Money doesn’t grow on trees, but for one New York couple it emerges from the filthy gunk at the bottom of a city pond.
James Kane and Barbie Agostini were magnet fishing — using a cable to toss a powerful magnet into a body of water — in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens on Friday when they “hooked” something big.
They yanked up their haul and discovered their magnet had grabbed onto a safe - with bundles of $100 bills inside. The soggy, but intact, bills were a new $100,000 fortune for the couple.
“We pulled out and it was two stacks of freaking hundreds,” Kane told NY1.
Kane said they had previously found other old safes, but said that they were typically empty or contained plastic bags and the disintegrated remains of money.
The couple said they contacted the NYPD about the safe once they realized it was stuffed with cash. The police ran a check and confirmed the safe was not connected to any crimes and told the couple they were clear to keep their findings.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Agostini said. “I lost it.”
Kane told NY1 that the couple started magnet fishing during the Covid-19 pandemic. He said it allowed them to go on treasure hunts without having to invest in expensive equipment like sonar or dredging gear.
“We call it the poor man’s treasure hunting,” he told the station.
Past magnet fishing trips had earned the couple guns, World War II era grenades, an in-tact motorcycle, foreign coins and jewelry.
The couple documents their magnet fishing trips on their YouTube Channel “Let’s Get Magnetic.”
Magnet fishing as a hobby blew up during the pandemic, and some have kept with the activity even after lockdown ended. As a result, some odd and unexpected things have been yanked up out of the depths.
Last month, a magnet fisher in New Orleans found a human skull that had been padlocked to an exercise dumbbell, CBS News reported.
In March, unexploded bombs were pulled up by magnet fishermen in the Charles River in Massachusetts in two separate incidents, according to CBS Boston.
