Thursday, March 1, 2012

The Stolen Boat Story


   
                                            The Stolen Boat I didn’t Want Story
                                                                1976
                                                          A true story
                  
                                           Written 3/2011 Re-Written 05/02/2016
                                                        Howard Yasgar
    

In 1976, I was running a small precious metals refining company in Miami.
At the time it was a part time business, that I was doing in the evenings and on the weekends.
I was also doing business with a friend that had a booth at the Miami Jewelry Exchange in downtown Miami.
Because I was the only one doing any precious metal refining in Miami at the time, it wasn’t long before he started sending me all sorts of strange people.
One day a father and son came over to see me.
The father was about 45 years old, and his son looked to be about 20.
After I initially met them, they came by several times bringing me some platinum metal scrap, and sometimes they brought small amounts of gold.
After several months, we became very friendly, and we talked about a variety of subjects.
The Father told me that he was a now a bachelor living with his son in a one family home in Miramar Florida.
He said that he and his son had tried refining precious metals themselves by emptying out their swimming pool and then setting up a small stove to heat chemicals up in the bottom where the deep end of the pool was.
He said they were trying to refine some metals just like I was doing.
He said that by their doing it in the empty pool, it kept the neighbors from seeing what they were doing, however the smell of the acids they were using was stinking up their whole neighborhood.
One evening he stopped by my house and brought me a small quantity of scrap gold and said he wanted to show me something.
He placed on my desk a small ingot of what looked like pure gold.
It weighed about 1/4 lb. I looked at it and I used a simple jewelers method of testing it.
Before I made a more intrusive test, I asked him how much he wanted for it.
He smiled and said he couldn’t sell it to me because I was his friend and the gold ingot was a fake.
I held it in my hand, and it sure looked pretty good to me.
It had the right color and heft to be real gold.
He said he and his son were having the ingots made out of a mixture of metals called jewelers alloy. Then they had a fellow who was electroplating them with 24K pure gold.
He said they said they were selling the ingots to investors that put them away in safety deposit boxes and vaults.
They felt that the investors would never discover that they were not real gold ingots.
It was easy to see how they could do this, as I was almost fooled myself with the sample he brought.
Now after listening to them, I now knew that what I had suspected was correct. I was dealing with real criminals, and con men.
He left that day leaving me with his sample of the fake gold ingot.
As I was a source of income to them, it appears that they considered me as being a friend that they could trust, and not report them.
One day, they came by and we were having a conversation. when I asked them what else they did for a living, and they said their real business was insurance fraud.
They went on to explain that many people wanted their cars or other property to disappear so that they could collect the insurance money.
I knew that, I had heard of Insurance fraud, but I never knew it was a real business, nor had I ever met any one who admitted that they were in that kind of business.
I wondered what did they did to make things disappear ?
They said that they drove lots of cars into the canals that were all around Miami.
They said that they had had put so many cars in some canals, that they couldn’t be used anymore, they said some canals were now 5 cars deep.
It was a big problem for them as they had to find new canals to sink the cars in.
I was flabbergasted to hear their story.
I always knew that stolen cars sometimes ended up in the canals, and here I was with the very people that put them there.
It was then that they asked me if I wanted a new car, as they had several late model ones every week to dispose of.
I told them that I didn’t need any cars, but jokingly I said that if they ever ran into a good legal fishing boat cheap, I would buy it.
About two weeks later, long after I had all but forgotten about the conversation.
I came home about 5 PM and there, parked in my carport was a boat on a trailer.
I got out of my car and walked up to it, wondering what this boat was doing in my car port.
It was a 18 foot fiberglass bowrider type boat on a trailer. It had a 200 horsepower Chrysler outboard engine on it.
It also had several fishing rods onboard and some other stuff.
My wife said she had heard some noises in the carport earlier in the day, but hadn’t noticed anyone putting a boat there.
It then dawned on me that my friends, the insurance fraud guys, had brought me a stolen boat.
I started to think of what would happen if the police found the boat at my house.
I knew that I certainly couldn’t ever use the boat, as it probably was already reported stolen, and the police were probably already looking for it.
The more I thought about it, the more nervous I became.
That night I could hardly sleep, worrying about the possibility of the police finding the boat in my carport.
The next morning, I got the fellow on the phone and asked him if he had left the boat, he said yes.
I asked him if f it was legal, did he have papers and if he did, how much did he want for it.
I knew he didn’t, no one sells a boat with fishing rods and other stuff on it.
He said, the boat was part of a friendly divorce and the owner wanted it to disappear, so he could collect the insurance.
I told them that I was very concerned about having a stolen boat in my carport, and I wanted them to remove it as fast as possible.
He was very calm about it and told me not to worry he would take care of everything.
The next day, when I came home, the boat and trailer were gone. But there were 3 fishing rods left leaning against the side of my house.
I never heard from him again, or his son.
You can be sure I never tried to contact them, as I now knew for sure that they were not only con men but car and boat thieves as well.
I didn’t want to anyone to ever associate me with them, so I was quite happy not to see them again.
Fast forward 20 years later to 1995.
In 1995 I had bought a small building that had been owned by an old friend.
I went to my friends office to talk with him.
His secretary told me that he was in a meeting with his new accountant.
After a few minutes, my friend walked out of his office, his accountant was right behind him.
Boy was I surprised, it was the same con man that was involved with the insurance fraud and had brought me the boat and left me the fake gold ingot.
He was just as surprised to see me as I was to see him. I tried not to show any sign of recognition and he did the same.
 
      


  
 
      

  
 


  

 


The George Lustig and the Pipe Bender Story

                                  The George Lustig and the Pipe Bender Story
                                                              1974
                 This is a true story that has been confirmed to me by several people.   
                                Written 2/2012, and Re-written 05/02/2016
                                                       Howard Yasgar

     This is an interesting and true story, its is all about how a person that I had met in Chicago, had gotten his start in the very unusual business of buying excess surplus government  merchandise.
     His name was George Lustig.
     I personally met George, and I did business with him in 1975 until he passed away.
     The following story was told to me by several of his friends, all of them were people that knew George very well when he was a young man, and was just starting out in business. So I am sure the story is 100% true, and it’s a classic.
     After WW2, there was a large quantity of excess military surplus equipment available, and the government did their best to auction off as much as thy could.
     The government’s method of disposing the excess merchandise was usually by public auction.
      Many major cities like Chicago had warehouses filled with this excess military surplus material so the government held weekly auctions to dispose of it.
      Chicago, Illinois is where George was located it was  one of those cities that auctioned off government material weekly.
      After the war, and all through the 1950’s and the 1960’s, the government surplus business in the United States was booming, some of what was auctioned off could sold and reutilized, but a lot of what was auctioned off was very specialized equipment made for the military only, so it took a lot of fast thinking, entrepreneurial guys to figure out how to make money from it, and George Lustig was one of those guys.
      In 1974, I was doing business with a company  that was located on Canal Street in Chicago. The company was Automotive Supply owned by Abe Greenstein, and Abe was the first to tell me this story.
      Later this story was corroborated by another one of my suppliers in Detroit, Barney Kaplan.   
      In the early days, after WW2, around 1950, George Lustig, Abe Greenstein and Barney Kaplan, were out of the army and they had little or no money.
      Barney told me they were so broke, that he or Abe got invited out for supper by a customer, they would save half the meal and heat it up on a radiator in their office the next morning so they had breakfast.
      They both told me that every week, their friend and rival George Lustig, would go to the docks in Chicago where the government was auctioning off surplus material.
      George religiously attended the government auctions every week and he always came early to inspect what the government was selling. Inspection was important because George had very little money, and he had to make sure that whatever he bought, he was able to sell and turn into cash right away.
      Usually Georges bankroll back then was about $50.00
      One morning George overslept and he arrived at the government auction late.
      By the time he got there the auction had already started, and he had no time to inspect any of the items being sold.
      Unable to inspect what he was bidding on, he decided to bid blindly on a few lots. But by not having inspected them beforehand, he had no idea of their value.
      As the sale went on George wasn’t having any success.
      By the afternoon the final items were being auctioned off, and it seems as though most of the bidders had disappeared.
      George listened carefully as the last item was being offered. They were supposed to be two, new and unused pipe bending machines.
      Well George certainly knew what a pipe bending machine was. They were probably just a couple of  bending tools that he could sell to a plumbing company or anyone that bent pipes.
      George raised his hand, he was planning on bidding a maximum of $15.00 for each machine, it was all the money he had to spend.
      His thinking was that if he was successful, he could load the pipe bending machines on to his pickup truck that very afternoon, and try and peddle them to some company the next day
      Well George was lucky and there were no other bidders, so he easily won both machines for only $12.00 each.
      As it was getting late, George was anxious to load up the pipe bending machines and hit the road.
      He found the site manager and they walked to the rear of the long Chicago storage warehouse, where the two benders were supposed to be.
      But as hard as they both looked they didn’t see anything that looked like a pipe bending machine.
      However, what they did discover at the very end of the warehouse were two big monster machines.
      The two machines must have weighed several tons.
      George double checked all his papers, could it be possible these were the machines he had just bought for twelve dollars each.
       George felt it wasn’t possible, perhaps there was a mistake.
       He knew that if it wasn’t a mistake, he was in trouble. He neither had the money or equipment to move these giant machines, and he started to get very nervous just thinking about it.
      George knew that if he defaulted on his bid with h government it would cost him twenty percent which would be five dollars, and that was money he could ill afford to lose.
      However, on the other hand, George knew he certainly couldn’t afford to pay anyone to come and move the machines.
      He knew it would take a lot of expensive heavy equipment to do it, besides, where would he move the machines to.
      George was really sweating now.
      As he walked around the giant machines he saw that each machine had a metal data plate on it with the name of the pipe bending machine manufacturer who was located Akron, Ohio.
      George drove back to his office, where he was using an old wooden crate as a desk.
      He called information in Akron Ohio and got the phone number of the company that had made the two machines.
      He called them up and a young man answered the phone.
      George told him that he had two machines that had been made by his company years ago and he gave the fellow the serial numbers off the data plates.
      The fellow was less than enthusiastic, he said, he knew the company had made the machines many years ago, but it was way before he ever went to work for them.
      George, had that bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, he felt that he had hit a dead end.
      He now realized that he would have to default on the government sale and lose his five dollars.
      But as a last resort, George asked the young man if he knew of anyone that might be interested in buying the pipe bending machines, the fellow said no, but he said that George could ask his grandfather who was the owner of the company.
      He told George that his grandfather was ninety six years old, and he only comes by the office for a couple of hours every day, but George could call him on the phone in the morning.
     The next day George got the boys grandfather on the phone, and the grandfather said, he remembered the pipe bending machines very well as he had built them himself.
     He said that the machines were very old but he would love to see them again, as they were his first government contract.
     He asked George, if he got on a train in Akron, would George pick him up in Chicago and take him to see the machines.
     He said he didn’t want to buy them, he only wanted to see them.
     George wanted to say no, but he George relented and agreed to pick the old man up at the Chicago train station.
      The next day George met the old man at the Chicago train station, and brought him to the government warehouse.
      At the warehouse, the old man saw the machines and he said, they were the first machines he had ever made, he had tears in his eyes.
      So again George asked if he would be interested in buying them back. The old man said, “Yes I would, but I can only give you twenty for them.”
     George was stunned, as he never expected the offer, that’s twenty for each machine  George asked, “Yes” the old man replied, “forty for both”.
      Well George quickly calculated, he had $24.00 invested and $40.00 would give him a $16.00 profit. It wasn’t much, but it was a profit.
       George decided to give the old man one last try, perhaps he could get the old man to go up to $50.00 for the two machines.
      Are you sure forty is your best offer George asked,  “Yes” the old man replied “$40,000.00 for the two machines is the best I can offer you”.



                              

The Stolen Military Vehicles Story


                                                The Stolen Military Vehicles Story
                                                                      1996
                                This is a true story about how we almost became involved
                                          Written 3/2011 and Re-written 05/02/2016
                                                               Howard Yasgar
                                                          
 
    This true story is about how our company almost got ourselves involved in one of the biggest military vehicle theft cases of 1996.
    We had no idea of how deeply involved we were until all the people involved were put on trial, and a copy of the prosecutions evidence was made available to one of the defendants.
    Our government encourages companies to bid on buying its excess military vehicles.
    This practice has spawned an entire market of “Collectors” People that buy used military vehicles, and rebuild them like new.
    Many of the military vehicle collectors are former soldiers who buy and restore vehicles similar to the ones they themselves drove when they were in the service.
    The military vehicle collector market is big, and there are several magazines that are devoted to it.
    These collectors have clubs, they have shows where they display their vehicles, and compete with each other.
    The rebuilding of military vehicles  not only involves collectors and reenactors, there is a big market for vehicles needed by military museums.
    And last but not least are the foreign governments that use U.S. military vehicles. They are always in the market to buy good used or rebuilt U.S. military vehicles.
    The point is, there is a very big market for U.S. government vehicles, from individual collectors, museums, and foreign governments.
    Any one that can get their hands on some used U.S. Military vehicles, usually has no problem selling them.                     
    One day I was reading a vehicle collector magazine and I saw the name “Tony’s Surplus”. he was located In St Paul Minnesota.
    I was curious  as to what he did so I called him up.
    The fellow that answered the phone said his name was Tony Piatz, and he was the owner of Tony's Surplus. Tony said everyone just called him “Tanker Tony”,  because he collected and rebuilt military tanks.
    It sounded fascinating, I wanted to hear more about what Tanker Tony did.
    Tony told me his regular business was moving house trailers, but he also did several other things.” He said that he liked to restore old military tanks and trucks, I wondered where he got them.
    Tony said he bid on government contracts to clean up firing ranges on fort McCoy.
    It seems that the government has practice firing ranges where helicopters practice shooting at
army vehicles.
    Tony said the government puts old tanks and trucks on the firing ranges and the helicopters fire rockets into them, pounding the vehicles into the ground.     
    Tony said when he gets a contract to clean up the ranges, the remains of the vehicles were now his.
    He said some times he digs up 3 or 4 old tanks, and he is able to make one good one out of all the junk parts.
    As a matter of fact, he said he was repairing a M46 tank right now.
    Talking to Tony was fascinating. He said the M46 tank he was working on had 2 live missiles
in the engine compartment when he cleaned it out. He said he buried them on a piece of property he owned.
    The more I talked to Tony, the more interesting it got. Tony said he owned an underground  missile site, and he intended to make a military vehicle museum out of it and charge admission.
    The more I talked to Tanker Tony, the friendlier we got.
    One day there was an auction held, a military parts company was disposing of old inventory.
    In the auction was a full trailer load of DUKW parts, that’s the old army duck.
    I bought the entire trailer load for $7000.00, and because the trailer was in Minnesota near Tanker Tony, he offered to pick it up and temporarily store it in his underground missile site.    
    Several weeks later, Tony called me up to ask if we were interested in buying some military vehicles.
    I asked Tony what he had, and he said that he was buying a whole variety of vehicles from the Fort McCoy army base in Wisconsin.
    He said that all the vehicles were destined to be put on the firing ranges to be shot at, but the ranges had been closed down and Tony was now allowed to purchase the vehicles rather than have the government send them to the scrap yard.
    Tony said he was just now hauling off all the vehicles from Fort McCoy as we spoke.
    Tony said he had a legal bill of sale for all the vehicles from the government.
    So I asked Tony if he had a list made up of what vehicles he had available and he said he did, and he  would fax it to me.
    When we looked the list over we were very surprised as it contained a big variety of vehicles which included Jeeps, shop vans, and three M113A2 personnel carriers.
    When I saw the M113A2 personnel carriers, I immediately brought it to the attention of Henry Moed who was a semi-retired military vehicle specialist that worked with us.
    Henry knew a lot about heavy military vehicles, and he said he thought we could sell the M113A2 personnel carriers to either the country of Pakistan or to Chile.
    M113A2 was probably the most popular troop carrier in the world.
    So I quickly called Tony back and asked him the price for the three M113A2 vehicles.
    Tony said, “I want $33,000.00 each for them.”  So I asked him what condition the vehicles were in, and “He said they were just like new, and they even had Tow missile launchers attached to the top of them,”
    Then Tony said, “I’m thinking of removing the Tow missile launchers from the vehicles.”
    I asked him, why he would do that as it reduced the value of the vehicle. Tony said, It was because he thought that the tow missile launchers looked too menacing”.
    I told Tony, not to remove the missile launchers, but he became adamant that he was going to do it anyway.
    I told Tony we would purchase the Tow launchers separately if he actually took them off.
    Tony then said, “He had also bought 28 ea. M151A1 Jeeps that were all just like new, and  all
had  low mileage.”
    Tony said, “If we wanted them they were $1,500.00 each.”
     I told Tony that we were pretty sure we wanted the M113A2 Personnel Carriers and I would like to buy all the M151A1 Jeeps.
     But I told Tony we had to find an economical was of shipping them to Florida first.
     I told Tony to give us a day or so to try and make shipping arrangements.
     I then spoke again to our specialist Henry Moed regarding the M113A2 personnel carriers and he said he would call his friend Knut Barth, who did business with the Chilean Army.
     After the call, Henry said Knut was sure the government of Chile would buy them all.
     I then spoke with my wife Katherine, and I asked her to find a way to ship the 28 jeeps to
Miami.
     So now Katherine started working on the project.
     She first called the railroad, to see if we could ship on a flat car.
     After working on the problem all day, she decided that the best way to bring the Jeeps to Florida was on a car carrier and the cost was $900.00 per vehicle.
    Then we realized that we had another problem, where to store the Jeeps once they were in Miami.
    We knew that the local population in Miami would steal the parts off them if we left the Jeeps outdoors.
    So the bottom line was, that after paying for the Jeeps plus the freight and storage costs, there was not enough profit to be made.
    Henry’s friend Knut Barth told him that the M113A2 personnel carriers were a bargain and we should buy them immediately, he was certain he could sell them to the country of Chile.
    I called Tony Piatz back and told him that we wanted the M113A2 personnel carriers at $33,000.00 ea. Tony asked, “What are you going to do with them,”
     I said that we intended to export them to Chile.
     Tony then asked, “If you sell them to Chile, would you need to record the serial numbers”?
    Yes, I told him, we would have to apply for an export license and we would definitely need the serial numbers.
     Tony then became hesitant.
     Both Henry and I  were both listening to Tony on a speaker phone, we looked at each other, we smelled a rat.
     Tony was obviously lying about how he got the vehicles.
     Then Tony said he had a collector customer (museum owner) for one of the M113A2 vehicles that very day and he was going to sell it to him for $35,000.00.
     So at this point we pretty much knew that something was very wrong with Tony.
     All the vehicles we now suspected were illegally purchased, or possibly even stolen.
     I was happy to hang up the phone with Tony, and I was very lucky that I did.
    Next day, I received a call from a friend and customer named George Pretty who owned a company called “Surplus Enterprises” in Sturgis Michigan.
     George said he was buying a couple of the M151 Jeeps from Tony.
     I told him of our suspicions.
     Then George confirmed to me that Tony had sold one of the M113A2 vehicles for $35,000.00 to a collector. So we knew that Tony had not lied about that.  
     After about a month, a very disturbed George Pretty again called me up.
     He said that the FBI and the Governments Criminal Investigative Division, had swooped down on his business and confiscated all the Jeeps he had bought from Tony, and they also confiscated an antique M114 Personnel carrier George had, as well as an HMWV (Hummer) that George was fixing up.
    George said the Government agents told him that they intended to prosecute him for buying and possessing stolen military vehicles.
    George told me, “I’m now nearly bankrupt, financially and I don’t know what to do, I know that I need to hire an attorney.”
    I debated if I should call Tony up, perhaps I could get him to get someone to ship our container of DUKW parts he was storing for us.
    So I called Tony up, and he answered the phone.
    I asked him, what he was doing, I acted like I didn’t know about all the trouble he was in.
    Tony said, “I’m sitting in the middle of my shop, with my head in my hands, waiting for the FBI to come get me.”
    I didn’t ask him why, because  I already knew what was going on.
    I did ask him if he could ship our DUKW parts to Florida. Tony said, “I sold your parts to a collector for cash, I need the money for a lawyer.”
    The next week, it became big news world wide, and it was in all the newspapers, as well as on television.
    They referred to Tony as “Tanker Tony”, and they said he stole over 13 million dollars in vehicles from the government.
    Tony was arrested along with 5 other military and civilian employees at Fort McCoy.
    They also arrested a military museum owner that also bought vehicles from Tony, probably the M113A2.
    Tanker Tony, they said, was the ringleader, and he had bribed the Fort McCoy employees.
    They said that there was 2 military guys and 3 civilian government employees that Tony had paid off.
    The news also reported that Tony had 11 charges leveled against him and could get up to 125 years in jail, as well as 2.75 million dollars in fines.
    We heard that all the vehicles were confiscated and anyone who bought them lost their money.
    Eventually Tony and the other 6 people were all convicted.
    I heard Tony got 5 years in jail.
    But the most interesting part of it all was my later conversation with my good friend George Pretty from Sturgis Michigan. George had hired an attorney, and his attorney got a copy of all the government’s evidence.
    When George read all the evidence, it included a transcript of the governments tapping of Tony’s telephone.
    Every conversation that I ever had with Tony had been recorded and printed out in the evidence package.
    Our friend George Pretty was eventually acquitted, of any wrong doing, but he never got his vehicles or his money back, and this pretty much bankrupted him.
    Interestingly enough, no one from the government ever contacted us, and our name was never mentioned at the trial.
    I think that was a close call.