FBI arrests CIA official with $40M in gold bars in his home | Hacker News Reader

FBI arrests CIA official with $40M in gold bars in his home

nytimes.com

472 pointscwwc394 comments

From last November to March, the court papers say, Mr. Rush asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.”

Obvious plant nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.

——

Also the CIA was unable to confirm his discharge with the navy earlier? As if people aren’t properly vetted every time they switch jobs within the agency. (Especially considering his CIA career was on an upward trajectory)

I have no clue what Mr. Rush actually did but it was neither of these two things which earned him ire.

Maybe he’s a traitor and the gold + foreign money are bribes. If the CIA doesn’t want to explain what he‘s been bribed for the charges make a more sense.

> nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.

But where else would you keep it? A safe-deposit box at a bank?

I think, if I received illegitimate gold bars and figured the FBI might look into that, I would choose to keep them somewhere where a judge would think twice before issuing a search warrant for. Judges don't generally just issue search warrants for residences willy-nilly (because there can often be collateral damage); they're much more blasé about issuing search warrants for safe-deposit boxes.

Or are you imagining he'd go bury the gold in a hole in the woods somewhere?

> Or are you imagining he'd go bury the gold in a hole in the woods somewhere?

Why not?

Why not make multiple trips to carry extremely heavy metal, as a frail office worker, into the woods, which are full of hikers and hunters, on country roads in a suspicious-looking sedan, with a shovel in hand? And then do it all over again whenever you intend to retrieve these gold bars to do whatever it is you want to do with them? Why indeed.

"as a frail office worker"

They could be CIA SAC/SOG, aka Ground Branch.

Why not carry 600 lbs of gold bars out into the forest and bury them, then hope nobody thought it was suspicious to see someone carrying a shovel into the forest on any one of the trips necessary to do it?

A small plot of forested rural land without utility service doesn't cost much at all. Go car camping at your new private getaway for a few days. This isn't rocket science.

Also if you drive out to a remote part of the US who is going to see you? There are some very empty places in this country. Not quite on the level of Canada or Russia but still.

flock or any number of cameras that contribute to flock would see you.

They would see you driving out into the sticks to go camping for a few days. That's entirely normal isn't it? We haven't (yet) made it to the level of flock cameras on gravel logging roads.

There are some on hiking trails :)

Flock brand?

Yup. Gen1 unit with the standard square Flock panel and black pole they always use.

https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1tofx8e/...

As horrifying as that image first appears, it turns out that's actually located adjacent to a road between two subdivisions in Mission Viejo CA. The picture conveniently had all of that cropped out though. It would appear that someone rotated the camera so it no longer faces the road.

Wow, it's really quite the panopticon you have there in the US. "Land of the free"...

Trail cams are set by individuals, hunters, and wildlife observers.

They’re used all over the world. It’s not “USA bad”. The government doesn’t have a network of trail cameras to monitor people on trails.

and what sovereign nation's regulations are you subjected to?

A despicable one. The pit of moral depravity, ethno-religious-supremacism and jingoism. 21st century genocide ground zero. You can probably guess.

(But it doesn't have trail cams.)

Let's not give them any ideas, please.

If there are deer or elk in the region, it is reasonable to believe that there will be "trail cameras" in the region. Many of them are camouflaged to look exactly like tree bark. In the event that you are considering burying treasure in that plot of land, it would behoove you to carefully inspect:

1. the fences to see where people have been cutting them or splicing them to allow for easier access.

2. All the trees within eyesight of your proposed Pirate Loot site for camo'd trail cameras. Install some of your own to ensure no one is a frequent flier in your turf. Ginseng poachers are a problem in wooded lands in the Eastern part of the US. With legal weed (in many states), growing pot on someone else's land has died down a lot (the owner of the land ends up in legal trouble).

In the end, it might be easier to dig up part of your basement to bury it there. And to obtain a large gun safe to appear to be where valuables are stored. If someone wonders why the cement floor has cut/repair marks, just shudder and mumble plumbing work on the main drain line due to tree roots.

> They would see you driving out into the sticks to go camping for a few days. That's entirely normal isn't it?

If someone has a history of taking a lot of solo camping trips it might not raise suspicions.

A common way criminals get caught is by suddenly doing something out of the ordinary. If the 50 year old guy who sits behind a desk and spends weekends at home with his family suddenly takes up a hobby of camping alone in one specific remote location and his trips coincide with each a acquisition of gold bars, the investigators monitoring him are going to be all over that.

I think everyone in this sub thread is imagining that he got all of the gold bars at once and could have made a single move to hide them all. He gathered these over many requests. Taking a solo camping trip every time you acquire something new is red flags all over the place.

All of the comments in this thread assume he was being investigated for his acquisition of comically large amounts of cash and commodities that he presumably left the building with in big bags with a dollar sign on them. They ignore the open secret that the CIA is cartoonishly out of control has been little more than a massive organised crime syndicate that happens to be on the government payroll for 20 years.

In all likelihood, his taking more than forty million dollars wasn't the suspicious behaviour that set him to being investigated. It's right there in the charge sheet. He was being investigated because payroll noticed he was fraudulently claiming leave that he wasn't entitled to. There's no routine oversight on who they're bribing with actual gold. There's still routine oversight on their payroll and HR practices. That led to them actually checking his resume properly, and when that was shown to be bullshit, only then did they actually look at what this guy was doing.

See you do what? Nobody's suggesting you go bury gold in front of a Flock camera.

> A small plot of forested rural land without utility service...

True. OTOH, (1) it's both unusual and public record that you own it, (2) it's seriously unsecured, and (3) the locals both know the turf far better than you and may feel little respect for the undeveloped land of an "outsider".

Bigger picture - Mr. Rush's obsession with collecting very tangible wealth seems to have completely overridden his abilities for rational thought and long-term planning.

EDIT:

> Also if you drive out to a remote part of the US who is going to see you?

The post-Snowden Surveillance State. Between license plate readers, the cell modem in your car, your cell phone, and the difficulty of faking your usual activity patterns "back home" while driving to/from some remote location radio silent (which itself is probably a red flag)...yeah, NO.

> A small plot of forested rural land without utility service doesn't cost much at all. Go car camping at your new private getaway for a few days. This isn't rocket science.

Once someone is under investigation for something like this, they will look at everything.

If the person suddenly bought a small plot of rural land with no utility service that’s going to raise red flags.

As a secondary problem, once the investigators start asking you about it you have to lie to them, which opens you to more charges.

> once the investigators start asking you about it you have to lie to them

You literally don't, that's what the fifth amendment is for

there's a large lack of creativity in these comments. pay for a deer lease, go hunting, don't bring phone, bury gold somewhere random in thousands of acres of land deep enough metal detectors won't find it, kill deer, go home. repeat 3x a year and it's both not suspicious at all but also basically impossible for others to find the gold at that point even if they suspect.

Also, Mr. Goldfinger would like to have a word.

Do you ever debate with intellectual honesty?

Nobody aside from you said “carry”.

There are endless miles of places in the US where you could not be seen. That said as evidence by your perspective, there are plenty of people who have never really been to places where you can not see another human for days or weeks or longer if you don't count seeing simple movement or campfire smoke a mile off.

Because, for someone with any kind of security clearance, suddenly going out to the woods, if you don't normally go out to the woods, would be a major outlier from your highly-scrutinized and documented regular life; and so could easily lead the FBI to finding your buried gold, without having to get any kind of warrant.

The security scrutiny is really so thorough that taking up a new apparent hobby gets flagged? That’s impressive.

The answer is probably "Yes" if you work at CIA

I don't think you know what you are talking about.

How would they know you went out to the woods?

Smartphone will report it.

Just leave it at home.

If FBI see you go without a phone, they will know you're a criminal.

Leave it at home obviously, or carry a burner, or just turn it off and put it in a metal lunch box etc. Solutions galore. This would only be a problem if every CIA employee is under surveillance.

So does your car now, if it’s made after 2018.

For such wealth, basic opsec would be worth it 10000x over, cia folks should know it well. No phone, use old car, pack it with camping gear placed above the gold. Initially go prepare the place, heck even setup a movement-triggered camera there for few weeks. Go where there is lush greenery so you can actually dig 1-2m deep hole in the dirt without dynamite. Learn how to cover place so it looks natural. And learn how to come back to it and find it reliably, day, night, rain, snow doesnt matter. My son could come up with this.

One thing that the Bosnian/Serbian conflict/genocide [0] taught authorities is how to find hidden grave sites. Ground penetrating radar comes in a convenient device that is sized & shaped like a typical American lawnmower.

Soil comes in layers and it would be best to spread ground cloths to capture different soils from different layers and to replace them at the appropriate levels in the ground. While this won't defeat ground penetrating radar, it will make the burial site more closely resemble surrounding soil to make the "signal" harder for the less skilled operators to detect.

Links:

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_War

This really says something about society, can't even imagine leaving your house without a smartphone.

Flock cams

Nonsense the cost of physical surveillance is extremely prohibitive.

Isn't the FBI investigating deaths and disappearances of people with critical access to sensitive material and only found out about it from a newspaper? How much resources do you think are put into monitoring every aspect of the lives of people with access to sensitive info?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/deaths-disappearances-scientist...

They are under the impression that the FBI and CIA are still functioning bodies of government

They are functioning, just not for the same country

Those deaths and disappearances is a big non-story if you actually look in to the details of the cases. The media is making a big deal out of it because the headline grabs eyeballs. So since the media is making a big deal about it the FBI now has to say and do something.

The government is already tracking every possible detail they can get their hands about every single citizen. Why wouldn't they expend at least that much effort on the people with sensitive information? The records are collected, the only question left is when/how often they get used.

It's easy to collect and collate logs from electronic systems (banking, purchases, internet browsing habits, ALPR data) and monitor for things that stand out. To track that someone hid something the size of a suitcase "somewhere" you need to turn that event into electronic data. That's constant individual video monitoring. Or else you just have one electronic data point "car parked here, phone in car".

I think you're overselling the security clearance system.

In reality, it'd flag something like "taking out a massive loan for no discernible reason", or "filed for bankruptcy".

I believe a huge part of the big AI push is that the government dragnets have collected so much data, it's nearly impossible to sift through and they're hoping LLMs can finally make sense of it, along the lines of what you're suggesting.

> Judges don't generally just issue search warrants for residences willy-nilly

What are you on about, searching homes is the #1 criminal investigation technique once you're able to name a suspect.

It's funny, some people commenting here seem to be a bit lost.

It's also obvious from the article that his home was indeed searched.

The idea that the government would not obtain a warrant if they suspect you of stealing millions...

Mr. Rush clearly did not watch Breaking Bad...

But how did the CIA not check on whether or not he had graduated from one of the three different colleges he listed as graduating from the three different times he applied for a job at the CIA?!?!?

Everyone is a criminal mastermind after reading about someone else getting caught: You only have to say you wouldn’t do the thing that they did and you can smugly imagine yourself getting away with it.

He didn’t acquire 300 gold bars and the other currency at once. He was getting these over a long period. He works for an intelligence agency, so he knew that his actions were going to be investigated. If he was doing any of these routines suggested in the comments like buying a rural plot of land to bury them or taking up camping (alone, by himself) these are all going to raise suspicions and become another thing that could give me away.

> he knew that his actions were going to be investigated

I disagree - my take when I first read this was that this was likely a pervasive thing that senior people all did, and they all knew about it. This guy pissed off the wrong person and so they took him down. Same for the lying about credentials - I am sure everyone is like "hey Jim, did you want to apply for that promotion?" with the response of "I can't because I didn't serve long enough", and the final reply of "oh just make up the numbers, everyone does and they don't check".

> Obvious plant nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.

This is an entertaining conspiracy theory because you'd have to believe that the CIA was so smart that they would completely manufacture a story to get someone arrested, yet so dumb that they'd make up a story that raises questions and makes them look like they did some stupid things.

If a powerful organization hypothetically wanted to get someone arrested by planting evidence, do you really believe this is the best idea they could come up with?

The idea isn't that they manufacture it from scratch but rather that they contrive a convenient explanation for the physical reality that already exists. In that scenario the evidence isn't planted but rather misattributed.

CIA recruits a lot of square pegs who didn't quite fit in to other parts of government

But it still vets them. This is very odd.

I think they are a couple of standard deviations more fucked up than the average person still.

Vetting has been put on hold in cases where there are labor shortages. Don’t remember where, but I read an account of a military guy applying to ICE and they did no vetting at all, and had he accepted the jobs with a sizablebonus (he did it to see what their process was) he would have been deployed without training. At the time the source and person seemed credible.

This is what happens when a new administration fires the incumbent experts and hires by loyalty tests.

DHS is not the same as the CIA. The former is heavily politicized and the latter kinda just does its own thing and I'm pretty sure they haven't paused vetting (ICE agents don't require TS/SCI clearance like CIA officers)

All you need to join ICE is being a certified neonazi, so background checks would only jeopardise that policy.

Does it?

He is accused of fabricating his educational credentials.

Either this guy is fantastic at lying or the orgs where he worked are falling flat on due diligence.

One thing I was reminded by a friend is that exposing his fabrication would make that information useless. As long as the person who knows it wasn’t involved in the vetting process, they now have leverage over at least two people.

As someone said, all spies are bastards.

CIA recruitment is actually highly competitive. The best avenue to get to the top of the list when applying is if you have an “in”. CIA managers still do college campus visits, and for new college graduates who have done an interview with that individual and decide to apply that can use that person to get to the top of the list.

Honestly I'm just trying to wrap my head around the fact that you can just ask for $40M in gold bars as a CIA agent and they don't have a better way of figuring out if you pocketed it than looking for it later (and apparently taking a while to think of checking his home?)

Who watches the watchers?

Flock

There's more to the story they aren't letting on to.

I would hope so. It would be very odd if they shared every detail of the suspect’s life, the investigation, the evidence, and all tangential but interesting facts as part of the arrest.

Probably a mini Iran-Contra. Get approval for paying $40m to [SECRET] to carry out acts of pro-US terrorism. Steal the gold. Tip off the enemies of the group so they fail/are killed/arrested. Then report to your superior that the mission was a failure due to enemy action.

Or get approval for $5m, run operation for $2m and pocket the rest. Operation has provable, demonstratable effects, and the falsified payoffs are mixed in with the real ones. If people check up on you, you can point them to assets still on the books to confirm a payoff or funding for equipment. Rinse and repeat. Its just embezzlement, but in an environment where the assets are supposed to not be traceable. Rinse and repeat.

Planting drugs would be wildly easier, both logistically and conveniently. Gold bars have got to be among the least easy ways to manufacture evidence to throw someone behind bars. Hell it could even easily explain the gold bars…

There’s zero reason to assume this is anything but exceptional incompetence, and looking at the current administration that’s wildly easy to believe.

> Obvious plant nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.

Whenever you say "nobody would be that stupid" you have to pause and take a deep breath and realise that however dumb something is, there are for sure people who are stupid enough to do it.

Example 1 from personal experience: I was at my aunt's house and she had to rush a friend's husband to get medical help because he had drilled a hole in his own stomach with a hand drill while trying to put up a bookshelf.

The friend had been reading a book on medieval medicine so (rather than rushing her husband immediately to hospital) decided to try a medieval remedy on him so fed him some soup to see whether (in line with the medieval diagnostic routine) she could smell it after he had eaten it. She could indeed, because it dribbled out of the hole he had drilled in his stomach.

Now. You might reasonably say: "Noone would be so dumb as to drill a hole in their own stomach" or indeed "noone would be so dumb as to see a loved one who had drilled a hole in themselves and decide to feed them soup" but I can tell you from direct personal experience there are people dumb enough to do this.

Example 2 from personal experience[1]: A friend of my dad who was a highly capable chemical engineer and generally very practical guy (eg he made a motorcycle for his kids to play on using salvaged parts including a lawnmower engine and a frame he welded together himself) was a hobby parachutist. He broke his spine because he decided to modify his parachute himself on his wife's sewing machine in spite of having no previous sewing experience.

However dumb something is, there are people dumb enough to do it and even otherwise smart people have blind spots that make them incredibly dumb under the right circumstances.

[1] Just in case you think smart people can't do incredibly dumb things.

I mean, you see smart people all over the world talking to imaginary, supernatural, all powerfull beings asking for favors via prayers, like that would have any effect on their lives.

Guessing the downvotes are because you said 'imaginary' about things folks consider very personal and are mostly unfalsifiable.

I feel like that says more about them. Feeling good about the existence of something, or bad about its absence, does not count as evidence.

> Feeling good about the existence of something, or bad about its absence, does not count as evidence.

Isn't the inverse also true?

Sure, but nonexistence is the default. Has to be the default; most possible things do not exist. In this case we have no evidence for, so we stay with the default.

You're making the "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it" pontification? If so, I disagree with you.

Are they? And anyway, plenty of trees have been observed falling in the forest, and gravity in general. Not so many repeatable observations about divine beings, healing, etc.

Absence of evidence isn't proof of existence. Ultimately it's all about probabilities based what is known. Unlikely there is a blue teacup within Saturn's rings or a flying spaghetti monster.

I'd say there's a lot less evidence of god than a tree falling in the forest that nobody was there to see.

I get your point, but prayer can be akin visualization and practiced focus, which can indeed have an effect on one's life.

Then there's the type of prayer where you straight up beg for things from FSM for five seconds and move on with your day. Probably less helpful, that.

i'm OK with meditation, as it doesn't require believing in superatural, all powerful beings

Here comes the /r/atheism level hot takes. In this moment, I feel euphoric.

> like that would have any effect on their lives

Prayer is more than begging favors from imaginary friends, even if that is the stereotype and there is some truth in it. Like meditation, journaling, and other contemplative practices, it is a mechanism for putting the day-to-day in proper context of some larger narrative. In a theological framework, then, it's about a narrative in which you aren't alone in your joys and sorrows.

I don't think intelligence and spiritual practice are mutually exclusive. I think you can be repulsed by the dogma, indoctrination, and irrationality but also recognize that there might be something redeemable in such popular frameworks for finding meaning and purpose in existence.

“Like meditation, journaling, and other contemplative practices”

The big difference is that meditation and journaling do not require a belief that you are communicating with supernatural beings.

“I don't think intelligence and spiritual practice are mutually exclusive.”

That’s a low bar. At the least we know supernatural/religious beliefs are negatively correlated with scientific training and scientific eminence.

I think most people would argue that's just being a moral person. Jesus was a humanist, after all. I find that these days, the folks looking for community won't really build for others, and the folks looking to build for others are extremely hesitant to join a community. You tell me why and which group are better Christians.

As outlined in John 1:1, Jesus is in fact God himself, and God is something far greater and more magnificent than a humanist. The message of the Bible is a total inversion of humanism, teaching us to believe in God alone rather than ourselves for deliverance from the necessary and ultimately temporary problems of evil and suffering. It's full of stories of human beings attempting to fix things on their own and failing spectacularly (which is ironic given the history of the church).

Forgot the holy spirit, doofus. The God in you and me. The reason Jesus told us to love one another. You will never be righteous with such a shallow and disconnected interpretation of God's will.

I have offered you a theological counterpoint to your claim, and you may take it or leave it, but you may not call me names and continue in any kind of meaningful dialogue here. It is beneath us both.

"For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." - Matthew 5:20

Nah I just wanna ragebait you. You have to respect someone to debate them.

I am an atheist, and have been for over 50 years.

You are a childish embarrassment.

It may be more than begging favors from imaginary friends, but it does include begging favors from imaginary friends.

How many people would agree with the statement "prayer works"? How many of them consider that to mean actual concrete effects taking place outside the person making the prayer? It's a lot.

Maybe prayer is, for some people, just a way to organize your thoughts or whatever. But for a huge number of people, it's a way to literally influence outside events.

Prayer does work, through the mechanism of putting your thoughts in perspective and context and sharing them outside yourself. Whether or not people understand the reason “why” it works doesn’t matter.

I think the difference is if its personal and spiritual. Compared to "thoughts and prayer" for the dead children in the latest school shooting, and continue to do nothing else.

Newton believed in God, ask an LLM what famous scientists believed in God, take a step back and ask if you think you are smarter than those people.

Just as OP’s derision isn’t a reason for disbelief, “smart people” expressing belief isn’t a reason to believe.

It should at least be a reason to not be snarky about the subject.

Yes, it worth aiming for common sense as a bare minimum, chaos and entropy only grows when things we don't understand are casually derided/attacked.

It made more sense to believe this stuff back in the 1600s.

It also made sense to say you believed in God, because if you did anything else people would do things like burning you alive. Even now, although it’s not usually as violent religion is frequently very coercive.

Newton spent more of his life working on alchemy than math or physics. Shall we all start searching for the Philosopher's Stone? Why not?

He was also a heretic, but what he was most certainly not, was an atheist. All I'm saying is that if some very smart people strongly believe that we're not just star dust that should at least make you question your own belief that there is no higher power.

Maybe put it to the test, even though you feel dumb for doing it, pray for something small that you would not otherwise expect to happen in the immediate future. see what happens

People who are otherwise smart often believe dumb things. History is littered with them. Which is why appeal to authority should always be regarded with skepticism.

This prayer example illustrates a series of fallacies and human biases. Confirmation bias, survivorship bias, apophenia, post-hoc reasoning... many ways we know our brains trick us.

Try this pre-registered, with large numbers and control groups.

Or just read the literature from people who did. Prayer does nothing.

In medicine, placebo was proven to have a positive effect. Maybe we will learn about similar effects about other things.

Now, if only we would convince everybody that those supernatural beings don't work through representatives that everybody must listen, that would already be an improvement!

Why wouldn't supernatural beings work through representatives? For one thing, they are presumably only going to work through people that are committed to their (the beings') agenda. And why would supernatural beings necessarily be populist? Until the Christian revolution, the dominant thought was that the supernatural beings were elitist; all of the heroes in Greek mythology were nobility of some form.

A myriad Christian monarchies have believed in Divine Right. The Christian revolution had no effect on this idea.

> Whenever you say "nobody would be that stupid" you have to pause and take a deep breath and realise that however dumb something is, there are for sure people who are stupid enough to do it.

Long ago, I graduated from a police academy. One of the things taught was that crooks, while clever at finding ways to make money, are rather unclever ("stupid" if you will) at performing that task. Which is why so many are caught.

The smart engineer who over-estimated his ability with sewing is a tragic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

I'm reminded of the Dunning Kruger paper [0]:

> In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. "But I wore the juice," he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras.

Links:

0 - that paper itself: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/sasi/wp-content/uploads/sites/27...

I think we often underestimate the intelligence of the criminal population for two main reasons.

1. The dumbest ones are most likely to be caught and have their stories told.

2. Law Enforcement often gets frustrated at chasing the smarter ones and use illegal methods catching them and the real story doesn’t come out in court.

> the real story doesn’t come out in court.

I'm not saying this hasn't happened, but any competent criminal defense attorney (like a SMART criminal would have) would go to town on illegally obtained evidence. I'm not saying cops don't do warrantless searches/taps/etc., to gather unofficial clues, but if they can't get real evidence that stands up under scrutiny, the criminal walks.

I'm not sure if prosecution would move forward on such shaky ground in hard to prove cases.

Only if such evidence was made public

It is CIA. For better or worse, different rules apply.

It would not surprise me to learn you sign away certain rights to sign up - arguably the way it should be for such an organization.

Parallel construction is when they use illegally obtained evidence to construct a separate set of ostensibly legitimate evidence. Like, an illegal wiretap might lead to someone being in the right place at the right time to witness a crime.

> any competent criminal defense attorney

I don't think 'going to town on illegally obtained evidence' works as often as you believe it does [0, 1].

And think back - how many people went to jail for national and/or international scale warrantless wiretapping? How did we, as a nation, respond to Snowden's revelations?

> I'm not sure if prosecution would move forward on such shaky ground in hard to prove cases.

There are people on death row in the US even after being proven innocent and ordered to go free. Dignity in Ink [2] present similar cases every day - they're never going to run out of material.

0 - A major DOJ/GAO-era federal study found that illegal search/seizure issues accounted for about 0.4% of declined federal prosecutions and roughly 0.7% of dismissed cases after prosecution began. - https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/84544NCJRS.pdf

1 - Another study across seven jurisdictions found motions to suppress succeeded in under 1% of warrant cases, and only 1.5% of defendants went free because of successful suppression motions. - https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/search-warrants-mot...

2 - https://www.instagram.com/dignityinink

Are you telling me that Luigi Manglone was not foiled by a eagle eyed McDonalds employee?!?

Near as I can tell Luigi nullified all his carefully planned evasion and escape routing by deciding at the last minute he really needed a coffee from the Starbucks across the street from where he was about to shoot his victim and didn't keep his hoody up. If he'd worn a long-billed baseball cap, dark glasses, kept his hoody up and skipped Starbucks he'd probably never have been caught.

His evasion and escape plan was actually pretty good and he put a lot of effort into being hard to trace by arriving and departing NYC via bus and staying in a hostel, which makes it surprising he screwed up the easiest and most obvious things.

On the other hand, smart people with criminal intent are more likely to find legal ways to profit. Why steal a hundred bucks from somebody when you can figure out how to steal a few bucks from millions and your only punishment is paying a fraction of your profit in fines.

The really smart ones leave people wondering if a crime really happened at all. It doesn't even need to be Oceans 11/12/n++, it can be simply "are you even sure the money is missing?"

> Law Enforcement often gets frustrated at chasing the smarter ones

and gives up, moving on to easier prey - and ideally getting them to plead to the other crimes I can't solve as part of a nice plea deal. Great for the stats.

The first story could literally be a sketch on a comedy show, thanks for the laugh

Reminds me of safety trainings where they show machine-shop accidents or people nailing themselves with an air-gun. It happens more than we think and is gruesome. Just a couple months ago saw a Dewalt framing nailer recall posted at home depot for accidental discharges without the trigger being held. Not the same as drilling into your stomach - and I see a black comedy element - but can't help but wince and cringe at the thought of it all and it's not genuinely funny to me.

The drilling into oneself is not funny. The feeding an obviously seriously injured person soup to deduce the severity of their illness is funny as hell to me

that was a fantastic story, thanks

> Obvious plant

$40 million in gold bars is about a thousand pounds of gold. That would be hard to plant.

Not that it matters, but I think it's closer to 600 lbs.

$40M /( $4.5k / oz) and then (1 lbs / 16 oz)

For precious metals, the units of measure are a bit different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight

You see, this is what I get for relying on AI. Kagi did catch that it was in Troy (hey that's me!) ounces, but I didn't check its numbers.

>As if people aren’t properly vetted every time they switch jobs within the agency.

have you seen the criminals elected to run your country and the ones they've put in important policy decisions?

There's this one guy who's apparently also insider and he and his family earns a lot of money because of market manipulation with his decisions. Maybe FBI should get into him as well?

Nah, he’ll just get some deal where the FBI can’t investigate him and his family for anything ever. Yay for democracy and rule of law.

Yay...

Yay indeed

I read a book by a CIA officer. A big part the job is carrying around tons of cash for shady people. It’s understood that if you take the cash for yourself, you go to prison.

The ironic thing is the money usually goes missing. It gets given to some VIPs brother, who is supposed to give it to VIP, but doesn’t.

The important thing is it not go missing while you are watching it. It can go missing later - just not on your watch.

interested in knowing what book, if it was good.

It was an anecdote from “First In.” It is about the CIA officers who arrived first in Afghanistan: with gigantic bags of cash.

The guy this post is about is likely in the same situation, trafficking valuables and money as part of his job, officially or not. Who gave him orders?

“$40 million…a small fortune” — inflation has gotten out of hand!

nearly retired

A couple more gigs and I can FIRE

That's only like 8 houses in mountain view.

Or one house in Beverly Hills.

Not even a decent jet.

My daughter is spending more than this on her birthdays.

You can definitely get a decent jet in that budget, there's a popular tech youtuber who recently bought one for considerably less. I'm pretty sure you could get like 6 houses in mountain view and still have money left over for a jet.

We clearly have differing opinions on what constitutes a decent jet. Are you buying your jets used??

Check out the Cirrus Vision. About $3 million. Very decent jet. Seven people, easy to fly, nifty safety features.

The Vision is tiny. It doesn’t even have a bedroom. Not even a single bathroom.

That is an "its technically a jet" jet, not a jet that anyone would picture in their mind if you told them "I own a private jet".

I think if you take a selfie with your phone at just the right angle and don't show your forked tail, you might pull it off. It's a tried and true internet technique.

You can easily do that at airshows as well.

It's not just the acquisition costs, it's the employee payroll--two pilots, one flight attendant, engine overhauls every six months, other maintenance. See the Amalfi Jets video on costs.

That could buy like, 30 houses here in Atlanta! Wow I have it good.

Probably about ~35-40 apartments in Barcelona. Going out to Spanish rural areas, you could probably buy ~4-6 abandoned villages with that, you'll get multiple houses, municipal buildings and whatever administrative stuff they had too.

But then you'd have to keep stealing more gold bars for the upkeep, and who has time for that?

You can get the president of the United States to work for you for way less money than that.

How porous is the CIA's interview process that they couldn't validate the guy's military discharge status?

When it comes to stories involving intelligence agencies I generally assume that I’m not getting the whole or accurate story.

Yeah, the CIA is all about CYA.

Much like most office jobs

Like most people, unfortunately. But most people aren't entrusted with so much power and duty, and done so ostensibly for service to the people of this country.

Not really, but all about manufacturing a story that fits whatever version the country needs pushed. It’s covering the country’s ass.

How porous is the approving manager/chain that someone can request 300kg of gold bars and no one knows why and they just approve it any way.

Imagine if government approvals were that easy for things the country actually needed, like safe nuclear energy and bullet trains.

I imagine a big difference is at most jobs the worst that will happen is you get fired, at the CIA you go to jail for the rest of your life.

I think that if you embezzled $40M at just about any job, you'd be looking at some serious jail time

I can think of exactly one exception, in the US.

The CIA is a cash only business.

Oh, please.

They're on record as happy to barter guns and drugs also.

That is why this story feels fishy.

The type of people Intelligence agencies need and use to accomplish their goals are also the type of people who tend to do these things.

Exactly, honest people would fail at such missions. A few million lost here and there is the cost of doing business

imminent danger pay

What a disingenuous way of thinking. Not falling for this is the basis of much religious text by the way. Splitting baby in the middle, etc.

But on the other hand, being a useful fool that blindly does anything for profit, Do seem in line with the people working in tech for the last decade.

Yes, the CIA is a corrupt today as "tech". And no that is not ok nor required, or it ever was like that.

lol "the extralegal spy agency has become as corrupt as the search engines!"

spies (and specially counter spies*) have a place in a State.

My point was about the populous eating up the inevitability of those entities being above the law by default.

* but is is sad we destroyed the most important part we can't even catch lowly thieves like this

They have funded each other since the beginning of the search engines, so I'm not sure the distinction is very important.

All spies are bastards. That's sort of their job. In the CIA it might speak more ill of the guy who was arrested that he was arrested than that he (allegedly) inflated his credentials and might have bilked the military for leave pay.

Yeah, that's why in a functioning State you have means to control the damage. But now we seem to have accepted it is a free for all and just throw ours helpless hands in the air and hope we are next to enjoy the criminal bonanza at some point.

Don't worry, this happens in functioning states, too. Well, the bastard spies part, at least.

For some specific jobs, not all of them, you need sociopaths. Still, the agency should always provide them with adult supervision.

When I worked at Los Alamos, the head of counterintelligence was a former CIA ops guy. He seemed warm and intelligent; just an all around good guy. In presentations, he explained that his job at the CIA was to exploit that appearance to ruin people's lives. He said his approach was to gain the trust of a mark, and then provide him with what ever was required to get him to betray things he loved. The presentations were effective, enlightening and spooky.

So, I agree: All spies are bastards.

the CIA is literally tasked with breaking (other countries') laws. tradecraft is a very similar skillset to being an effective criminal.

think about it: shell companies, lockpicks, bribes, theft, blackmail, hacking, forgery. two kinds of people do those things: spooks, and the mob. the difference is why you're doing it and to whom.

also, if anything the CIA is far tamer today than it was in the '60s.

MKUltra would have been a bizarre horror to experience

I'd move that up a bit! Iran-Contra was around '85, and that involved trading cocaine, which ended up on the streets of the USA, for arms.

I think using the 60s as a comparison unfairly implies the CIA rehabilitated sooner than should be implied.

I suspect the 1960s was chosen because it was before the Church Committee. Back then, the CIA had fewer restrictions about working within the USA.

Got it, thanks. The CIA's cocaine was still ending up on the streets of America during Iran-Contra, though, so I (in my very uninformed opinion!) don't feel like the CIA cared that much.

That’s debatable.

It’s likely the cocaine originating from Colombia was going to end up in the US with or without the CIA’s help.

Also, it’s worth reading about the journalist who broke the story about Contra-sourced cocaine making it to LA. That journalist is very often misquoted and when he was still alive he tried to fix the missing several times.

A lot of the really sketchy stuff the CIA used to do has been folded under special ops parts of the military. After the church committee, the CIA has to report to the senate intelligence committee. The military only really answers to the Commander in Chief(POTUS), and gets away with a lot more.

Check out the book "The Fort Bragg Cartel". Tl;Dr, the US military and special ops were holding up the poppy industry in Afghanistan, something like 80% of the world's supply of Heroin came out of US occupied Afghanistan. The DEA would look the other way on shipments intercepted over a certain size.

The special ops guys brought the drug trafficking home, now i95 through the southern states is a major drug trafficking route.

eh. the shady people are supposed to be the assets; the handlers are supposed to be squeaky clean (on paper, at least.)

but yeah, I imagine that a job which requires keeping secrets and breaking laws tends to attract people who keep secrets and break laws.

They are not supposed to break laws in the US.

The mindset of law breaking probably carries across jurisdictions.

It’s all about professionalism.

They're not supposed to operate in the US at all. I'm practice I imagine that's mostly aspirational

Let’s say it should be avoided.

Same with NSA - they are not allowed to conduct surveillance of US citizens on US soil. Shit needs to be brought under control.

In their minds, when (not if) they break laws, they should avoid getting caught... because that's all that matters.

True, but hiring someone then, later, accusing them of lying in the admission forms that should have been verified before hiring them is bizarre.

I’m sure the CIA could come up with a better excuse.

> is bizarre

Only under the incentive structures you’re used to considering.

It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.

It’s reasonable to assume they knew it from the start he was getting money illicitly from the Navy and they might have enabled it. This was part of the leverage they had on him, to be used if he ever became a liability.

> It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.

Iran–Contra? Their cyber espoinage tools getting swiped? The self-admission from the US administration that the CIA failed to properly recognize and prepare for the tactics used in 9/11, in spite of ample forward warning?

Like most intelligence agencies, their unaccountable power often gets mistaken for actual intelligence. That power makes them dangerous, but it doesn't make them smart.

They also totally missed India's second round of nuclear weapon development and were blindsided by the tests:

U.S. Intelligence and India's Nuclear Tests: Lessons Learned

  August 11, 1998 98-672

  The U.S. Intelligence Community did not have advance knowledge that India intended to conduct nuclear tests beginning on May 11, 1998.

  Although intelligence agencies cannot have foreknowledge of every significant development in world affairs, many observers (and senior intelligence officials) believe that, in view of the election of an Indian government committed to "inducting" nuclear weapons, much greater attention should have been given to indications of impending nuclear tests

~ https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-672.html

> Their cyber espoinage tools getting swiped?

Pretty sure that was some of their own more-corrupted people leaking those tools - at least, one of the occasions.

Confirmed. CIA hires people with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies and tries to hire them so they're mild rather than criminal in nature.

Ha, this was explored in some credible article here on HN some months ago, wasn't it? It made complete sense.

You can't be a nice balanced guy doing work which often dips in shady stuff, sometimes being responsible for killing innocents, or in extreme cases one's failed actions can send some region into death spiral of some small or larger conflict. No, you need (relatively) smart folks for whom emotions are just a tool to use on others to achieve your goals.

And this obviously has various side effects, some quite negative.

Moral flexibility if the term we use. Substance abuse is also, unfortunately, is a hallmark.

I reject the the idea that these types of people are needed. It's probably that most of the people in the CIA happen to be like that because they're power-hungry and they're just selecting their kin and justifying their choices as "right kind" because they narcissistically believe themselves to be the right type... They're probably the wrong type. Especially if they all share narcissistic or psychopathic traits; it's too many, it cannot work.

The company hires people who match the company’s desired culture.

If the people in the CIA who do hiring want the talent who are excellent at lying and compartmentalizing their ethics, then that’s what the organization becomes over a generation.

the CIA told him to make that part of his identity and then burned him with it

isn’t it obvious?

not being charged for the forty million dollars in gold and foreign currency missing, no explanation on why they are even looking for something that was rightly paid out as expenses, no explanation on what kind of expenses those could be to begin with to incur this much, no explanation on why the government wasn't using US dollars to pay a government employee expenses. Its a complete red herring because some client state is paying off a debt, CIA just needs this guy burned

> no explanation on what kind of expenses those could be

I think it's pretty obvious the gold was to pay a bribe. The only thing I'm surprised about is the value. That's A LOT of money for a single pay-off or bribe. It seems more than what would conceivably be paid to an individual at once because spy agencies tend to prefer to pay-as-you-go with individuals. Each round of documents, actions or whatever gets a payment.

So I suspect this was intended to either buy a one-time, career-ending action from someone very senior or, more likely, the ongoing cooperation of a company, gang or small nation-state. It's hard to guess but looking over major events in that time frame, Venezuela might be a good bet. The odd part is that the gold was in his house. Aside from the dumb trade craft of keeping it in the very first place anyone would look, why is the gold even in CONUS?

And why gold? Bulk gold is one of the worse ways to transfer that much money. It's big, heavy, and easy to trace until melted down (which is hardly trivial for most people). But the thing I'm stuck on is the places you can walk into and get cash for even one kilo of gold, much less over 300 of them, is extremely limited - and half of them will be under some form of "Know Your Customer" reporting, especially in North America, and the other half might prefer to "Kill Your Customer" and keep the gold. Diamonds, bearer bonds, offshore numbered account, even good old Benjamins seem far better. I think the amount and medium both narrow down the sort of person or entity the intended recipient must be.

One imagines the sort of folks who'd actually prefer to receive payment in that much gold bar all reside overseas where they might control a national bank or have their own precious metals smelting operation. That's why I'm struggling to picture the fake scenario this senior executive used to plausibly convince anyone at the CIA he personally needed to take possession of more gold than several people can comfortably carry and do so in the vicinity of rural Langley, VA. I mean, he can't carry it on any commercial flight and It's not like he's going to schlepp it himself in his family sedan to put it on a secret CIA cargo flight. The CIA has people for that. Also, someone that senior isn't generally doing any direct case officer work. They manage case officers who manage field assets.

So many interesting questions we'll never get answers to.

Even more tantalizing is that it was probably a domestic bribe he was tasked with. Traveling internationally with hundreds of kg of gold is not very reasonable and I'd assume they have access to resources in other countries as needed.

And we'll get all the answer, it'll just take 50 years, and then everything will probably make a lot more sense. Maybe even sooner if an administration finally gets the courage and brains to get rid of the CIA. So incompetently destructive to US interests, and an overall abhorrent organization.

> it was probably a domestic bribe

I did consider that for a minute but if it really was the CIA acting in any domestic capacity, I think they would have taken him down on some other pretext. Not that the CIA doesn't quietly do domestic spying, they just wouldn't let anything get to the media that might lead in that direction.

I don't think it'd be difficult for the CIA to charter a cargo plane from somewhere in the USA without any questions being asked. They used to be very involved in the air freight trade. Guns don't move themselves!

They still own several air freight companies!

Yes, I agree. CIA cargo flights out of U.S. military bases and private airfields probably happen all the time. My point was that if the guy's scheme to get the gold issued involved a cover story of flying the gold on such a cargo flight to some general or warlord somewhere, I can't imagine the normal process is "Ok, we'll deliver a pallet of >600 pounds of gold bars to your office desk."

The CIA must have people who securely transport illicit things like pallets of gold, RPGs, explosives, etc from a wherever they are warehoused to airfields for secret cargo flights. So, I was puzzled by how the culprit circumvented what I assume would be the normal delivery channel and took direct possession himself.

The reality may be more depressingly banal than clever clandestine deception. The guy was probably just the senior person in charge of approving dispersal of the CIA's slush fund 'petty cash' for illicit bribes and payoffs. And, incomprehensibly, there was no process for reviewing the approver's approvals, so he just wrote up his own paperwork and approved delivering it to himself in whatever way he found convenient. Hell, maybe he just had them deliver it to his house.

I guess that's the kind of stupid stuff that can happen when you combine "need to know" compartmentalized secrecy with massive bureaucracy. People just do what the paperwork says and don't ask questions or care.

Traveling internationally with hundreds of pounds of gold wouldn't be that hard for a CIA senior official on "official" business. A diplomatic passport and access to the State Department or War Department's fleet of aircraft would get you pretty far.

It’s funny to see how "normal" people talk about 40 million in gold and like a few million in foreign currency.

That’s really nothing in the theatres the CIA operates in. They simply gave it to him and followed up only after the agency’s bureaucrats couldn’t find it during auditing half a year to a year later.

To bribe a nation-state, you’re in the billions. https://www.jfeed.com/middleeast/qatar-iran-bribe-deal

To gain at least some loyalty from a warlord-based Middle East militia, the US was willing to spend 500 million in cash, plus another 200 million in weapons.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-blocks-iraqs-dollar-shipmen...

If you wanted to bribe a high-level drug trafficker, 40 million would get you laughed out of the room or put in a barrel and shipped around for other associates to laugh at.

According to the 2012 annual report of Sos Impresa, the total annual turnover of money by criminal organisations operating in Italy would be valued at €138 billion, with a net profit of €105 billion.

What’s 40 million to someone moving billions in product?

https://unicri.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/UNICRI_Organi...

You’re also wrong about the gold. Gold is easily moved in the hawala system. You give the gold bars to a hawaladar in the US, they give you a piece of paper with a few numbers and you can take it out of the network minus the agreed fees at a different physical location within the network within a few hours in local currency or gold.

https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/AOTP/Hawal...

There is a good example in that report.

Witnesses testified that the trafficker kept track of his drug transactions using relatives who were hawaladars and who recorded the drug transactions and profits in ledgers.

The ledgers were seized and presented as evidence at trial. One ledger, covering the year 2006-2007, contained a series of money transfers linked to opiate and precursor chemical transactions. Another contained financial records of heroin transactions, arranged by a trafficker, covering the period March 2006 to March 2007. Analysis of the ledger determined that the defendant produced and sold over 123,000 kg of heroin, worth more than USD261,000,000: this represented over 19 per cent of the total amount of heroin produced worldwide in 2006, based on UNODC figures.

My bet is he is probably responsible for Middle East-related activities and saw an opportunity in this Iran mess to gain some pocket money while simply squeezing his contacts in the Middle East for whatever favour the CIA needed and keeping the money for himself. Not the first time this happened.

This usually either surfaces because the contact tells someone on a tapped phone that he got his balls squeezed by the CIA and not even got any money for it or when someone in CIA finance says, “Hey Lisa, I need to make this report where the billion for the Iran stuff went and how much we spend and for what and we’re missing six paperclips and 40 million in gold and a few mil in foreign currency. Did someone take it home with them again to make Breaking Bad Ka$h bed photos for their Instagram?”

> But the thing I'm stuck on is the places you can walk into and get cash for even one kilo of gold

My sister had been hoarding our mother's & grandmothers' jewelry for decades. I finally got her to sell off the gold before another of her bad choices in boyfriends stole the rest (last guy took her for about $40k). We took a check for it, but the guy had most of the $70k in cash at hand. No KYC at all. Here in the US.

Selling gold is still the Wild West.

Sure, selling the sorts of gold grandmothers and crazy uncles horde like rolls of Krugerrand coins, etc and even raw flake amateur prospectors mine out in Nevada is common and probably pretty easy to convert into cash amounts up to a few hundred thousand dollars. But these seem to have been minted gold bars, very likely stamped and serialized.

Admittedly, I don't know that industry, but wouldn't trying to cash even a dozen 1kg minted gold bars with Federal Reserve serial numbers trigger some... questions? Or alternatively, require finding a vendor who explicitly asks no questions (basically a fence for probable stolen or illicit goods). And, even moving the gold a dozen bricks at a time is 25 separate transactions of over $1.7 million each. Are there a lot of places that just keep a couple million in $100 bills on hand for transactions? The largest branch of a national bank in our suburban area of 200K people gets pissy when we go to get $10,000 cash without calling ahead because "we might run out and need to schedule extra cash delivery."

If it's really possible to walk into a "We Buy Gold" place with 12 1kg gold bars and walk out with $1.7M in cash, no questions asked I'm just surprised. As someone who leans moderate libertarian, I don't have a problem with it. I do kind of resent having to fill out a government form (and the implied presumption I'm a criminal) anytime I get $10K of cash at the bank.

> If it's really possible to walk into a "We Buy Gold" place with 12 1kg gold bars and walk out with $1.7M in cash, no questions asked I'm just surprised

the spreads are horrible in most places, outright swindles

> the spreads are horrible in most places, outright swindles

Most of those retail locations will pay 60% of spot. My sister did a lot of research looking for better deals within about 200 miles of us. We negotiated 90% of spot with the guy we sold to. The smelter (who only dealt with the wholesale trade like the guy we sold to) would pay 95% of spot.

The CIA as an illegal and fascist organization tends to hire the illegals and fascists. Drug killers, torturers, and psychopaths.

There's even a Tom Cruise movie about it called American Made.

I prefer the one with Harrison Ford, where he buys an overpriced helicopter with a check.

I trust the independent books more. Such movies are mostly paid propaganda

When I had to have a TS/SCI with a SAP for a specific mission in the military, they weren't going to wait for the investigation, poly, etc. so a general just waved his hand and signed a hand written note (to be formally typed up later... which never happened) and, ta-da, I had clearance.

It's just like security in any system... sometimes it needs adjusted for expediency. The key is to be eventually consistent at the very least.

If he's truly a "senior" CIA official, he probably actually was a reservist for much of his career, and continued to claim leave for reserve duties after he was discharged. And payroll eventually did pick up on this, which sparked an HR investigation of his credentials, which turned out to be inflated, and only then did they start to look at what this guy was doing with all the money he was taking home. Payroll is probably the only entity in this story that was actually doing their damn job.

I'm curious why he was discharged now.

Sounds like he was most likely involved in some serious shit that was off the books and somehow it came to light. His boss is probably aware of what it was but no one will admit shit. It went awry and he is left holding the bag.

Gold and money for an operation that could have been to anything from funding armed rebellion to god only knows.

$40m+ in an expense account based in gold bars is absolutely crazy. CIA agents must have access to untold resources if this is seen as a somewhat regular 4 month spend. Seems it is, given that they seemingly weren't concerned about the $40+ million being taken out, but where it was being held.

The "resources" are off the books, it must be just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm imagining its like the Continental Hotel in John Wick. Everything you need to fund and arm an insurgency, checking it out from facilities like I might with an AV adapter.

$40M is a trivial amount of money to everyone involved in this matter. It’s only a few hundred 1kg bars.

And the bars are the size of a cellphone.

You're thinking in pre-covid peasant dollars. $40m isn't that much anymore, and frankly never was to these people.

Nobody’s talking about how much money it is to them,

to some degree, that’s our employees and often our money - it’s our concept of how much money is okay to fuck around with that matters.

I thought this was baseless speculation, but from TFA:

> [he] asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.

Yeah, this reads like right out of "Burn notice".

Or, someone decided they wanted to redirect the flow of black money through someone else, but couldn't do it internally for some reason; so they called in their FBI friends to make a ruckus. While the guy is busy defending himself, they have an excuse to pick someone else to receive the new stream of gold.

The article says "A senior C.I.A. official was arrested last week after investigators found hundreds of gold bars worth over $40 million stashed in his Virginia residence, a small fortune that he apparently brought home from work, according to court papers."

The same article also says:

"When the C.I.A. conducted a review of where the gold and currency were stashed, the agency was “unable to locate the gold bars or significant amounts of the foreign currency,” according to court papers."

The NY Times fact checkers don't seem to have seen this article.

That's ~280kg of gold if anyone wonders

It would make such a fantastic set of barbell plates.

Gold is pretty soft. You would have to cut it to 10 carat, so there’s be even more to go around!

Nah literally crushing plates would feel so good. Worth the effort to melt it again every few sessions

Having to handle the plates with care and the damage they’d take regardless would add to the charm.

This whole thread renews my faith in humanity

I’ll spot you!

You could encase them in plastic to prevent damage and mask them for some run off the mill equipment. Nobody would suspect anything without prior knowledge.

But they feel nice to touch.

> Nobody would suspect anything without prior knowledge.

The weights being nearly twice as heavy for their expected size would be a bit of a giveaway to anyone who has ever been in a gym.

That's easily sorted by higher plastic to gold ratio.

1kg gold bars are tiny.

Or a really cool scuba diving weight belt.

Or a huge gold statue of Trump and Epstein partying and raping children.

It is our fiduciary responsibility to put this resource to it's highest and best use.

Black humor.

Or isn't anyone allowed anymore to mention "Black" in the context of Epstein?

I prefer “dark humour”. After all, it allows some colours to come through.

Donald Trump Wants His Blue Blazer "Black" | Friends

^ This person jokes about raping children.

Donald Trump has aided and abbeted the rape of children, is actively preventing child rapists from being prosecuted, and has set up a multi-billion dollar legal defense fund to protect his criminal associates.

And what offends you is that someone made a joke to point that out? Pathetic. You should be offended by the criminals, not the clowns.

More like 20+ weight belts, you go underwater with a 280kg weight belt you're not coming back!

Technically that depends on how much water you and the gold displace.

I'm a scuba instructor so for giggles I did the maths!

Based on these densities:

    Gold Density: 19.32 g/cm3
    Lead Density: 11.34 g/cm3

We now need to understand how much water is displaced by a kg.

    Gold volume: (1,000 / 19.32) ≈ 51.75 cm3
    Lead volume: (1,000 / 11.34) ≈ 88.18 cm3

1kg of gold displaces 51.75 cm3 of water. 1kg of lead displaces 88.18 cm3 of water.

    Fresh water: 1000 g/litre
    Salt water:  1025 g/litre

In fresh water:

    1kg gold = (1000g negative buoyancy - 52g water displacement) = 9948g negative buoyancy
    1kg lead = (1000g negative buoyancy - 88g water displacement) = 9912g negative buoyancy

In salt water:

    1kg gold = (1000g negative buoyancy - 53g water displacement) = 9947g negative buoyancy
    1kg lead = (1000g negative buoyancy - 90g water displacement) = 9910g negative buoyancy

As a scuba-diving weight, gold is less than 1% more efficient (by weight) than lead.

It's counter-intuitive: gold is nearly twice as dense as lead, but the importance in scuba diving is the weight of the, er, "weight", vs the weight of the water it displaces (Archimedes principle).

Gold weights per kilo are a tiny amount more efficient than lead per kilo, but much smaller and much sparklier. Anyone who wants to donate me a gold weight-belt, please be assured I would display it to its full magnificance. Around 8kg would be fine :-)

now that's how to flex right!

(also so would the plates or the bar holding them!)

~ 617 lbs.

~ 44 stones

~5.3 Emma Stones

~1 billion freedom units

~681 American footballs. At 27 balls per team per NFL game, an average of 17.8 games per team per season, and an annual salary cap of $301 million, those many balls are equivalent to a salary of $481 million. So by weight, footballs are "worth" 12 times the price of gold.

Joe Burrow weighs 215 lbs and makes $55 million per year. That makes him worth his weight in gold x4.

I'm still researching the average weight of a football field. Depends if it has rained recently.

What's their beef with the metric system? :)

The article says "approximately 303 gold bars, each of which weighed approximately one kilogram"

I guess the gold bars aren't uniformly sized, which would agree with your ~280kg number.

Or the chain of custody lost some 20 bars?

From the article: > approximately 303 gold bars, each of which weighed approximately one kilogram

So the bars just be a bit under one kg on average

probably less by the time it gets into the evidence locker

In a weird reversal to Conway's law, the organizational structure of the US government has started to resemble the software it uses [0].

[0]: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...

The gold bars and foreign cash thing seems normal. They have to pay off warlords, drug dealers, foreign dignitaries, informants, assets. You can't be filling out requisition forms, going through multiple banks in foreign nations, carrying gold bars and cash in and out of banks, etc to pay off a secret government informant. Somebody will see the money trail, tip off the bad guys, and your op is over (and the informant is dead)

But of course it's also bad because not only can the money easily be stolen, there's basically no transparency into how intelligence agencies use taxpayer money. I have no idea how much corruption is in intelligence and military, but it's probably a lot, considering just how easy it is to steal or misappropriate these funds

https://archive.is/9Qb1K

If this were a Jason Bourne movie, it was the CIA that put the gold bars there.

I was just looking for something to watch tonight. Thanks for the recommendation!

Ehh, more like Rush would've been found dead like Abbott after declaring "I'm a patriot" to internal CIA. What's tantalizing about Bourne is something about who we are and capable of, regardless of conditioning... both good and bad.

There's a surprising number of CIA and secret agent experts in this comments section.

I've seen From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball I'll have you know.

Burn After Reading

That's MI-6

I saw a John Kiriakou book on a shelf once.

You don't take possession of 600 pounds of gold without a plan. Putting it in a hole isn't putting it to work. Sell it to a country where jewelry is manufactured, that at least gets it into the banking system. Lebanon loves gold. So does India. If this guy is under investigation, everything linked to him will be discovered. He can't really spend it. Aldrich Ames bought a Jaguar and was caught.

Guy sounds like a dragon. What's the deal with the watches though?

I imagine watches are more liquid than gold bars

also they seem to be a virus that wealth-chasing people catch on to

Gee I don't know, they look pretty solid to me, unless they're Dalí watches /s

They're very high value by weight, very fungible, and there is much less regulation about carrying them across international borders.

Moving a six-figure Audemars Piguet or Patek Philippe watch through an airport would be much easier than the equivalent in gold or cash, even at 50% value. A watch roll with four watches in it could be the same value as 4-5 lbs of gold. If you needed something that you could cash in anywhere on the planet fairly quickly, gold would be the best option. But if you wanted max value, minimal scrutiny and had time at the other end to set up legit buyer, extremely high-end watches would be a pretty optimal option.

Watches are the commodity of choice for corruption in some circles. I know people in jewelry and a significant portion of their transactions are watches to Chinese businessmen, formerly through Hong Kong, now through Singapore. They're high value items with razor thin margins.

I collect watches worth >$100k and I promise you that most collectors in this range are just watch nerds that have more money than they know what to do with.

Singapore is a big watch market because it has a very tight knit and wealthy collector community.

Margins on most watches in this range are around 10% on the low end. I wouldn't call that razor thin.

What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches? Is it kind of like art collections, where its a decent store of value while maintaining a collection of something you are personally interested in? Or is it more for "love of the game"?

Not saying its not a cool thing to collect, well made watches are a very cool piece of engineering, I'm just curious if there's any "special" appeal outside of "i like this thing and have the money to enjoy it" :)

> What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches?

You can carry them on your person through airports and other places reasonably unmolested in a way carrying a bunch of cash isn't so easy.

> Is it kind of like art collections, where its a decent store of value

Art doesn't store value: It trades whatever number the parties exchanging it want it to have, so those parties can manipulate their total annual revenues, which might be confused with value if you cannot think of why else someone would want to tell other people they made more or less money in a year, but is not valuable to anyone else.

> It trades whatever number the parties exchanging it want it to have

I'd argue that that's the very definition of (economic) value. Someone puts a cost on a good/service, and someone who values and can satisfy the cost gets said good/service.

Sure it is, but that's not a way to store value (what economists specifically call store of value if you want to read more about it), which is a little different:

If you buy a €100k rolex, you probably can't be sure you can sell it for more than €100k anywhere at anytime in the future.

You probably can't even find a bank that would take that €100k rolex you just bought as collateral for €500k on a 30y mortgage.

That's why a €1m watch collection is never going to be worth €1m unless we're talking raw materials.

> > What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches?

> You can carry them on your person through airports and other places reasonably unmolested in a way carrying a bunch of cash isn't so easy.

Now I have to ask, why do you need to carry a bunch of cash through airports, and why so often that you need a method of doing so?

I'm of course assuming you're doing this for legal reasons, I understand all the reasoning for less legal ones, but then that's hardly comparable to the original question, so I think this is a fair assumption.

    > What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches?

It is the same reason that women collect high priced handbags. Men and women use these items to signal their wealth and status (in public).

Sure, some people use them to signal status but I'd say the vast majority of the collector community does not buy expensive watches for that reason.

At the $100k range you get a lot of things that appeal to a watch enthusiast: true high-horology hand finishing (like handmade anglage and sharp interior angles), some of the more advanced complications, more interesting escapements, etc.

> Or is it more for "love of the game"?

More this. I love wearing what are basically highly complex, mechanical works of art on my wrist. It appeals to both the engineer/nerd and the romantic inside me.

Some watches hold value, others don't. I have some watches that have halved, others that have doubled. But I don't really intend to sell so it's immaterial.

Collectors are the end buyers, who ultimately create the value; but the existence of collectors as a predictable sink, permits the trading of the thing they collect as a medium of exchange and (short-term) store of value.

Similar to fine art. For every purchase of a painting by a collector who's actually going to display it, there are 10-100 being purchased by people who're going to keep them in freeport awaiting resale.

Basically like commodities futures. You don't buy onion futures because you have anything you would personally do with multiple tonnes of onions.

What people can actually do is buy a watch then return it in another branch in another country after paying a "restocking" fee.

If you're buying new, there is almost no dealer on the planet that will let you return watches this expensive. They lose so much value the moment you put them on.

I say "almost" no dealer because some domestic dealers have a 24-48h return policy but they are pretty strict about these things and care way more about their business than any money laundering attempt. They will be very suspicious of you buying in one country and asking for a return label from another.

It's very blatant and below that range. They got many orders for the exact same model that's around $50k.

Obviously, per definition a collector is probably a watch nerd.

But I think the point is that if I want to transport money from one country to another, I can buy a watch for 30k, take it to the other country, and sell it to a collector relatively easy for probably the same amount of money.

Same if I wanna give a bribe to somebody, I can give them a watch for worth 30K and they can easily sell it for cash to a collector for 30K.

So that person would not be a collector. They would just use it to transfer the value.

> I collect watches worth >$100k

It's off topic for this thread, but I'd totally read a blog post about that hobby :)

Most of the time you can wear a watch through customs and move $250K without anyone blinking an eyelid. If it has a box and papers you mail those ahead of you. (Don't have them in your luggage)

Maybe this is part of the shadow money. CIA has been working with business people since the beginning of Cold War and I wouldn't be surprised that they have deep roots in the financial world -- after all both Intelligence and Finance need globalization.

It’s almost certainly grift. If it were official, the arrest would have been scrubbed.

sometimes i wonder if the left hand knows what the right is doing. it looks like we arrested our own spy in this case: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/25/american-journalist...

The CIA director requested the FBI intervene. This is almost certainly not a fuckup.

That's their post hoc, uncorroborated claim. It's easy to imagine many other possibilities; it could just be face saving. It could be Rush is taking the fall. etc.

This could also be internal politics intentional designed to burn someone for pissing off the wrong people. That shit happens.

I don't think it's connected to this specific event, but there's a lot of lore about the CIA moving gold in/out of Afghanistan, Iraq and others during war time.

I used to read a lot about Michele Sindona who was supposed to be connected to the Mafia and the intelligence community. His currency trading firm was one of the first to trade the Eurodollar contracts back in the 60s, IIRC.

I think intelligence and finance really go hand in hand. It makes so much sense -- you see, the intelligence community really hates the congress or whatever to snoop around its operations before approving the budget -- wouldn't it a lot easier to just earn your own $$? And with all the information the intelligence agencies control, it is almost trivial to make quick money in finance. Last but not the least, wouldn't banker be the perfect cover for spies? They wear nice suites, too.

This also applies to tech now.

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc all have Global Security branches.

Yep I wouldn't be surprised. I think Meta had seed $$ from some intelligence-backed VC, too?

From Rockefeller to Sheldon Adelson (only naming dead ones), oligarchs have had an extremely close relationship to the CIA, and although the CIA probably gets something out of it, I think it goes more the other way.

They want globalization to make their jobs easier. In no sense do they "need" it. Whether we want a world where the desires of intelligence and finance are blindly prioritized is an open question. For my part the answer is obviously no.

I think most ordinary people would say No, but most of us do not have a say in any important things. They put up the facade of voting while all the important stuffs are decided within the circles.

I think it really makes sense to consider ourselves to be just intelligent cattle -- they still tolerate us because they need us to turn natural resources into machinery, weapon, insights and other stuffs they need, but once AI and robots keep up, they can probably get rid of 90% of us.

> I think it really makes sense to consider ourselves to be just intelligent cattle

That's too misanthropic for my tastes.

> to turn natural resources into machinery, weapon, insights and other stuffs they need

It's easy to live in our world and ignore the maintenance staff.

> but once AI and robots keep up

This is nowhere near happening. Your seeming rush into anticipatory compliance is exceedingly premature.

> they can probably get rid of 90% of us.

It's the same moronic death cult that's been active since the 1860s. They would like to believe this, more importantly they would like /you/ to believe this, but a sober examination of the facts shows it to be a mixture of bluster and folly designed to intimidate you into transferring your personal wealth into their profit.

The cover of national security has allowed a certain type of organized crime to proliferate to the point it's breaking society.

Son: dad, I’m thinking of getting in to organised crime

Dad: Public or private sector?

There's a book that ties into this sort of thing - Gold Warriors [1]. It about how, post WWII, the US recovered a bunch of Gold looted from China and used it to set up an anti-communist slush fund.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249237.Gold_Warriors

Sounds like using an official position to make money.

A guy I used to know, a retired USAF Maj. pilot, acquired a bunch of racing cars, motorcycles, and a non-flyable MiG-21 through shady characters.

More than likely individual people try to get away with doing shady shit on the side rather than it being a grand UFO conspiracy.

> From last November to March, the court papers say, Mr. Rush asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.”

- "I need these bars to pay off this Russian spy who will tell us Putin's nuclear codes password"

Comes back a week later

- "His password is 12345"

- "How do we know the story is not fake?"

- "What am I going to get a signed receipt from him? Duh..."

It is an eternal problem with human intelligence. GRU and FSB spend serious resources on provoking their own agents, aimed at a range of problems including this one.

Weirdly the CIA actually does require case officers to get signed receipts from their assets for payments. Whether they verify the signatures is another question...

Ha! That's interesting. I think it would be funny to read some of those. "I, Mr. Ivanov, the Russian spy, got: 2 bars of gold, 5 buckets of caviar, 10 cases of vodka and 3 kilos of cocaine". Then they call the CIA headquarters complaining the cocaine is stale and they would rather have another 5 buckets of caviar instead.

The CIA legitimately engages in bribery and hard asset payments. Note that the CIA approved his request and gave him these assets (or at least many of them - the paragraph below doesn't specify the amount).

Possibly the question here is, why did Rush take them home. It's always possible Rush was just sloppy and undisciplined, which would also reflect a cultural problem. Many people have been found with secret documents in their homes.

If he still has them, it’s probably ‘garden variety’ workplace embezzlement.

Make up some sources, pretend to pay them, cash the payments.

He probably just got sloppy, and it got too obvious.

"Legitimately" is a nonsense word in that sentence.

Someone's gotta pay for the mortgage at 7327 Georgetown Pike, McLean VA

This could easily be an episode from Snowfall (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6439752/), the rather excellent TV show about the early days of the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles during the beginning of the 1980s. The CIA feature prominently and regularly acquire large amounts of cash & narcotics in order to run their operations.

I can't read the full article, but the subtitle says :

> The only charge lodged against David Rush is that he inflated his academic credentials and obtained military leave pay worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Is this guys just very good at saving gold for CIA/personal reasons and it's still his or is this gold in related to some crime ?

Almost assuredly they charged him on the crime easiest enough to get a search warrant and arrest warrant and this original indictment will be superseded with one covering the full gambit of his crimes.

CIA: Corruption Institute of America

Its nickname since the 1970s has been Criminals in Action, when they were smuggling heroin out of the Golden Triangle to fund covert actions during the Vietnam War.

I’ve walked off with a few of my employer’s pens over the years. Is this really so different?

A couple of weeks ago there was a story that the CIA raided the office of the director of the NSA and seized information regarding the CIA. Trump was in China at the time. About a week later the NSA director resigns. I waited for it to turn into a major story and get some kind of explanation, but silence.

It seems like an extraordinary story and I don't understand why there isn't a hullabaloo. Did I hallucinate it? Who runs this country?

> Who runs this country?

American Thought Control.

Crazy crackpot schizos aren’t the only ones listening to the voices in their heads.

The DNI, not the NSA.

Because nobody reputable reported on it?

Reputable reporters know that publishing those stories leads to break-in burglaries where everyone is killed and nothing is stolen.

Or with hands tied and two gunshot wounds to the back of the head and its ruled a suicide (Gary Webb)

Or crawled into a suitcase and zipped it up = suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams

> A subsequent Metropolitan Police re-investigation concluded that Williams's death was "probably an accident"

My sides

You think that reputation was earned without submission to intelligence agencies?

Anna Paulina Luna is the only one claiming that the CIA raided the office of the DNI. No other trustworthy sources are reporting this and there's been no independent verification. Anna Paulina Luna is a lunatic who says outlandish things with no regards to truth.

There might be a mix up on the details.

The FBI raided the home of John Bolton who was a former National Security Advisor for the first Trump administration. (not directly part of the NSA and definitely not the director of the NSA). Bolton has become a vocal critic of Trump since he was fired in Sept 2019.

Trump's DOJ has a track record of prosecuting Trump's vocal critics. eg. Former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_John_Bolton

There has been no legal action taken against current NSA director General Joshua M. Rudd or his recent predecessor, William J. Hartman

> Trump's DOJ has a track record of prosecuting Trump's vocal critics.

And many Americans claim they have freedom of speech!

(Of course the little guys speech is "free", they aren't important. But the moment the little guy critical of Trump is in a position of power or influence, watch how quickly he is silenced.)

The media is tightly controlled.

Huh. I’m actually glad to see the IC fragmenting like this.

Is it fragmenting? The FBI has always been in charge of investigating other agencies. The article even notes that this particular investigation was initiated when the CIA director made a referral to the FBI.

> article even notes that this particular investigation was initiated when the CIA director made a referral to the FBI

Fair enough.

> millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.

Hey, handing over millions of $$s to local warlords is a business expense...

Yes? Also children of Russian or Iranian generals or deputy ministers.

The In-Laws:

Shel: "You robbed the U.S. Mint on your own? The CIA thought it was too crazy?"

Vince: "Too risky."

Archive.ph/archive.today failing me to bypass paywall, is everyone commenting on the title? Or you all have NYT subscriptions? Or you know of some other bypass?

Many community libraries offer free NYTimes access to their patrons.

I get 24 hour access through my local library. Here, have a gift link https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/us/politics/fbi-arrest-ci...

I had no idea this was an option. Libraries are the best.

Thank you!

oh man i just discovered that i have access to a lot of publications through my local library! thanks for this!

this being the C.I.A - this guy is being railroaded or is being made a fall guy.

he will serve a short jail term but at least he will live.

remember folks - C.I.A is the only gvt org that self funds itself & can run entirely without gvt money.

> is the only gvt org that self funds itself & can run entirely without gvt money

Citation needed.

The CIA receives lots of opaque funding from the US government (at least opaque to citizens trying to FOIA), but just because it’s not easily accounted for doesn’t mean the org funds itself.

that's the point. you can't prove it. I can't prove it.

however - with a little common sense you can link everything together.

CIA has mandate to operate abroad. they can own mines, journalism houses, drug operations - abroad & in the U.S. technically the CIA is not allowed by law to operate in the US (but bcoz they're too powerful - they now have a free pass in that area)

remember they can also self-classify material. which means what they own will always remain opaque till they choose to declassify it usually after 70 or so years.

>> now back to the gold. remember they're restrictions around gold citizens can hold etc. & suddenly a private citizen has massive gold bars ? how so ? unless they were holding the gold for a powerful entity (but discovered by some gvt agency & now they need a fall guy) ?

I think it's somehow related to the recent whistle blower and or the congressman who sent an open letter to the head of CIA saying "I'm not sure if you're getting my requests through private channels so please call me when you get this". There's something terrible going on in the agency (terrible even by their standards who drown people and revive them) and I think this might be an attempt to bring it to light.

Did Scott Rudin already option it? "Gold Rush"

I'm guessing they decided they don't like the guy anymore? The CIA is very corrupt as an institution and things like this run rampant. Billions of dollars go unaccounted for a year at the CIA.

DoD <--> defense contractors (military-industrial complex) is pretty close to the same. Never passed an audit and contractors were ripping off the DoD while creating scrap metal that was used by the Taliban. Trillions and trillions wasted.

How quickly can we get the movie?

He just needs to profess his love for our country (the president, you know how Trump says attacks on him are attacks on the whole country) and may be say he has dirt on the deep state or hasan piker or something. Trump will be inviting him to the white house where he can steal from the government and tax payers in a more sanctioned way.

By the title only, having gold bars is bad? There it goes my plans of buying some.

Really? Gold? Mr.Rush? … unbelievable what a surname can inflict on you

okay now the Director!

Should’ve used Monero or something lmao

So we have this, and the Google employee polymarket trading:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302822

I'm totally not surprised, except that Trump's admin is actually catching and prosecuting these people.

I assume that means this is just the tip of the iceberg, and the grift is so predominant that they can't help but catch some people.

Gold Rush, yet another very unlikely story

So what is that, like 10 gold bars?

EDIT: it's 240. but still, they were worth a lot less not that long ago...

According to the article, 303 gold bars worth about $40M.

This seems absolutely crazy. Probably Fort Knox should be inventoried, might indeed not be anything there!

This is different than that and scant on pertinent details

It says he received it as compensation for expenses, not that it was ever in some government vault. This is additional gold and foreign currency that an agency had, not the reserve.

It then says

> When the C.I.A. conducted a review of where the gold and currency were stashed

Why would they do that if it was compensation for expenses

He wasn't charged for that, and the phrasing doesn't suggest it was supposed to be remitted to the government

if the CIA didn't have a history of being involved in shady shit like this that already explains everything, this would be weird

instead it looks like he's got burned over his necessary use of fibbed identity

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Fort Knox doesn't store gold bars that small. A 1kg gold bar is about the size of a cellphone. The ones at Fort Knox are the large trade bars, which weigh about 400 ounces (or 12.4 Kg).

> Size of a standard gold bar: 7 inches x 3 and 5/8 inches x 1 and 3/4 inches.

> Weight of a standard gold bar: approximately 400 ounces or 27.5 pounds.

https://www.usmint.gov/about/tours-and-locations/fort-knox

Mysteriously only 39.12 million dollars is accounted for, The FBI is carefully monitoring the remaining 38.25 million dollars of gold, for a hearing later this week where the fate of the 36.5 million dollars of gold will be decided.

Gold is the "bitcoin" of yesterday, in the sense that it is untraceable, anonymous and yet high value enough to be worth it.

And it can be made to disappear in a hurry, if you have to: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/10/03/140815154/d...

None of those points match bitcoin. What you are describing is more like tornado cash or similar stuff which are really really banned when interfacing with banks or similar institutions.

> untraceable, anonymous and yet high value enough to be worth it

Literally none of these is true of Bitcoin.

Btc is neither fungible, untraceable or private. The only actual currency which is comparable to gold is monero xmr.

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