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00:00Mysteries can be buried anywhere, under the earth, beneath the sea, or even right under
00:19our own feet. And when we stumble upon them, sometimes what we find can change history.
00:30Tonight, accidental discoveries that expose dark secrets. From a Prohibition-era hideout.
00:39The room looks like no one's been down here in decades. Then something catches their eye.
00:44To a clue from an infamous crime. It's more money than he's ever seen in his life.
00:51The FBI run the serial numbers and what they find is shocking.
00:56To a scandalous secret hidden in Washington, D.C.
01:01Just steps from the Capitol was the ultimate retreat for Washington's elite.
01:07Join us now, because nothing stays hidden forever.
01:11In the winter of 1977, a man named Ron Likens and his friends were all waiters at the famous Awani Hotel in Yosemite National Park.
01:30They decide on their day off that they are going to go snowshoeing into the frozen tundra of the Yosemite backcountry.
01:45About six miles into their hike, they spot something surprising.
01:49Surprising.
01:52It's a debris trail.
01:53And then suddenly, they encounter an airplane wing.
01:58Just sitting out there in the snow.
02:02They head back and report it to the park rangers.
02:04And before long, officials from four government agencies swarm to the area.
02:09They follow the debris trail and eventually come to a twin engine plane in a frozen lake.
02:20Officials fire up chainsaws and start cutting it out of the ice.
02:24When they cut open the cargo hold, they see something incredible.
02:28They find marijuana, literally tons of it.
02:33They estimate there are 6,000 pounds of weed in the hold.
02:38Authorities spend the next week hauling bundles of it out of the Yosemite Valley.
02:43Unfortunately, their work is cut short when a huge snowstorm rolls in.
02:48A full wintertime salvage operation would be too hazardous.
02:52So the feds have to press pause on the entire operation and wait for the spring.
02:56Before they leave for the season, they run the tail number to ID the plane.
03:01It belongs to a guy named John Glisky, who's been on the DEA's radar for a while.
03:07He's a former army helicopter pilot in Vietnam and now a full-time smuggler.
03:13Authorities contact Glisky's wife and she shares what she knows.
03:18She confirms that about a month earlier, on the night before the crash,
03:21he loads up three tons of weed at a dusty airstrip in Baja.
03:26And under the cover of darkness, flies it into the United States.
03:30But the run ends in disaster.
03:32Glisky's plane goes down in Yosemite.
03:39Leaving both men dead and three tons of marijuana entombed in ice.
03:44Some people overhear off-duty DEA agents at a bar talking about how they had to leave this wreck until spring with tons of drugs still inside.
03:55Among those who hear it are three anonymous hikers who race to the scene days later.
04:00When they reach the plane, one of them sticks his arm into a hole next to the cockpit and pulls out a plastic-wrapped bale.
04:09The plane is packed with five kilo bricks of high-grade Mexican weed.
04:17Now word spreads like wildfire, and in the days that follow, a stream of hikers brave the elements to get to the goods at what they're calling Dope Lake.
04:28When April rolls around, there's an unexpected heat wave.
04:35The snow melts, the trails clear, and the looting goes into overdrive.
04:40It is a full-blown green rush.
04:43Dozens and dozens of hikers make the 32-mile round trip.
04:48Some of them carry out 200-pound loads of marijuana worth about $50,000 at the time.
04:56In just one week, over a half a million dollars of marijuana goes missing at the hands of opportunistic Yosemite hikers.
05:07Rangers launch a surprise raid, but only nab two hikers.
05:11All of the true culprits are never identified.
05:15And the crime slowly fades from memory.
05:19It's one of the wildest forgotten stories in American crime history.
05:24But for a brief window in the 70s, Dope Lake turned Yosemite into the most lucrative hiking trail on the planet.
05:31Years later, a shop owner stumbled on another set of mysterious criminals.
05:40This time, a couple you'd never suspect.
05:42In 2017, a New Mexico antique shop owner named David Van Auker is browsing an estate sale of a recently deceased pair of school teachers named Jerry and Rita Alter.
05:58He combs through some various knick-knacks, pieces of art, and chotskys.
06:04David picks up a few inexpensive items.
06:07He also picks up an old abstract oil painting of a woman.
06:11All in all, he spends about $2,000, and he thinks he can make some money off of it if he cleans up the oil painting and a few of the other items.
06:20Van Auker throws everything in the back of his truck, and when he gets back to his shop, he leans the painting in the back.
06:26Less than an hour later, a customer approaches David and tells him that the painting looks an awful lot like the work of a famous Dutch-American abstract painter by the name of Willem de Kooning.
06:36De Kooning became really popular after World War II in the abstract expressionism movement, and his paintings have sold for millions of dollars.
06:45So it's pretty surprising that two retired school teachers would own an original de Kooning.
06:51After being offered $200,000 for the painting by a customer, Van Auker hides the work in his bathroom and begins researching de Kooning.
07:02What he finds piques his interest.
07:04Sure enough, he soon finds a de Kooning painting called Woman Ochre that looks just like the one he's propped up next to his toilet.
07:13And as he reads about Woman Ochre, he finds out it was stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art.
07:20Van Auker is shocked. Could he really be in possession of a stolen masterpiece?
07:25He doesn't want to get into any trouble, so he calls the Arizona Museum and speaks to the curator.
07:31She tells Van Auker to keep the painting safe, and she'll be there to have a look at it the next day.
07:36Understandably, he is freaking out.
07:38The next day, museum officials visit him to inspect the painting, and sure enough, it is the original Woman Ochre.
07:46That means it's worth just a little more than the $2,000 he spent on it.
07:51It's valued at $150 million.
07:54Turns out, the painting was stolen during a bold museum heist nearly 35 years earlier.
08:03The day after Thanksgiving in 1985 was a pretty slow day at the University of Arizona Museum.
08:09Shortly after opening, a man and woman entered.
08:12They were sort of acting kind of strange and oddly, and they only stayed around for about 15 minutes.
08:21A little while later, as museum security guards made their rounds, they discovered the unimaginable.
08:27One of their most prized paintings, Woman Ochre, had disappeared.
08:32Whoever stole it cut it right out of its frame and walked out the front door.
08:36At least, that's what officials assume happened, because at the time, the museum didn't have security cameras.
08:43Museum staff provided a description of the odd couple to the police,
08:47and mentioned also seeing a red sports car in the parking lot at about the time that they were in the building.
08:53The couple were really the only suspects, but the police had no idea who they really were.
08:59There were no photos, no fingerprints, nothing.
09:02It's not until the estate sale, over three decades later, that investigators are finally able to start piecing it all together.
09:13Police sketches of the suspects do resemble the alters.
09:17And a few old family photos place the couple in the Tucson area at the time of the theft.
09:23One photo even shows Rita and Jerry in a rented red sports car.
09:26All signs point toward them as the culprits.
09:30But without a living suspect, it's almost impossible to prove it for sure.
09:35So David Van Ochre returns Woman Ochre to the University of Arizona Museum of Art and declines the reward money.
09:44When authorities look deeper, they start thinking that a few other paintings supposedly owned by Jerry and Rita were also stolen.
09:50They're still investigating, but it may just turn out that these two unassuming school teachers were some of the best art thieves of all time.
10:03Yard sales can turn up just about anything.
10:08Junk, antiques, even hidden gems.
10:10But one Florida man's discovery carried a secret.
10:14It had been stolen.
10:19Back in 2021 in Brooksville, Florida, Jamie Bath and his wife are browsing a local yard sale.
10:25They like collecting and looking through all sorts of things.
10:29Old coins, vintage radios, maybe a rusty tool or two.
10:33As Bath picks through the goods, he spots a cool metal lying on a table.
10:39It's gold and purple with George Washington's face right in the middle.
10:44And he doesn't know what it is, but for two bucks, he figures, why not?
10:47Later, as he's going through his hall, he spots an engraving on the reverse of the metal.
10:52It says, for military merit, Gus A. Allbritton.
10:57Bath thinks this thing might be important.
11:02So he starts digging.
11:04A quick search tells him all he needs to know.
11:06This isn't just some old metal.
11:09It's a Purple Heart.
11:12The oldest and one of the most prestigious honors awarded to members of the U.S. military.
11:17The Purple Heart is awarded to those soldiers who are wounded or killed in action.
11:24Bath discovers that this is a rare honor.
11:27A very large number of recipients of this metal receive it only because they have been killed in action.
11:33So Bath wants to make sure that it gets back to the brave man or the family of the brave man whose name is engraved on the back of the metal.
11:40Gus Allbritton.
11:42Bath does some sleuthing and tracks Gus down through the VA to a town called Dublin, Georgia.
11:49He happens to be alive and well and has been volunteering there for over 30 years.
11:53The VA passes Bath's message along and when Gus calls him back, Bath is floored by the veteran's heroic story.
12:01Back in the summer of 1968, Gus graduates high school and then receives his draft notice the very next day.
12:08A week later, he reports to Fort Benning to receive infantry basic training.
12:12A few months after that, he's deployed to the Republic of Vietnam.
12:17Over the next two years, Gus defies the odds in numerous battles.
12:23The war was brutal.
12:25And Gus didn't have it easy.
12:27First, an AK-47 round tears through his shoulder.
12:31He survives.
12:33Then he's shot through the midsection.
12:35And again, he survives.
12:38And just when it seems like he's cheated death enough, an RPG explodes in his bunker, sending shrapnel into his back and chest.
12:46Gus is both tough and lucky.
12:49He survives and is awarded the Purple Heart three times.
12:53After the war, the newly decorated hero moves to Florida and gets a job as a court bailiff.
13:00While most people would keep their medals on display, Gus, he's not most people.
13:05He gives one to his son, a second to his daughter, and he keeps the third for himself.
13:10Until one day, it disappears.
13:12In 1983, while Gus is at work, someone breaks into his house.
13:21They steal jewelry, they steal guns, and they steal his Purple Heart.
13:26Gus has spent enough time in law enforcement to know that stolen items like these are rarely recovered.
13:31For nearly four decades, it remains lost until Jamie Bath finds it at a yard sale in the same town where it was stolen.
13:44Law enforcement thinks whoever took it probably had no idea what they had and either tossed it or gave it away.
13:49Once Jamie gets in touch with Gus, he mails the medal back to him.
13:56A small but valuable piece of stolen valor returned to its rightful owner after 38 years.
14:03If you think finding a war medal at a garage sale is wild, wait till you see what two brothers uncovered in their bookstore.
14:13It's 2021 in Evansville, Indiana.
14:19Two brothers, Sam and Adam Morris, are about to open their dream business.
14:25A bookstore that's appropriately called your brother's bookstore.
14:28The brothers are eager to open their doors, but first they need to finish some renovations.
14:35As their workers start ripping up the hardwood, they find something strange.
14:40One section of the floor doesn't match the rest.
14:44At first, this looks like it's just a bad patch job.
14:48But as the workers begin to pry out the wooden slats, they find something unexpected.
14:54It's not just a loose floorboard.
14:56It's a secret trap door.
15:00The workers wave the brothers over, and suddenly this renovation feels more like an investigation.
15:07They climb down into the space below, expecting to find something like an old cellar.
15:13But when they shine their flashlights around, they discover that this is much larger.
15:18The room is covered in a thick layer of dust.
15:22It looks like no one's been down here in decades.
15:25But then something catches their eye.
15:27There's a hole in the far wall about the size of a dinner plate.
15:32When they look through it, they see another space, and what looks like the entrance to another tunnel.
15:38They assume that this is simply a passage that connects to the basement of the building next door.
15:44That's very mysterious, but the brothers have a lot of work to do to get their bookstore open.
15:49So they head back upstairs and get back to work.
15:52A few weeks later, the store opens.
15:56Hoping to pique the curiosity of new customers, they place a sign outside the business that says,
16:03Ask about our secret tunnel.
16:05Soon someone does.
16:07The Evansville African American Museum.
16:09For years, the museum has been researching the Evansville history of the Underground Railroad,
16:17the storied network for enslaved persons who were fleeing southern states in the 1850s.
16:23Museum officials have heard rumors that there was a station of the Underground Railroad somewhere on Main Street,
16:30but they found no evidence until now.
16:32The museum officials take a look at the mysterious room under the brothers' bookstore.
16:37Then they take a look at the hole in the far wall and eventually decide to break through it.
16:45That's when they discover that the tunnel doesn't just go to the basement of the next building.
16:52It keeps going.
16:54As they continue to explore the tunnels, they begin to notice an assortment of strange artifacts.
17:00Glass bottles, tables and chairs built into the tunnel walls.
17:04And the real surprise, a still for making alcohol.
17:09It doesn't look like a safe haven for slaves.
17:12It looks more like a bar.
17:14They realized this tunnel wasn't a station on the Underground Railroad.
17:18It was a Prohibition-era speakeasy.
17:23At the turn of the last century, Evansville was well known for its breweries.
17:28But in 1918, the state of Indiana outlawed the sale of alcohol, two years before the National Prohibition Law.
17:38Not everyone was happy about giving a booze.
17:42With its brewing expertise and strong German drinking culture, Evansville becomes a center of speakeasies and underground drinking halls,
17:51like the one the brothers have discovered under Main Street.
17:56The Morris brothers' fine doesn't just uncover an underground hideaway.
18:01It reveals a hidden and very interesting part of Hoosier history.
18:05It's one of America's most infamous unsolved crimes.
18:15One without any leads until a second grader makes the find of a lifetime.
18:20In 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram is out with his family camping along the Columbia River in Washington State.
18:31It gets cold out, so Brian's father tells him to head down to the river to where the sand is, clear a spot, and build a fire.
18:38While he's smoothing the ground for the fire pit, Brian's arm rushes up against something.
18:43He immediately recognizes a signature distinctive green, and he produces a stack of $20 bills.
18:56It's more money than he's seen in his life.
18:59So he calls his dad over, they start to count the cash, and altogether, Brian has found $5,880.
19:06That's the equivalent of over 20 grand today.
19:08But some of these bills have rotted away down to the size of playing cards.
19:15They don't know if the money is real, counterfeit, lost, or stolen.
19:19They decide that they have to call up the authorities.
19:22They stuff the cash in a plastic bread bag, and when they get home, his dad calls the FBI.
19:29Soon agents show up and collect the money.
19:33The FBI run the serial numbers on the dollars through their database.
19:36And what they find is shocking.
19:40The cash is associated with one of the most well-known crimes in recent American history.
19:47The D.B. Cooper hijacking.
19:50Back in 1971, a man who is later known as D.B. Cooper buys a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle.
19:57He sits in the last row of the plane, and after the plane takes off, has a drink, and then casually passes a note to a flight attendant.
20:06The note read, I have a bomb.
20:10Then he opened his suitcase and showed what looked to be a very real bomb.
20:17And at that moment, it became a hijacking.
20:19He contacts authorities and demands $200,000 and a parachute.
20:29With lots of innocent people on board the aircraft, and with no way of knowing whether or not D.B. Cooper's supposed bomb was real or not, the authorities had no choice but to play along.
20:37Authorities get the money and the chute together.
20:41The plane touches down in Seattle.
20:44D.B. Cooper makes good on his word and lets the hostages go, picks up the money and the chutes, and the plane takes off again.
20:51Shortly after the plane takes back off into the sky, Cooper parachutes out of the plane over the Pacific Northwest, never to be seen again.
21:04And neither is the money, until now.
21:07Almost a decade after the hijacking, Brian Ingram is the first and only person to find any of D.B. Cooper's loot.
21:15This instantly becomes the FBI's best piece of evidence in the infamous crime.
21:19So how does the stolen cash end up on the shores of the Columbia River?
21:25Some claim that Cooper landed in the river and the cash floated downstream.
21:31Others suggest that Cooper buried the cash on that part of the beach and would come back to it later.
21:37Others even accuse the Ingrams of working in cahoots with Cooper by finding this little bit of money as a way to throw the authorities off of D.B. Cooper's trail.
21:47Now, despite the speculation, Brian is a hero among his fellow second graders.
21:54But unfortunately, this epic monetary fine does not make him rich.
21:59The FBI tells Brian he can't keep any of the money he found because it's evidence.
22:05What follows is this multi-year court battle where Brian ends up getting to keep half the money.
22:13The rest goes to the airline's insurance company.
22:16Now, Brian hangs on to this money until 2008 when he ends up auctioning off 15 of those bills, which have a face value of about $300.
22:23But for collectors, they're pieces of an unsolved case, and they're worth much more to them.
22:30At the auction, these bills end up going for about $37,000.
22:35To this day, not a single additional bill from Cooper's ransom has been recovered.
22:41And the hijacking remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in commercial aviation history.
22:47Thousands of miles away and decades earlier, another shocking discovery is pulled not from the sand, but from the sea.
22:59It's April 1935 in Sydney, Australia.
23:06Fisherman Bert Hobson, who's out on the water, attempting to bring in his daily catch of things like amberjack and southern calamari.
23:16As he's hauling in a big catch, he notices that what he's caught is no ordinary game fish, but in fact, is a 14-foot live tiger shark.
23:29He goes to toss it back in the water, but then he gets an idea.
23:34His brother runs the local aquarium, and he figures maybe they could use a new star attraction.
23:40Bert's brother feels, oh, having a shark in the aquarium would definitely bring in the crowds, bring the shark over.
23:46And they do, and they toss it in a tank at the aquarium.
23:50And then there's a problem.
23:52The shark isn't exactly thriving in its new environment.
23:55At first, the shark looks agitated, and then it starts to look sick.
24:02And then one day, in front of a very stunned crowd, the shark convulses and vomits.
24:10What the shark coughs up isn't fish bones or bait. It's a human arm.
24:15Upon further analysis, the authorities realized this arm was not bitten off by a shark.
24:22They don't notice any sort of jagged teeth markings on the arm, but more cleaner incised wounds from either a knife or a cleaver.
24:29So now they realize that there is a homicide on their hands.
24:35The severed arm has a pretty distinctive tattoo of two boxers fighting.
24:41So authorities released this information to the general public, and not long after that, a man by the name of Edwin Smith comes forward.
24:48He says that his brother James had a tattoo just like that.
24:53James Smith is a failed boxer, small-time crook, and an occasional police informant.
24:59Edwin tells police that he hasn't seen his brother for a few weeks.
25:03Further digging reveals that the last person that James Smith was seen with was a man by the name of Patrick Brady.
25:10Now both Brady and Smith work for a local crime boss by the name of Reginald Holmes.
25:17So the police think that Brady and Holmes might have teamed up to take out Smith.
25:24Police arrest Brady first, but when they go after the boss, Holmes, he panics.
25:31He jumps in a boat, speeds into the harbor, and tries to shoot himself in the head.
25:37Now Holmes ends up surviving, and when questioned by authorities, gives his own version of the events.
25:47After he recovers, Holmes swears that he had nothing to do with Smith's murder, and he pins the whole thing on Brady.
25:55Before Holmes can testify at Brady's trial, he's found dead in his car under suspicious circumstances.
26:03Police suspect that Brady had Holmes killed to shut him up.
26:08But without Holmes' testimony or Smith's body, prosecutors have no case.
26:14Brady walks free and lives a long and peaceful life for the next 30 years.
26:19The rest of James Smith's body is never found.
26:23As for what happens to the shark, I think it's safe to say that it never had another meal like that again.
26:34Washington, D.C. is known for its secrets and scandals.
26:39One of the most intriguing lay hidden for over a century, buried in a place you'd never expect.
26:46It's 1997, and the Smithsonian Institution is looking to build the brand-new Museum of the American Indian near the National Mall.
26:54And so before they can build, they want to do a full survey of the site.
27:01As the team surveys this piece of land, they find something surprising.
27:09The workers discover the remnants of a palatial estate.
27:13But what's strange is historians know this area used to be a working-class neighborhood populated with the homes of people who worked in nearby factories.
27:23The foundation of this house, however, is way larger than all of the modest homes around it.
27:30Archaeologists start a formal excavation, and they find china, champagne corks, and various women's fashion pieces.
27:41This is all high-end stuff, and it doesn't make sense to find it in this old working-class neighborhood.
27:47So who could have owned such a luxurious home here?
27:50Some of the museum's researchers start looking at historical maps and real estate records of the day, and they discover that in the 1840s,
27:59six women in their 20s and 30s lived here in a house owned by a woman named Mary Hall.
28:07But Mary wasn't just any woman.
28:10She was known as the Madam of the Mall, and her house was a high-end brothel.
28:16Mary was born in 1814, and by all accounts, became a rather successful prostitute.
28:24She was so successful, in fact, that she was able to earn enough money to buy a lot on what is now the National Mall,
28:32and build a rather impressive house on it.
28:34Today, you find a bunch of stately monuments in the area.
28:38But back then, it was not the most respected part of town.
28:41There were streets with names like Laos Alley and Murderer's Row, so it's incredibly clear that this was a very unsavory area.
28:51But Mary was a very shrewd businesswoman, and she stayed in business for about 40 years.
28:59And in fact, Mary's tenure spanned the terms of about a dozen different presidents.
29:05Just steps from the Capitol, Hall's three-story brick mansion was the ultimate retreat for Washington's elite.
29:14While there are no surviving records naming her high-end clientele, it's clear that the Madam of the Mall was a talented businesswoman.
29:23Mary found great success at a time when women had very few rights to property or business ownership.
29:31In 1883, Mary retired with over $87,000.
29:36That's the modern equivalent of over $2 million.
29:39After getting out of the brothel business, Mary rented the property to a women's health clinic.
29:45In 1886, shortly after her death, it was converted yet again into a school for African American children.
29:54Even though we can acknowledge that Mary's field was a rather illicit one, some say she has a better reputation than many of the politicians that passed through her door.
30:05In a quiet neighborhood backyard, another mystery is about to surface, one that will solve what was thought to be a murder.
30:16In August of 2019, a man is using some online tools to take a virtual walk through his old neighborhood in Wellington, Florida.
30:27While scanning satellite images of his former stomping ground, he notices something unusual about his former neighbor's pond in his backyard.
30:38It's white, kind of shiny, kind of metallic looking, so he zooms in and it looks like a car.
30:48The man calls his former neighbor, Barry Fay, and tells him what he saw.
30:55But Fay's not buying it because he spent thousands of hours in his yard and he's never noticed anything weird, even when the water levels drop.
31:03Just to be sure though, Fay asks a friend to fly a drone over the pond.
31:08And when they take a look at the footage, there's no question, there's absolutely a car underwater.
31:15Fay calls the police and soon his backyard turns into a crime scene.
31:22Officers work late into the night and wind up pulling out a white 1994 Saturn from the pond.
31:29But that's not all they find. Inside the car is a skeleton.
31:36Forensic testing matches the remains to a man who's been missing for decades, a mortgage broker named William Malt.
31:43Authorities look into Malt and soon uncover the shocking details surrounding his disappearance.
31:50In November of 1997, Malt is out partying with a few of his buddies and around 9.30 p.m. that night, he calls his girlfriend to let her know that he's heading home.
32:00But he never made it home that night. In fact, no one ever found a trace of him.
32:04Malt was reported missing and police opened an investigation. But the case went cold until now.
32:12Investigators see no signs of foul play.
32:15They think that Malt lost control of his car, veered off the road and crashed into the pond.
32:21Over the next two decades, the neighborhood developed around the pond.
32:27Houses were built, roads were paved, and all the while, William Malt and his car are hidden beneath the surface.
32:35Thanks to Fay's former neighbor and some zoomed-in satellite images, the case of the missing mortgage broker is finally solved.
32:4322 years later.
32:44Imagine searching for a legendary wreck said to hold 10 tons of gold and silver.
32:58Instead of treasure, you uncover evidence of a crime hidden beneath the sea.
33:02In 2005, a team of researchers launched a mission to locate the wreck of a famous warship that sank in the Mediterranean more than 200 years ago.
33:15The HMS Sussex was a ship in the Royal English Navy's fleet that sank in 1694 during a violent storm.
33:22The team deploys an underwater robot and begins scanning the seabed between Spain and Morocco, where it's rumored that the ship went down.
33:35Hours pass.
33:37They find nothing but sand and shadows.
33:41Then suddenly, bingo!
33:44They see a wreck.
33:45When the remotely operated vehicle moves in for a closer look, something doesn't add up.
33:53The Sussex was a beast.
33:56157 feet long, three towering masts, 80 guns.
34:02But this wreck is a much smaller ship, just 45 feet.
34:06A sleek, two-masted vessel called a Tartain.
34:09It's not what they're looking for, but it's still something worth exploring.
34:12Lying 2,700 feet below the surface, this wreck is remarkably well preserved.
34:19Among the debris, they find pottery and glassware.
34:23They also find Turkish tea bowls and liquor bottles made in Germany and Belgium.
34:28These discoveries all suggest the ship was made to pass as a training vessel.
34:34But its real mission was more sinister.
34:37The rover shines its light on the wreck and reveals four large cannons.
34:43They also see muskets and ten swivel guns.
34:47Researchers know that when a Tartain is outfitted with this type of artillery, that only means one thing.
34:54It's a pirate ship.
34:56Another piece of evidence, the shipwreck's location is on the Barbary Coast,
35:00which stretches along the western coastline of North Africa from modern-day Morocco to Libya.
35:07During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this was a notorious hunting ground for pirates,
35:12who attacked ships and ran brutal slave raids.
35:15The Tartain was one of their primary tools of terror.
35:19From a distance, it looks like a small fishing boat, allowing them to nonchalantly pursue their target.
35:25By the time the target realized they were in danger, it was already too late.
35:29But this ship wasn't just plundering other boats. It was abducting people.
35:39When most of us think about the slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries,
35:44we naturally think of Europeans and Americans enslaving Africans.
35:49But there was also a smaller slave trade working in the other direction,
35:53with Africans from the Barbary Coast enslaving Europeans through the Mediterranean.
36:00It's estimated that 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved by Barbary pirates.
36:06And the area that this ship is in leads researchers to suspect that it was en route to Spain,
36:13which is just across from the Barbary Coast.
36:16By presenting as a harmless trading vessel, the pirates could ambush their target.
36:20And then would use larger galley ships to transport the slaves back to North Africa.
36:30Ships like this menaced the open seas for another half century after this particular boat sank.
36:37Eventually, their reign of terror ended in the early 1800s, thanks to the Barbary Wars.
36:43This amazing discovery serves as a reminder that even the ocean keeps her secrets.
36:48Some lost to history, some just waiting for the right time to resurface.
36:54Sorting through a deceased father's keepsace doesn't usually turn up evidence of a crime.
37:07But that's just what one family uncovers to their total surprise.
37:10In 2023, a Massachusetts family is going through their late father's house.
37:19As they start rummaging through bags and boxes, they find the things that you would expect to discover.
37:26Old documents, holiday decorations, and some family heirlooms.
37:30As they make their way through these boxes, they find something totally unexpected.
37:37A collection of Japanese artifacts.
37:40They carefully collect the antiques, bring them downstairs to try to learn more about them.
37:47With any luck, they figure maybe this stuff might be worth a few bucks.
37:50The family begins researching the unfamiliar artwork, and soon they find themselves on the last website they expected.
38:00The FBI's National Stolen Art File Database.
38:03Basically, if something culturally significant goes missing anywhere in the world, it ends up on this website.
38:11One by one, they start to see that these dusty antiques in their living room seem to be matches to the black and white photos on the FBI's website.
38:20And that can only mean one thing.
38:21All of these artifacts that they find in their dad's attic are stolen Japanese treasure.
38:29The family contacts the FBI to tell them how they stumbled onto these works of art.
38:35They meet up with FBI agent Jeffrey Kelly, assigned to investigate art crime in Boston.
38:42The first thing that I needed to do was verify that these objects were the same ones that were listed on the FBI's stolen property database.
38:49And when I compared them with the old black and white photographs that were on our stolen art file database, you could tell that they were a match.
39:00In all, there are 22 artifacts that date to the Ryukyu Kingdom, the kingdom that ruled Okinawa from the 15th to the 19th centuries.
39:09Little of the art from this time period survived, and that makes these artifacts all the more valuable.
39:14These were not little trophies or knickknacks. These were incredibly important pieces of cultural patrimony for the Okinawan people.
39:23The FBI is determined to figure out how these relics ended up in this attic.
39:29Agents begin investigating the artwork and soon trace them back to World War II.
39:33In the spring of 1945, the Battle of Okinawa was raging in the Pacific.
39:41During the fighting, a group of American soldiers occupied the palace of a royal family that fled the city.
39:48When the fighting ended and Americans vacated this palace, authorities eventually returned to the island and found that many of its artifacts had been looted.
39:57But according to the family, their father was never stationed in the Pacific, something that initially confuses Agent Kelly until he uncovers a clue.
40:07As I'm examining these artifacts, I see that tucked inside a ceramic jug is an unsigned typed letter.
40:16And this isn't just any letter. This is basically a confession.
40:20The author discusses how he came to acquire these pieces when he was stationed in Okinawa and he found them in a palace and he brought them back to Massachusetts.
40:29According to the letter, when this author made it back to the United States, he tried to sell the artifacts to a museum.
40:37The museum declines and the artifacts vanish into storage for decades.
40:43How they surfaced in an attic remains unclear.
40:47But the FBI is now on a mission to send them home.
40:50In 2024, the FBI teams up with the Smithsonian to help pack up all of these ancient artifacts and return them to Japan, to their rightful home.
41:03It was a big event in Okinawa for them to finally get these items back, items that they never thought that they would see again.
41:10And I was really proud that we were able to help out.
41:13It's just part of the 900 million dollars that the FBI's art crime program has recovered over the years.
41:23Whether it's ransom money, stolen treasure or a case gone cold, sometimes the darkest secrets have a way of coming back into the light.
41:33I'm Danny Trejo.
41:34I'm Danny Trejo.
41:35Thanks for watching Mysteries on Earth.
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