Barbie Augustini
Appearances
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
Yeah. They had to, the officer that came actually had to call his supervisor. And I believe he was a captain and he had to call his higher up because he didn't know the protocol for this. Yeah.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
Some of them that weren't assigned to the call came. They heard it over the radio and they said, I just had to see it for myself because a call over the radio of a safe found in the water with a ton of money in it. Don't know the procedure for that, but they just... Yeah, in the middle of New York City, you know? Exactly.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
We've been together for about eight years, I'd say. Yeah, 2016. But funny story is we've actually known each other since we were about the age of three.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
What did it smell like? I think it almost smelled like feces and just something that was left to rot and hasn't been touched in a long time.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
So it had to be 2013 or later. What's your theory about how the safe ended up in the river? I personally think it was more than likely a home robbery. And they got it out of the place. And maybe it was a, I assume, a group of people. And they were trying to get in the safe. They were trying to move as quickly as they can. They maybe shook it upside down, getting out whatever they could.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
And they drove into either Corona Park or there was an expressway above. And maybe they just chucked it out because they thought they got everything. And they left money in there. They didn't realize it.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
And so they couldn't tell exactly the amount, so they didn't want to count it as money. They counted it as paper, like found paper.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
So they said, you know, they called the higher-ups and they said that if we can do anything with it, it's ours.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
But even then, even after they said you can have it, we still didn't believe it. We thought they were eventually going to call us and be like, actually, bring it in. We did not believe that it was going to be ours at any point.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
Yeah, but there's no way to prove it. There was no ID, no serial numbers on the safe, no way of identifying it.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
Did you try to dry it out? We did open the bag. We showed our kids.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
Yeah. It ran out of the room because the smell was just that bad. We did try to, like... touch it a little bit, but once it started to, once we would touch it, it started to flake and almost come off in pieces. We were like, okay, we're sealing the bag, we're not touching it again.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
Our moms were best friends. They actually met each other on the train going to work. And, you know, we all got together, family events and everything. So we grew up together, had some of the same classes. And, yeah, it just... We separated our adulthood and came back together eventually.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
We waited to hear back from them and for them to tell us what to do. The Bureau emailed them back.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
We were thinking that, oh, this money is probably going to be super hard for them to deal with. And they're like, nah, this is nothing. We've had worse.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
The water compresses it and shrinks it or something. So it actually could be potentially more depending on the weight of the water and everything else and the mud that was in it.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
I think my mind just went blank at that moment. I just could not conceptualize any type of that this is actually real.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
Yeah. And what it is, is that once they take it in, they will get one person to assign it to the case. That one singular person is the only person who will work on finding out how much it is and putting it all together. And then they'll write their report. And then another person will have to come and do the same process over again. And it's cleared immediately.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
Yeah, I mean, he doesn't think, he's like, I'm just putting it out of my brain to picture it as if we never got it. Until, I think until he sees the end point, will it be real to him? Mm-hmm. Barbie, what have you spent the money on already? Well, I've always said I wanted to have a house of my own. So I want to move somewhere down south. I've always said I want to have less concrete, more grass.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
So I'd like to have property of my own with a lot of outside land and somewhere that I can have chickens and little mini goats and dogs and stuff running around. Just like a little piece of happiness that I can call my own. But it's going to have to be around some water.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
And James was like, oh, I would love to do this one day. And my son was like, yeah, that looks cool, but you're never actually going to do it. And James took it, he took that challenge and we got the stuff, the very basics, and we started magnet fishing.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
Definitely at first, like, it was the boys' thing. You know, like, I saw how interested they were in it, and I was intrigued, but... But it wasn't fully my thing. It's very dirty sometimes.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
And so that wasn't really what I was into. But I saw how excited they were getting. And eventually the day that you found, I think, the motorcycle.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
Yeah, it got real. And I was like, oh, okay, this is more interesting than I thought. They started going to different parks and lakes around New York. In Central Park, we actually found a mason jar filled with purple liquid, and inside of the purple liquid was a whole tarantula spider. Did you keep it? That one, no.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
We've had, you know, daily stress in life, and it's good to be around. For me, I love being by the water. I like being outside, you know, hearing the birds chirp and everything, and going out just with a simple magnet and a rope. It's amazing. You can just go out with these basic things and have an adventure, and you never know what is going to come up. Every day is different.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
I guess if you want to get rid of something, you throw it in a pond. Yep. All those TV shows and movies that they show them just tossing things away, apparently it's actually a real thing. Yeah.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
And originally we were supposed to go pick up our pets from my friend who was pet sitting them. But he changed the date, said, you know, come by tomorrow. So our day was then free. So we're out. What are we going to do? And we had our stuff and we said, you know what? Let's go to Corona and let's go magnet fishing.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
And 45 minutes in, he gets that click, and he's like, oh, I got something.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
And he's like, I think I got a safe. And he pulls it up. The magnet had a black box stuck to it.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
No keypad on the front. It was just a twist lock. This is not the first safe that you've caught before. No.
Criminal
Guns, Grenades, and $100,000
All of a sudden, he turns it around. I see a hole in the back, and I see something fall. And I'm like, there's something inside.