Construction Crew Finds $10 Million in Gold Bricked Into Wall During Renovation
Kobe was a week into his summer construction job when he found himself holding $10 million in gold.
The 18-year-old was part of a crew renovating a former brewery in Sint-Gillis-Dendermonde, a Flemish community about 40 minutes outside Brussels, Belgium. The team had been removing the foundation to lay sewer pipes when they hit something unexpected.
"When we did that, we suddenly saw something lying around," Kobe told local media. At first they thought they'd stumbled onto a pile of one-euro coins. Then they saw the gold nugget. Then they kept digging.
Site manager Mario heard his crew shouting from across the site. "They shouted, 'We found gold,'" he recalled. "I went to look and took the gold in my hands. We kept digging up new coins and bars. Only then did what we had found really dawn on me."
Mario called his boss. Then the police.
"After 33 years in construction, it is the first time I have experienced something like this," he said.
The haul turned out to be 49 gold bars and more than 4,000 gold coins — worth roughly 9 million euros, or about $10.4 million U.S. The stash had been wrapped in a plastic bag and bricked into a wall in the basement of a villa originally built for the brewery's owner, one Theophilus van Assche, in the late 1800s. One of the bars has a datestamp from the 1960s, suggesting the gold was hidden sometime in the mid-twentieth century rather than the 1890s when the building went up.
"Apparently there used to be a cellar, which they filled in later," Kobe told Belgian broadcaster VTM. "And the gold was really bricked in there — not in a safe or anything — so I think it really was hidden."
Police Chief Patrick Feys had the same reaction most people would. "I thought it was a joke because things like that normally don't happen in real life," he said.
Who Gets to Keep It
Not the guys who found it. Belgian law is clear on this — the crew was required to hand everything over to police immediately, and they did. Mario acknowledged there wasn't much of an alternative anyway. "There are so many coins and bars — it would be almost impossible," he said. "Besides, that would be theft."
The gold is currently being held by CAW Oost-Vlaanderen, a welfare organization that provides support services to residents of Dendermonde. The organization is hoping to use the money for charitable work — which is a fairly remarkable pivot for a sewer pipe project.
Dozens of people have since shown up at the renovation site looking for more gold. Nobody has found any.
Nobody Knows Who It Belonged To
The brewery was built in the 1890s. The gold was hidden sometime after the 1960s based on the dating of at least one bar. Whoever bricked $10 million in gold into a basement wall at some point in the second half of the twentieth century apparently didn't tell anyone where they put it — or the people they told are no longer alive to claim it.
Belgian law requires found treasure to be handed over to authorities, who then attempt to identify the rightful owner. If no owner is found — and given that a plastic bag of gold bars hidden inside a bricked-up cellar wall for decades is not exactly a straightforward estate claim — the property typically reverts to the state or, in certain circumstances, is shared between the finder and the property owner.
Mario is still hoping for a finder's fee. Given that the building is being renovated into transitional housing for homeless people, and the gold may now fund that effort, the story has a particular kind of symmetry to it. Workers laying sewer pipes found $10 million in someone's hidden fortune — and the money may end up helping people who have nowhere to live.
Not a bad Tuesday.
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