Comment by olalonde
15 hours ago
Spending a decade in jail at age 60+ is a hell of a price to pay for a few millions. I'm tempted to believe he doesn't actually know where the coins are. If that's the case, he just spent 10+ years in a cage because a judge didn't believe him....
According to the article, the lawsuit said the coins were worth up to $400m. That's more than a "few" millions, it's $40m per year spent in jail. I think the bigger issue for him is that it will be very hard to launder all of that without getting caught.
At no point in my life would I choose to spend 10 years in jail for $400m. Only if my current living situation was very poor and this was my only way out of it. I can sort of imagine why one would... but it seems like an awful decision to me.
It seems more plausible to me he actually doesn't have the gold.
I would in a heartbeat. $400,000,000 is never-work-again-in-your-life money. Not just for me, but for my parents and other members of my family. You could put it into bonds at a mere 2% APY (far lower than current interest rates) and get 8 million dollars per year in interest for doing nothing.
At 16 waking hours per day, we're losing at least half of that with work, so it would only take 1 additional decade before I break even in terms of time, not even considering the vastly improved quality of life having millions of dollars of annual passive income nets you. I could even afford dram.
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Could it be the sunk cost fallacy? He started out thinking he’d spend a few weeks, then a few months… and before long, he has been in there for years and so he must continue with the lie lest he have wasted years of his life.
I’m amused but I guess not shocked or surprised that some people below this comment have different limits on what they’ll do for money than I do. I 100% would not spend any significant time restricting my freedom in jail for ANY amount of money. You can extend my principle to doing other things for money, also. I think my principle might come down to: I won’t trade myself (me, I don’t mean my time or my knowledge) for money. I won’t relinquish my autonomy or control for your money. Yet some will.
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He could have just give the investors say 80% of what he found and hid the rest without them even knowing the true amount
you can save hundreds, maybe thousands, from poverty and hunger with that kind of money
10 years is nothing compared to 400m
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I would maybe spend one year in prison for 40M$. If I actually had a button in front of me that would — if I pressed it — land me in prison for a year and got me 40M$ when I get out, I still wouldn't do it. But I can see the point there. No way would I spend a second year in prison for another 40M$ after that, not even a year for the remaining 360M$. The subjective value of money does not scale linearly. But then again, people are greedy and like big numbers and other unimportant things and they do give away their valuable time of life for these unimportant things instead of using it for actually valuable things.
>40M$ button
You just reminded me of this old internet horror story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h-cAbOyRXc
Why didn't they just convict him of fraud and fine him the estimated value of the missing coins, rather than trying to convince him to divulge where they were? Now, the guy is out of jail and they still haven't recovered the value of the gold from him. Lose-lose for the plaintiffs and for justice. Why are we so soft on fraud?
I’m not sure that is being soft on fraud, but being realistic and thinking the other dude would crack first.
For one, to convict him, they’d need to prove the coins existed (actually) and they were plausibly worth that much. Not a straightforward thing if you have no idea where they are, eh?
You're really gonna take what the other party to a lawsuit says at face value? They probably took the most expensive "collector coin" and then assumed all the other coins were worth that rather than melt value.
"With a street value of over $10 million dollars, the baggie found on the suspect is expected to vault the police chief to running-mate status for the governor..."
Well, if there is anywhere to learn how (and make friends with whom!) he could possibly launder $400m worth of gold coins….
10 years for refusing to to say where he found gold is wild. people who committed fraud against elderly people and child molesters often get sentenced for less than that.
> 10 years for refusing to to say where he found gold is wild.
No, that's not what happened. I'm guessing you saw this news before under a clickbait title.
It's not about where gold was found, it's about where he stashed it later. These are assets that are (or were) in his hands which partially belong to all the investors he defrauded.
Still point stand that fraud is at times punished harsher then rape or child molesting
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I don’t understand why he won’t just share it, that’s Thorin Oakenshield level of crazy to choose jail over that.
“On my life, I will not part with a single coin.”
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He defrauded his investors. As much as I find that funny, what he did was a white collar crime that has consequences.
Right.
It’s a mystery to me how on one day on HN you will see “corporate death penalty” discussed and on the next “$400MM white collar crimes should not be punished as much as murdering a single person”.
If this were Apple, Google, or Meta having committed the crime, I think the tenor of the discussion would be very different.
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Yeah it's a sad consequence but... He effectively stole from others, why are people shocked? And yes contempt charges shouldn't go this long, but that's a separate qualm than "should he be criminally charged at all".
In Germany, financial crimes are often punished much harder than capital crimes too. Tells you where the priorities lie.
Well, you could look at it from the perspective of incentives. The number of people who would commit a financial crime for $LARGE_SUM in exchange for a short stint in prison is much higher than the number of people who would commit rape or murder for the same stint. Most people don’t even want to commit murder or rape. But most people do want money and if you presented them the opportunity to get it in a non violent manner that they could rationalize in any way…well, now you need some heavy disincentives.
That's true in the US as well. It's because that kind of crime undermines faith in the financial system, something it must have to function. People grumble about white collar criminals getting light sentences, but the easiest way to get sent to jail for fifty years is to swindle a bunch of pensioners out of their life's savings.
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To be fair, that’s pretty common and the justification is that it’s much more difficult to get caught (and the criminals are usually much smarter and better at not getting caught too).
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Well it's not shocking given your countries history. Both target crimes usually committed by their minority groups.
they mostly get elected to positions of great power i guess
Most don't even get sentenced at all, what's your point?
Seems more like sunk cost fallacy, after 12 months in jail you could be unwilling to give up and tell where the treasure is, because then you would have spent a year in jail for nothing, and then it just gets worse and worse each passing year...
At what age do you believe, 10 years in jail are a better price to pay?
Several people in the comments are focusing too much on the 10 years and on if that’s an acceptable trade-off.
It’s worth pointing out no one knew it would be 10 years, not even the judge. The sentence wasn’t “10 years”, it was “indefinitely until we get an answer”. It just so happens that 10 years is when this judge decided “alright, we’re not going to get an answer, no point in the jail time”.
Younger. The opportunity cost of time scales non-linearly with age. If you're old enough, 10 years can be a life sentence.
If I were asked to give up 10 years of my life I would rather choose to give up the final 10 years than 10 years in the prime of my life.
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If you ask people that would still have 25+ years of life after they're freed, I bet a lot of them would willingly take that trade.
I don't think there exists an amount of money I'd take in exchange for 10 years in jail, at any point in my life. 10 years is a long time.
And sure, it depends on the jail... Can I like go for at least a short bike ride or go running? Can I have my computer and internet and Hacker News? Can I drink my oolongs and pu-erhs? Is the food delicious? But then it's not much of a jail anymore...
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Nobody knows how long you will have to live, especially not if you spend 10 years in an average prison. But there is a limited time of being young.
It depends on what life you've lived so far.
This presumes he knew he would be held that long.
Presuming he holds keys to vast wealth, the calculation would have shifted over time. Especially once he was serving his original sentence again starting a year ago.
Another consideration is that many go to jail longer with no upside once getting released.
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