By Michael Rubinkam —
The Associated Press
The court-ordered release of photos, videos, maps and other official documents related to the FBI's secret search for a shipment of Civil War-era gold has made one treasure hunter more convinced than ever that there was a cover-up.
And he wants to prove it.
Dennis Parada fought a legal battle to force the FBI to turn over records of his dig at Dents Run, Pennsylvania, where local lore has it that a shipment of Union gold in 1863 disappeared en route to the Mint. in Philadelphia.
Parada talks about the 2018 FBI digging for Civil War-era gold in an interview at his Clearfield office.Michael Rubinkam/AP
The FBI, which turned to Dents Run after sophisticated tests suggested tons of gold could be buried there, has long insisted it found nothing in the dig.
But Dennis Parada and his advisers, who have spent countless hours poring over newly released government records, take the opposite view.
They accuse the FBI of tampering with key evidence and inappropriately withholding records in an effort to conceal the recovery of a highly valuable and historic cache of gold.
The FBI defends its handling of the materials.
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Parada's battle against the FBI takes place in federal court, where the judge overseeing the case must decide whether the federal bureau should publish its operational plan for gold digging and other records it wants to keep secret.
The judge could also order the FBI to turn over additional materials to Parada.
“We feel like we were betrayed and lied to,
” Parada said in an interview in his small, wood-panelled office, where huge drill bits and sophisticated metal detectors compete for space with rusty miners’ picks, cannon parts and other metal knick-knacks. the Civil War era he has unearthed over the years.
"The truth will come out," says Parada, co-founder of the treasure-hunting company Finders Keepers.
Solving the mystery is not his only goal: he hoped to make money from the recovery of a shipment of gold worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
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An FBI spokesman declined to answer questions about the gold digging records or comment on the cover-up allegations, citing ongoing court litigation.
Last year, the FBI issued a statement publicly acknowledging for the first time that it had panned for gold at Dents Run.
He said he had found nothing, adding that he "continues to unequivocally reject any claim or speculation to the contrary."
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There is little evidence in historical records to suggest that an Army detachment lost a shipment of gold on the Pennsylvania wastelands - possibly the result of a Confederate ambush - but the legend has inspired generations of treasure hunters, and Parada is one of them.
Parada and his son spent years searching for the Dents Run gold, eventually leading the FBI to a remote forest 135 miles northeast of Pittsburgh where their instruments are said to have identified a large quantity of metal.
The FBI turned to a geophysical consulting firm, which detected a mass of between 7 and 9 tons that suggested the presence of gold.
With a warrant, a team of FBI agents came in March 2018 to dig into the hillside.
An FBI cameraman was on hand to document it, at one point interviewing a Philadelphia-based agent from the art crimes team who explained why the FBI was in the woods of one of Pennsylvania's most sparsely populated counties.
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"We have identified through our investigation a site that we believe [...] includes a significant amount of base metals that are valuable, [...] gold, perhaps silver," the agent said in the video, and his face was blurred by the FBI to protect his privacy.
Calling it a "155-year-old cold case," he said the FBI had corroborated Parada's information about the location of the gold through "scientific evidence."
He stressed that the test results did not prove the presence of gold.
Only a dig would help "get to the bottom of this story once and for all," the agent said.
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Parada obtained the video and other documents from the FBI through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, hoping they would help answer questions about what happened at Dents Run five years ago.
Parada stayed away from the dig site while the FBI did their work on him.
He suspects that the FBI conducted a clandestine nightly dig between the first and second days of the court-sanctioned operation, found the gold and took it away.
Residents had already told of hearing a backhoe and jackhammer overnight, when digging was supposed to have stopped, and seeing a convoy of FBI vehicles, including large armored trucks.
The FBI has denied that it conducted a night dig.
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Parada and an adviser, Warren Getler, have focused on a set of FBI photos and an accompanying photographic record that have led them to question the official timeline of the dig.
At issue is the presence or absence of snow in the images and when a storm occurred that briefly interrupted operations.
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For example, an FBI image purportedly taken an hour after the storm shows no snow on a large, moss-covered rock at the dig site.
That same rock is covered in snow in a photo that FBI records show was taken the next morning, about 15 hours after the storm.
They accuse the FBI of altering the sequence of events to hide a night dig.
"We have conclusive evidence that a night dig took place and that the FBI went to great lengths to cover it up," says Getler, co-author of
Rebel Gold
, a book exploring the possibility of buried gold and silver from the time of the Civil war.
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There are other apparent anomalies in the records, according to the Finders Keepers legal petition.
Between them:
Initially, the FBI released hundreds of photos, but in low-resolution, high-contrast black-and-white, making it impossible to tell what time of day they were taken or even, in some cases, what they show.
The treasure hunters again requested several dozen color photos, which the FBI provided.
The agency did not provide any video of the second and final day of the excavation.
It also failed to produce photos or videos showing what the FBI's own hand-drawn map described as a 30-foot-long, 12-foot-deep trench that treasure hunters say could only have been dug overnight.
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Government lawyers acknowledged those gaps in the photographic and video record, but gave no details in a court filing last week.
The consultant hired by the FBI to assess the possibility of gold produced a report of its findings, but the version given to treasure hunters appears to be missing some key pages.
The FBI did not provide any of its agents' travel and expense invoices, which could shed more light on the dig.
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The documents released so far "cast doubt on the FBI's claim to have found nothing and raise serious and troubling questions about the FBI's conduct in the excavation and in this litigation, in which it has gone to great lengths to misrepresent critical evidence." wrote Anne Weismann, a lawyer for Finders Keepers, in a lawsuit seeking more documents, including the FBI's operational plan, which she says were improperly withheld.
The Justice Department did not address in its latest legal filing the most explosive claims by treasure hunters about a possible cover-up.
Instead, the government told a federal judge in Washington DC that the FBI had fulfilled its legal obligation to the treasure hunters to search for their dig records, and asked that the case be closed.
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The judge has not yet ruled.
Parada said she will keep asking questions until she gets satisfactory answers.
"I'll go through with this until the end, until I know what happened to that gold," he said, "how much, where did it go and who has it now. I have to know."
