer foolish searching because the booty’s not there now. The laddies who put it in the ground dug it up and gave it away.

The tale began in 2009, when two men from Brooklyn, Vincent Bova and Damien Eckhardt-Jacobi, hid a chest filled with 10,000 one-dollar coins and released eight videos featuring Muppetlike creatures playing pirates who dropped hints about where the loot was. Mr. Bova and Mr. Eckhardt-Jacobi said that whoever found the money could keep it.

Despite the best efforts of treasure hunters who searched for almost three years, no one did.

“We definitely didn’t make it easy,” Mr. Bova said. “I had the feeling it would take time for somebody to find it, and from what I’ve seen on the Internet, people got close.”

After Hurricane Sandy devastated communities not far from their own Brooklyn neighborhoods, Mr. Bova and Mr. Eckhardt-Jacobi decided the money in the ground could be put to better use, and made plans to donate the coins to a group in Far Rockaway, Queens.

Digging up the booty was trickier than it would have been before the hurricane, because the storm had remade the landscape in the woods where they had stashed it. Some of the trees and trails that figured in the video clues were gone, Mr. Bova said. And that was before he took a couple of wrong turns and had to do some backtracking.

Spoiler alert: The next paragraph will tell where the treasure lay untouched even as some dismissed the project as a hoax.

It was next to Floyd Bennett Field in southeast Brooklyn, not more than 300 yards from a parking lot now used by National Guard soldiers assigned to the recovery effort. The spot was marked not with an X but with a skull and crossbones that Mr. Bova and Mr. Eckhardt-Jacobi nailed to a tree.

Once they finally found the spot the other morning, there was the noise of shovels stabbing deep into damp soil. That was followed by the slot-machine-jackpot sound of 10,000 one-dollar coins being lifted out of the ground and poured into backpacks.

That, in turn, was followed by some huffing and grunting as the two men discovered, all over again, that 10,000 one-dollar coins weighed an awful lot.

The first time Mr. Bova and Mr. Eckhardt-Jacobi learned that was when they buried the money, from their own savings, a few months before they began releasing videos on the Web site, We Lost Our Gold.

The idea was to increase Web traffic for their projects – and perhaps catch the eye of someone willing to pay them for the next one. We Lost Our Gold, the Web site, had thousands of followers, but one of their other puppet productions found a bigger audience and was nominated for a Webby Award. So Mr. Bova and Mr. Eckhardt-Jacobi decided to end the treasure hunt.

They asked Jim Twerell, a friend who was the voice of the pirate parrot and who composed the music on the videos, to help with the digging.

“There are the black hell-type gates,” Mr. Bova said, referring to a clue in “We Lost Our Gold” as they walked toward the North 40 Natural Area, part of the Gateway National Recreational Area.

In the hurricane’s wake, they had to push fallen branches out of the way and climb over a couple of large limbs on the way to a pine tree that figured in a clue about Cybele, “the goddess who turned her son into an evergreen tree.”

Mr. Bova mentioned a “flying birdie” clue. It referred to jets screaming low overhead on the way to John F. Kennedy International Airport. But it was helicopters that flew low as they dug, and the coins were wet and tarnished.

Mr. Bova and Mr. Eckhardt-Jacobi had insisted on anonymity when they began the We Lost Our Gold project, partly for their own safety.

Someone connected Mr. Eckhardt-Jacobi to the project and called him one morning at 4 a.m. And called. And called. And called again, demanding to know where the loot was.

Another message came from someone at the United States Treasury Department. “They were like, ‘Nobody’s using dollar coins and we love what you’re doing to promote it,” Mr. Eckhardt-Jacobi said.

By last week, some fans were worried that the storm had swallowed up the treasure. Alyson Cozzolina of Manhattan went to We Lost Our Gold’s page on Facebook and posted a photograph of a box lying empty on a beach in the Rockaways. “Please tell me this wasn’t the chest containing the treasure,” she wrote.

It wasn’t.

After hauling the backpacks out of the North 40, the three men loaded them into Mr. Twerell’s sport utility vehicle. They drove to the end of Flatbush Avenue and over the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge in search of Lava Girl Surf, a surfing school that had turned into a relief group.

Mr. Bova described his initial call to Davina Greene of Lava Girl Surf. “I said I want to talk about a donation, but it’s kind of bizarre,” he said.

He mentioned $10,000. She told him she was going to cry.

Then he mentioned pirates and said, “It’s a treasure chest bursting with coins.”

“She started laughing hysterically,” Mr. Bova said.

Correction: November 20, 2012
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misspelled the surname of Jim Twerell. He is not Jim Trewell.