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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.
Yeah, our parents knew each other.
Yeah.
Barbie Augustini and James Cain grew up in New York. Barbie was born in Queens, James in Brooklyn.
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.
Yeah. They started dating and moved in together, along with Barbie's daughter and son. When COVID hit, James lost his job operating cranes for a sanitation company. Barbie had recently had surgery and was recuperating at home. And the schools were closed. So all of you were home together. Yes. And I assume no one could go out. You weren't working, but you could watch TV.
Oh, yeah. A lot of YouTube. Yeah.
They especially like to watch videos about treasure hunting. James says he's always been fascinated by it, ever since he was a kid.
My stepson and I, during COVID lockdown, we saw something called magnet fishing on YouTube, watched a few videos.
What is magnet fishing?
So magnet fishing is where you take a really strong magnet, you tie it on the end of a rope, and you throw it in the water. Most metals are going to be attracted to that, and you take it out of the water, it being garbage or treasure or other things. Basically, you're taking metal out of the water.
In the videos they were watching, people were finding all kinds of stuff, like old war relics. Some people found old cannonballs while magnet fishing. One man in England found an old Viking sword that experts say is probably over 1,000 years old.
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.
Found a $20 magnet about six inches wide and an inch in thickness, weighs maybe a pound. Put it on the rope, went to our local pond in Jamaica. Queens, by the way. I wish it was Jamaica Island.
They found a good spot by the pond. And they spent a couple of hours throwing the magnet in and trying different ways of moving it around.
And we found some... toenail clippers and bottle caps, and that was super exciting.
Sometimes they'd find coins, but only international coins. American coins are made from metals that aren't magnetic. Eventually, they got a bigger magnet.
I would say within a month we started getting the big stuff. A full-size Kawasaki motorcycle, scooters.
A drone.
Drones, yeah.
They used a grappling hook to drag the motorcycle out of the water. It took six people to get it out, covered in mud and slime.
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.
It's gross. It's terrible. Yeah. It's terrible.
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.
It got real.
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.
I'm going to say it, but I guess obviously I don't know if we could put it on or not, but we found a... It was in Cheapside Bay. We found a bag of a sex bag, we're going to call it. Handcuffs, pleasure toys. Yeah, thumb cuffs. I don't know if we can put that on or not, but that's a strange one.
Yeah. Well, we'll put it on, but I don't know what a thumb cuff is.
I didn't know either. They're police-issued cuffs you wear along with handcuffs for very dangerous people that just locks your thumbs together. And I tried it, so it locked my thumbs together, and it wasn't nice.
They've found computer hard drives, silverware, acupuncture needles, at least five empty safes, a key fob for an Audi, which still seemed to work, cut-up car parts, and a lot of cell phones. But Barbie says, for her, it's not really about the stuff.
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.
But then one day, they pulled their magnet out of the water and a gun was stuck to it. And then they pulled out another one. Three in one day.
and some magazines with bullets still in it in a park in Jamaica. And I was excited, but also very nervous because I had no idea how it's going to go, you know. Obviously the firearm was in the water because somebody did something really bad with that. So I was petrified. And then we go ahead and contact the authorities.
The first confusing thing is, do you call the police department or do you call 911? He decided on 911. I have to explain to them what magnet fishing is. So they hear a guy on a bridge with a gun. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not standing on a bridge with a gun. I am on a bridge with a gun, but I found it.
The police arrived, questioned Barbie and James, and left with the guns.
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.
Yeah.
More recently, they found another gun that looked new, like it hadn't been in the water for more than maybe a week or two. It looked like it still worked.
Like there was no mud on it, no nothing.
And I was so nervous, I was like, I don't want to, when we handed it in to the police department, I was like, I don't want to follow up, I don't want to know.
Barbie says she always wants to know. And one time, she called the police to ask, but the police didn't share any information. Magnet phishing has sometimes led to new evidence. In 2015, a couple in Georgia were reported missing. The couple, who were in their 60s, had gone to meet with someone who claimed to be selling a Mustang on Craigslist. They were found shot dead off a county road.
Investigators arrested the man, who'd claimed to have a Mustang for sale. He pleaded not guilty. The case was delayed for years. In the spring of 2024, a magnet fisher in Georgia found a rifle in a creek. A few days later, the fisherman returned to the same spot and this time found a bag with driver's licenses and credit cards, which turned out to belong to the couple.
That led to investigators obtaining warrants and finding more evidence. About six months later, the Mustang seller changed his plea to guilty and is currently serving two life sentences. That same year, a magnet fisher in New Orleans found a human skull that had been padlocked to an exercise dumbbell. He also found a handgun and a gun barrel.
The police sent in a dive team and two cadaver dogs to search the area and ask the public for tips in the case. Police told reporters they weren't aware of any unsolved cases where someone had been decapitated. The case is still unsolved. And a magnet fisher near Boston found an unexploded bazooka rocket from World War II. It turned out that the rocket still worked.
Bomb squads sent an emergency alert to the public that they were going to hear an explosion that day, and then they detonated it. Barbie and James have found grenades.
I played enough video games to see what those were. They were World War II grenades.
Did you call the police about them?
Oh, God, yeah.
Yeah, they had the bomb squad come out and everything.
Yeah.
Sounds like by this point, you've gotten to know the NYPD pretty well.
Oh, goodness, yeah.
Yeah.
I tell people, you can't imagine. Anything you can think of is going to be in the water. And I think you would be shocked of the things that are disposed of in the bodies of water around the world. And specifically in New York City is unbelievable.
And then, one day in May of 2024, Barbie and James had just gotten back to Queens after a trip out of town.
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.
Corona Park is one of New York's biggest public parks. It has two large lakes. Barbie and James picked a bridge that crosses one of the lakes. James threw the magnet far into the water. The first couple of times he pulled it back out, it was just covered in sludge.
And 45 minutes in, he gets that click, and he's like, oh, I got something.
James and Barbie refer to that day in Corona Park as the day our lives changed forever. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back.
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Visit squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash criminal to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. James Cain said as soon as he heard the magnet attached to something, he guessed it was a metal box.
It's a hollow sound. And my experience with finding metal boxes, it's always a freaking safe.
And he's like, I think I got a safe. And he pulls it up. The magnet had a black box stuck to it.
Maybe a foot and a half wide, weighed about like 30 pounds. It's a cheap Amazon safe that you can get for like 40 bucks or something like that.
No keypad on the front. It was just a twist lock. This is not the first safe that you've caught before. No.
This is like the sixth one that we got.
Wearing thick rubber gloves, James removed some of the mud that was covering the safe. It was locked. He picked it up, and black water and sludge came pouring out of it.
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.
The hole looked homemade, like someone had drilled into it.
Stuck my hand in. I felt what I thought was Ziploc bags, and it turns out it definitely was not Ziploc bags.
What was it?
It was a giant stack of bills.
$100 bills.
Completely soaked and slimy as the mud you could ever, the blackest of black water. And I peeled it back, and I just lost it.
Here's a clip from the video Barbie recorded.
Oh! Oh, it is! Stacks of bills, dude! Hundreds! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! And then I started banging in on the floor, and the door popped open. So it wasn't so much, it wasn't really a safe-safe, you know what I mean?
They found two stacks of bills that looked like a lot of money.
I'm estimating like $100,000 at least in the safe. The first second we saw all that money, and it's hard to explain, but the first feeling I had was fear. Because, you know, fear of as in not everyone forgets their stacks of $100 bills in the safe before they throw it in. I don't know who's doing that. So we contacted the NYPD and no one believed us.
What did you say to them?
The initial call is, and we're magnet fishing. I said, we just found a safe with a ton of money in it.
The person at the other end of the line seemed confused. But after a while, officers from the NYPD started arriving.
There was a small investigation. They wanted to see how we got in. Questions were asked. Yeah. Took like an hour.
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.
And then more officers came.
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.
The money wasn't in great shape. Barbie and James say it smelled horrible. Oh, horrendously.
Terrifying, terrifying.
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.
How long do you think it'd been in the water?
The bill's date, I think the only date I could read was 2013. 13, yeah.
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.
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.
Do you think they maybe tried to drill the holes in the back of it and it was just taking too much time or they couldn't get stuff out? A hundred percent.
They probably were in a rush. Imagine how much money you need to take out already to just leave two giant stacks in there and say, let's go. We have no time.
The police couldn't find any kind of evidence suggesting where the safe had come from. And James said the bills were so damaged that as they dried, they started falling apart.
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.
There's a law in New York City that says that found property valued at $10 or more has to be reported to police. But in this case, the NYPD told a reporter that the money was so severely disintegrated, it didn't count.
So they said, you know, they called the higher-ups and they said that if we can do anything with it, it's ours.
So right there on the side of... Right in Corona Park on the Meridian Bridge. They said, sorry, yeah, it's good luck.
Yeah.
Basically, yeah.
What did you think?
I was immediately, babe, we're going to get some pizza.
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.
I always told officers, I said, I'm not going to deny someone if they prove that it's their money. I wouldn't be like, no, you can't have it. No, dude, if it's yours, just let me get like $1,000.
Yeah, but there's no way to prove it. There was no ID, no serial numbers on the safe, no way of identifying it.
So the police leave, you're there with this muddy mess of $100,000. How do you even get this home? Yeah.
We always bring Ziploc, so we put it in the Ziploc bag and sealed it and put it in our backpack.
And then they walked out of the park. And when you got home, did you take it out of the bag?
Did you try to dry it out? We did open the bag. We showed our kids.
It all ran away because of the smell?
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.
Something about the mud underwater seemed to have preserved the money. And now that it was out of the lake, it was coming apart quickly. They thought the Ziploc bag would keep the money from drying out. But over the next couple of days, the bill started getting really stiff.
The bags started getting hard and swollen, you know. The bills started turning to rock. So that's the point where I was like, we got to go.
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This wasn't the first time Barbie and James had found cash while magnet fishing.
I would say the year before, we were maggot fishing in Central Park near the Bethesda Fountain. There's like a drop off of the water right there. And we found cell phones galore. I would say one day we found maybe 12 cell phones. And in the back of one of the phones was money behind the case. I guess people store money in their cell phones. And it turned out it was $200.
But the bills were damaged by the water, and James says they weren't usable.
So I went to our local bank, and they said you could exchange it in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, and they do all free money exchanges.
Every bill in circulation is printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, either in their Washington, D.C. or Fort Worth, Texas facility. The office in Washington also redeems what they call mutilated currency, dollar bills that are so damaged they can't be used in a store or in a bank.
The money that's brought to the Bureau has usually been damaged in a fire, by water, chemicals, or animals, or after being buried. A damaged bill can be redeemed if at least part of it is identifiable as U.S. currency. Every year, the Bureau receives more than 22,000 requests from people who are hoping to redeem damaged dollar bills. The total value of those requests is about $35 million.
They also shred a lot of bills. And people can request large amounts of shredded money for things like art projects, or buy a small bag as a souvenir at one of the Bureau's visitor centers. So in the spring of 2024, when Barbie and James were trying to figure out what to do, they knew who to contact. But they couldn't just mail a backpack of $100,000 to D.C.,
James said he tried calling the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, but says there was no response. He emailed them, asking if they could bring in the backpack in person. In his email, he wrote that the experience was, quote, driving us a little crazy and we're a little afraid.
We waited to hear back from them and for them to tell us what to do. The Bureau emailed them back.
It looked like an automated response, but it had an address. They didn't have an appointment, but Barbie and James decided they were just going to show up at the address in D.C. and hope someone could help them.
Now we found out Megabus from 12th Avenue and 34th Street will take you right there in about four and a half hours.
They got on the bus at 6.45 a.m. on a Friday morning. They wanted to make sure they got there before the Bureau closed for the weekend. So what happened when you got to D.C.?
We jumped in a car and... Actually, we couldn't find the engraving and printing building. It was a little weird to find at first. Got to the building eventually and went inside. A very secure location, believe it or not, where they make the money for the country. Pretty secure.
They went through security, and the backpack had to go through the metal detector. James told the guard why they were there and warned them about the terrible smell. The guard said something into his radio, and two people came down the stairs to talk to them.
were greeted by people in lab coats.
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.
They told James and Barbie that they'd seen money that someone's grandparents had buried in the backyard, which had practically turned into dirt.
So they said, this, this is no problem.
And the other wild thing is they literally said, where is the safe? So there was more money that we didn't take that was just these tiny little flakes and sand, and it was water. And they said, you should have collected everything, the sand, the water, the mud, in the safe and brought us everything because they will issue a bill.
I don't know how they do it, but they can find the bill even if there's a tiny bit of money only.
How much money did they say that they thought was in there?
The official estimation is 50,000 to 80,000 only. Only. One of the people in the office said it could be even more because the water does something to the money where it compacts it.
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.
How did you react when you heard that amount?
I think my mind just went blank at that moment. I just could not conceptualize any type of that this is actually real.
They were handed a case number and were told that they needed to wait for an update on the exact amount and for a check. Did you celebrate? Oh, yeah.
Shake Shack, I think.
Yeah. And then they went sightseeing in Washington.
Believe it or not, it was my first time going there, so we visited all the main areas, like the monument and some of the main buildings that are there. I saw the White House for the first time, and I saw spots to magnet fish. I don't know. There's some places right by the monument. I don't know if we try. The Secret Service might tackle us, but I want to try it one day.
This was in the spring of 2024. They got an email with an update about their case, including the estimated wait time.
Two and a half to three years.
What?
Before we're going to see a single penny.
Mm-hmm.
That is the waiting line.
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.
Then after that, that's when we would get the money.
So in two and a half years, if all works out, you'll get a check.
We will, yeah.
With no taxes taken out of it.
No, they explain that. There is no taxes taken out of that. Because it's just an exchange from damage to working.
Have you already started spending the money in your head? Do you not even want to believe it?
I don't believe it. Barbie spent it.
Yeah, pretty much.
It still doesn't feel real.
Yeah.
Still doesn't. We don't have a single penny of it, so.
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.
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.
So, James. Definitely. Keep going. Keep it up. Yeah.
I couldn't do it without Barbie, honestly. Barbie's, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. This episode was mixed by Emma Munger. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal.
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