A Queens couple reportedly pulled a safe containing $100,000 in cash from the bottom of a lake in Corona Park while “magnet fishing.”
Two anglers, James Cain and Barbie Agostini, were casting a fishing line with a powerful magnet attached to the end into the water on Friday afternoon when they felt something bulky on the end of it and pulled out an old safe.
They pried open the safe and found the find wrapped in plastic, but unfortunately ruined by water.
“It was two stacks of hundreds of dollars. Big stacks of bills.” Kane told NY1..
Kane said that as veteran magnet fishermen, he and Agostini have found many safes before, most of which are empty except for plastic bags to hold cash, and he expected this one to be the same.
Mr Cain said he was shocked and swore, and Mr Agostini thought he was joking.
“He showed it to me and the moment I saw the actual money and the security ribbons, I lost my mind,” she said.
Unfortunately, the note was “soaked and pretty much torn,” Cain said.
To avoid any legal trouble, they called the NYPD. Several officers arrived to investigate the strange call on the radio. The officers told the couple they had never seen anything like it before.
Since there was presumably no way to identify the owner of the stolen safe, Kane and Agostini were allowed to keep what they found.
“The pick-it-up-wins rule seemed to work for us,” Kane said.
The couple started magnet fishing during the pandemic.
“We were stuck at home during the COVID lockdown and I’d always wanted to be a treasure hunter… and then I discovered something called magnet fishing,” Kane told NY1.
He called the hobby “poor man’s treasure hunt.”
Finds include a World War II-era grenade salvaged from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn and six or seven guns in Flushing Meadows alone, some dating back to the 19th century.
