Animals (standard:adventure, 3904 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Jul 28 2007	Views/Reads: 3509/2519	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
128 little gold animals become $ 12,000,000,000 underneath downtown Cincinnati. Truth really IS stranger than fiction.

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turned into a blackbird on Hallowe'en.  For my part, I skipped most of 
the meetings and taught my secretary to  forge my signature in the 
checkbook.  That  was  it,  of  course. I held the checkbook and an 
eight-figure account to draw on. 

That was the game.  How fast could I convert those eight figures into
ten?   That was the goal.  And the countdown?  One year. Vern took a 
little wind out of my sails by pointing out that Wall Street brokers 
often accomplished ten times as much in six months or less, but I 
refused to be intimidated by this kind of competition.  After all, who 
cared whether or not I broke any records, so long as the I.R.S. got its 
share? 

How easy it would have been to walk away at this point.  All I had to do
was to drop a cache of petty cash in a few dozen banks around the 
world, dye my hair and shave my eyebrows, walk with a staggering limp, 
wear knickers with an earring in one ear and speak French.  A few new 
credit cards would complete the picture.  But why settle for a measly 
eight figures when I could apply leverage on a world market to generate 
that magic ten-figure number: a billion dollars or more. 

Let others cull through the bombed-out rubble of yesteryear.  I would
pave my own Stairway to Heaven, starting with the nearest subway 
station. 

I thought first of the Liberty Street station, at Central, but that was
too near City Hall.  Then I checked out the station at 7th and Race 
Streets.  Too narrow.  Same thing at Fifth and Race.  But the station 
at Fifth and Main was ideal: Right under Government Square, flush with 
the Federal Reserve Bank. 

Many living Americans have never heard of the Greater Cincinnati
Underground Rapid Transit System. Well, contrary to popular belief, it 
really exists -- all 1.8 miles of it.  The subway had been an integral 
part of my plan from the beginning. 

The Subway -- whose origins go back to 1818 -- had a colorful history. 
The Miami-Erie Canal was dug in that year, running 116 miles from 
Cincinnati to Toledo, but it was wiped out financially by the railroads 
in 1859. 

By 1885 hardly any evidence of the canal was left -- except for a
stretch that split Cincinnati in half, about 12 blocks north of the 
Ohio River.  Somebody got the bright idea of draining the canal, laying 
trolley tracks and initiating a public horse car system. Lots of 
excitement.  Money was raised, money was spent, nothing was done.  
History repeated itself in 1912 and again in 1916.  Finally, by 1927 
two miles of old canal bed were paved over, creating a subway tunnel.  
There were no horse cars, no electric trolleys, no subway trains and no 
more money.  After re-funding again and again, until some thirteen 
million dollars had been siphoned off, the subway stations were sealed 
shut and the project was abandoned once and for all. 

Did I say abandoned?  Well, not entirely. Near the Brighton Station, a
vintner rented a stretch of tunnel for aging wine.  Next station down, 
the brewery stored beer on the express line.  A walled off alcove at 
Central Parkway was outfitted as a whorehouse and operated for years 
until the tunnel sprang a gas leak during the earthquake of August 3, 
1980.  Luckily, the 48-inch water main running down its center didn't 
rupture.  About 1951, the Liberty Street Station was rebuilt as a 
nuclear fall-out shelter for 3,000 people -- complete with wooden 
benches and tins of biscuits, toilet paper and sanitary napkins.  "When 
they were fresh" claimed a local official "those biscuits tasted like 
animal crackers."  Thirty-five years of damp aging, however, had not 
improved their flavor and texture.  A tunnel air shaft went up to the 
County Jail and Courthouse as a handy escape hatch for desperate 
criminals.  The plan to set up a major radio broadcasting studio in the 
Subway never matured.  Instead, the FM station settled for an abandoned 
stern-wheeler down on the river. It was safely grounded on a sand bar. 

Shortly after a large property management firm reneged on its option to
lease the Cincinnati Subway for use as a parking garage, the City 
accepted another bid. This was from a small group of skilled metal 
casters who built a foundry for casting gold and silver.  It was 
located under Fifth Street, with easy access to sewers and basements of 
nearby buildings, like the Public Library. 

Many jewelers in town supplied the foundry with old gold at a discount.
That gave them a big margin of operating capital. Gold was melted down, 
assayed, analyzed, weighed and melted down again into ingots.  A 
Federal agent stood guard night and day to insure that none of the 
splashes or runouts grew legs or wings.  The design department was a 
block away, on the 44th floor of the Carew Tower. 

The designers had their molds cut and polished by skilled pattern
makers, some of whom had been doing this since the Great War of 1914. 
The molds went down the elevator to the sub-basement, took the 
cross-town shuttle and transferred at Walnut Street Station for the 
casting bay. Four young men with unlisted phone numbers owned the 
foundry. Friendly people from the IRS often dropped in around coffee 
break. They had many good ideas. 

When not otherwise occupied, (three were professional football players),
they cast the gold into molds, and supplied the nation's high schools 
with graduation jewelry: items like class rings, sorority earrings, 
fraternity pins, medallions, jewel settings, pendants, bracelets, 
lockets: all solid gold.  They ran a pretty quiet operation.  And the 
sketches of my animals delighted them.  All the little gold animal 
castings I wanted them to cast also delighted them. 

I always got a thrill out of metal casting.  It wasn't so much the idea
of gold, which is just another metal to me, but I really admired the 
precision molds and skills that it demanded.  Molds, for example, were 
made of plaster -- not ordinary household plaster but a special porous 
temperature-resistant plaster with a creamy smooth ceramic face.  Each 
mold cavity would faithfully reproduce the tiniest detail with minute 
precision, giving birth here to a little gold chipmunk with a gleam in 
his eye, or there, to a furry little gold tabby cat. A child could 
count the stripes. 

The team melted and poured out eleven species of delicate gold
butterflies. One was almost transparent. They weighed in at $1,600 an 
ounce. 

The fellows at the foundry were delighted to cast everything I asked
for: giraffes, monkeys, elephants, peacocks, alligators, tigers, bears, 
snakes, badgers, ostriches ... altogether, if I remember correctly, 
there were 128 animals. 

Let me tell you about the baboon.  He was cast in gold using three
ladles all at one time.  The first ladle held "blue" gold, which was 
really a greenish-colored alloy with twenty per cent silver.  The third 
ladle held "red" gold, a copper-bearing alloy.  Once it was cool, the 
solid gold baboon came out with blue crested brows and a glowing red 
tushie. 

I retained a public accounting firm to engrave identification numbers on
each piece, and prepare certificates denoting the weight, value and 
date of casting.  All numbers were registered with the appropriate tax 
agencies, and the notarized duplicate certificates were deposited with 
the Federal Reserve bank at the end of the tunnel.  A little stairway 
led to the "walk-up" window. The tunnel was actually part of the Bank's 
foundation.  With all the other paper work, it took about 6 ounces of 
paper to certify an ounce of gold. 

By April 15, bushels of gold pieces were stacked up for a quarter-mile
down that subway tunnel. Stairwells and manhole covers had been welded 
shut and paved over years ago. Nevertheless, I provided a little extra 
security:  an infra-red detection system, a radar detection system, an 
ultrasonic detection system, nuclear sensors, hidden sonic detectors, 
concealed TV cameras, smoke detectors, bolometers, and, of course, a 
handful of armed guards with an undercover spy worker to keep an eye on 
them.  This ensured that none of the merchandise would "evaporate". 

By the way, these little animals weren't exactly tiny.  True, one of the
smallest, a field mouse, weighed in at 0.565 ounces and fit into a 
small thimble. The forty-pound golden Tyrannosaurus Rex towered nearly 
three feet.  It would look pretty impressive on somebody's mantelpiece 

When we launched the ad campaign, a remarkable number of people told me
to my face that there was no market for such a big piece cast in gold.  
In the end, we sold a hundred and six copies of Tyrannosaurus Rex.  At 
only three  hundred  dollars  the  ounce,  he  was  worth  over 
$192,000, give or take a little for paperwork and commissions. By 
comparison, people bought only fifty gold elephants. This may have 
reflected some prejudice, since each elephant weighed nineteen pounds 
or so. 

We learned very quickly that quite a few of our clients couldn't read or
write.  They kept our 24-hour hot line busy answering questions, slowly 
spelling out the name and weight of each animal.  In the end, they were 
our best customers.  We got some pretty strange offers.  One man 
offered to trade six offshore drill rigs for a herd of gold sheep to 
complete his Christmas manger.  A model sent in her photograph, then 
telephoned demanding that our public relations man "look her square in 
the eyes and tell the truth."  She bought sixteen assorted rodents to 
wear as gold earrings.  We kept six interpreters on call to handle 
cables and phone calls from Europe, Japan and South America.  Peak 
sales hours were between 3 and 6 every morning. 

Quite a few prospects just couldn't strike up a deal with us.  One man
with an atrocious accent offered a plane-load of "slightly used" 
weapons, including a couple of unfired missiles.  As exchange for gold 
pandas, we had to turn him down.  In July, however, he turned up again 
with bona fide papers of ownership for a stableful of race horses and I 
took them in exchange for the gold pandas. 

Or rather, the Gold Certificates showing he was now the proud owner of
pandas instead of horses. The pandas, of course stayed safely with us, 
without charge. 

The next steps were easy as pie. I had full-page ads run in the seat
pocket magazines of every airline in the US and Europe, aboard every 
cruise liner registered in Panama, Liberia or Jamaica, and in a few 
prestigious journals.  As expected, a flood of orders came from the 
usual collectors, followed by much larger orders from new speculators.  
Each gold piece was sold precisely at market value .... to the penny.  
Nowhere else on earth was gold available at such competitive prices.  
Word got around fast.  Before long, we were mailing out Animal photos 
and Gold Certificates round the clock. 

You see, the gold animals never left their comfortable little bushel
baskets.  We mailed out only a glorious color photo of each piece, with 
its registration number, accompanied by the original certificate of 
authenticity -- with a copy to the Federal Reserve Bank, the IRS and 
some other interested parties. 

Three collectors actually showed up, coincidentally, on the same day,
asking to claim their pieces. The security guard handed everyone white 
gloves and passed each animal to its owner with graceful fingers. 

They toured the entire foundry, visited the Federal Reserve Bank walk-up
window, and went with me to a good restaurant.  All three agreed to 
leave their animals in our little "zoo", confident that their gold was 
in good hands.  The Federal Reserve Bank, who supplied us with the 
metal, didn't care what we did with "their" gold, of course, as  long 
as it didn't wander too far down the tunnel. 

Did you ever wonder why some people are called collectors? It's because
they practice the wisdom of that famous fortune cookie: "When 
opportunity knocks, keep calm and collect."  Demand from collectors 
grew to exceed our daily allotment of gold ingot.  It was time to 
trigger the sting. 

I wired the Vancouver office to launch a direct-mail campaign, saying
"We Buy Gold Animals" and offer to pay ten per cent above the original 
cost.  We were all astonished: only a dozen collectors were willing to 
give up their little animals for a measly ten percent profit. A few 
mailed in their certificates and banked the ten per cent earnings. 

On August 22, I authorized "our man in Vancouver" to boost our offer to
15 per cent over the purchase price.  That brought a little more 
action.  Hundreds of buyers began contacting us, offering to sell back 
their little animals for a markup of 30 or 40 per cent. 

Vern authorized me to buy a few, and word got around.  Soon, a lot of
brisk trading began among zookeepers around the world.  Some sharpies 
were ordering more and more gold animals daily, selling them off before 
we could even assign a serial number and mail the photograph. 

To make sure we wouldn't miss out on a rising market, we jacked the
price of new animal castings by ten per cent.  Nobody seemed to notice, 
and sales increased.  We went for 15% and sales went up again. 

To ride the crest a little further, we took out late-night television
ads with an "800" number, so the whole world would be talking about us. 
 By August 30, people were still willing to pay a 35% "security 
premium" on each gold animal. Nine months had gone by and I didn't want 
to miss my self-imposed deadline.  Every penny had to be back in Vern's 
hands on the day they laid the foundations of my "blockful of 
buildings."  I was so tied up with the gold business, I wasn't even 
sure of what they had already built on that block! 

The TV show was a heart-stopper. I never imagined there were so many
bachelor girls, emancipated housewives and elementary school teachers 
out there with no other use for $20,000 than collecting gold marmots, 
chipmunks, porcupines, kangaroos, wolves, turtles, octopi, eagles, 
chow-chows, harlequin bugs -- you name it. 

To close out the charade, I ordered a mass mailing worldwide (gratis,
unsolicited) with a full list of all the people who had ever bought 
gold animals from us. I sent it to the complete list of all the people 
who had ever bought gold animals from us!   The market exploded. 

Speculators went bonkers in an attempt to buy up all the little gold
animals owned by collectors. Meanwhile, collectors clung ferociously to 
their precious certificates, refusing offers of double and triple the 
value. Floods of new orders came into our hands.  By October we were 
swamped.  After all, who else made little gold animals?  Gold was 
edging up past the 1700 mark when we had to sit down and have a little 
talk with the Federal Reserve Board. As a matter of fact, quite a 
considerable number of people sat in on that talk, but in the end, Vern 
and I didn't have to spend more than a week in Washington DC, mostly at 
museums. 

Actually, the certificates were traded among collectors, speculators and
others, so we didn't have to do a thing to make money. Whenever an 
animal changed ownership, we merely recorded that the certificate was 
turned in (for a credit equal to the original value) and issued a 
certificate to the new owner: for cash -- equal to the current value of 
gold!  Vern and I pocketed the difference thousands of times a week.  
As the demand got heavier and heavier, the price of our little gold 
menagerie kept going up, right along with the price of gold on the 
world market.  Which was, more or less, about what I was expecting.  
This was, of course only the first half of our profit.  When business 
got really hot, we were turning over the ownership of little gold 
animals two and three times a day! 

Toward the end, each day's profit was greater than the total original
market value of the little gold animals in the first place!  Since I 
had bet all my borrowed money on casting of the little gold animals, 
under the watchful eye of the Federal Reserve Bank, I naturally never 
owned any of the gold itself.  My only "working" expense was setting up 
the operation, bringing revenue to the bank, and covering the foundry's 
operating cost.  That was always fun!  Our profits covered costs fifty 
thousand times over. 

One day, Vern called me in and complained that he was having quite a bit
of trouble discounting gold certificates at the bank's clearinghouse.  
The gold market had become saturated, soft and volatile.  A lot of 
people thought we were trying to compete with the Federal Treasury.  
The truth was that we had initiated a beneficial gold panic, which 
harmed nobody. In fact, banks in Singapore and Zürich were willing to  
extend credit on my name. 

That was in November.  I began hauling bushel baskets of gold animals
back to the Federal Reserve Bank at the end of the tunnel.  At the 
walk-up window, they checked out each little animal, verified the paper 
work, and issued me a credit slip for the current market value. 

I deposited the credit slips with Vern's bank, and we split this second
profit.  For all practical purposes, the Federal Reserve Bank was 
happy, because the gold was safely back in their ingot vaults; our 
customers were happy because they held a precious limited edition of 
gold certificates whose value had multiplied five times inside of a 
single year; Vern and I were happy, and so were the restaurant 
waitresses, who shed service on us like royalty.  Maybe I had gotten a 
bit too generous with the tips. 

By the year's end, my accountants and I struck a favorable compromise
with several agents of the I.R.S. and came to some satisfactory 
arrangements. 

The initial seed money I had received for rebuilding the downtown block
-- less than $100,000,000 -- had now become more than twelve billion 
dollars! 

I had to do some pretty fast shuffling to keep the excess profits from
leaking out here and there.  At one point, juggling the mountain of 
flowing cash became such a burden, I began to regret starting the whole 
business in the first place.  I paid off everybody, closed down the 
foundry, let the Federal Reserve Bank store the last of the little 
animals in their vaults and went home to sleep. 

Once in a while I get nostalgic, when I remember my staff stuffing
envelopes and mailing out those glorious color photos along with the 
Gold Certificates.  I feel a little like the monkey, reaching into his 
tin cup and taking out a dime. 

* * * * * 

Seattle Washington, September 17, 2003 Gerald X. Diamond All Rights
Reserved Original copyright 1991 


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