The couple who caught a safe crammed with $100,000 while magnet fishing in a Queens lake may have hit the mother lode — but they won’t be able to tap into their newfound fortune until next year.
James Kane and Barbie Agostini last Friday lugged their muddy and waterlogged riches to the Treasury Department in DC, where an 11-person team will spend up to nine months rifling through the soggy cash and replacing it with new bills.
When they finish, Kane and Agostini will be handed the fresh pile of cash, tax-free.
“America the beautiful!” Kane told The New York Times.
The Treasury Department has a team at its Bureau of Engraving and Printing dedicated to the odd — but not unusual — predicament Kane and Agostini found themselves in.
Typically, the crew deals with remnants of money — sometimes reduced to literal dust — that family members find buried in their backyards.
That makes Kane’s decaying cash seem like a much easier task, especially since the lucky fisherman estimates that only about 40% of the roughly $100,000 he found has survived its two weeks on dry land.
It also made him regret leaving wads of what he thought were irreparably destroyed bills lying in the park, he told the newspaper.
The couple sought out the government’s help after their story went viral and long-lost friends and near-strangers came out of the woodwork to get their hands on their find.
“All the immediate attention we’re receiving from this money is driving us a little crazy and we’re a little afraid,” Kane wrote in an email to the Treasury Department.
“We don’t have a lot of money so we’re going to be using whatever we have for a bus to get down there,” he continued, adding that his plight was time-sensitive because the money was turning brittle and starting to disintegrate.
In the lobby of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, officials immediately estimated that Kane had somewhere between $50,000 and $70,000 on hand.
The couple did not expect to hit the jackpot when they sunk their magnetic fishing rod into the Queens pond earlier this month.
The pair, who film their adventures for YouTube, have found plenty of safes before, but most were empty.
Instead, they found two stacks of hundred-dollar bills covered in mud.
They called the NYPD to avoid any legal trouble, but the cops told them finder’s keepers.
“This is the most significant find in poor-people treasure-hunting history,” Kane said.
