Finding Columbus’s Gold: A Grand Adventure on the Island of Hispaniola

By Howard Yasgar

In 1966, an old friend invites Matt Vercair to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to assist in disassembling and selling a now defunct Haitian railroad, acquired under unusual circumstances. Once in Haiti, Matt is introduced to chief archeologist Dr. Marc Blanchet. Blanchet is an expert on Christopher Columbus and everything he did on the island of Hispaniola.

According to Blanchet, the history being taught about Columbus is a fraud. Instead of exploration, Columbus’s true intentions were to amass gold and sell as many slaves as he could to finance his travels. Blanchet knows where a large cache of Columbus’s gold has been hidden in Haiti for five hundred years.

With the help of a map, Matt now embarks on an incredible journey to recover the gold, traveling across previously unexplored terrain. The railroad is of little concern as they search for hidden treasure, but it’s possible Matt is about to find a lot more than riches in the beautiful but dangerous wilds of Hispaniola.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jul 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665723862

Howard Yasgar

Howard Yasgar was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He attended New Haven State Teachers College and graduated from the University of New Haven. He moved to Miami, Florida, in 1963 and still lives there.

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Copyright © 2019 Howard Yasgar.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This fictional novel is inspired by a true story. Names and characters have been changed. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Archway Publishing

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2384-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2385-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2386-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022909156

Archway Publishing rev. date: 07/06/2022

CONTENTS

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter 1 The Call from Haiti

Chapter 2 The Reason for the Call

Chapter 3 The Railroad Project and the Firebombs

Chapter 4 Meeting Dr. Marc Blanchet

Chapter 5 A Columbus History Lesson

Chapter 6 Columbus’s First 1492 Voyage

Chapter 7 The Columbus Colony of Isabella

Chapter 8 The Friend and the Cab Driver

Chapter 9 The Cabaret in Haiti

Chapter 10 The Conversation with John

Chapter 11 Good News

Chapter 12 The Meeting and the Partnership

Chapter 13 The Pass to the Interior

Chapter 14 The Railroad Project and the Jeep

Chapter 15 The Trip to Hinche

Chapter 16 The Trip to Saltadere

Chapter 17 The Village and River of Saltadere

Chapter 18 Finding the Gold

Chapter 19 Back to Port-au-Prince with the Gold

Chapter 20 The Hospital and the New Theories

Chapter 21 First Trip to the Dominican Republic

Chapter 22 Second Trip to the Dominican Republic

Chapter 23 Third Trip to the Dominican Republic

INTRODUCTION

I am Matt Vercair, and this story is about my unusual adventure: the finding of Christopher Columbus’s gold on the island of Hispaniola in 1967.

One evening in December 2012, out of curiosity, I was surfing the web and looking at things being posted regarding the country of Haiti. I had spent a considerable amount of time in Haiti back in the 1960s, and I was interested to see what other people had to say about it.

I came across an interesting post from a fellow who had recently been in Haiti. He was looking to find out what had happened to the Haitian railroad system. The fellow said he had found a few remnants of the railroad, and he had taken several pictures of some railroad pieces he had found, which he posted. The fellow said the railroad seemed to have just disappeared all of a sudden, and no one really knew what had happened to it. He said the rumor was that it had been sold to the Japanese sometime in the late 1960s.

As I read his blog, I sort of felt sorry for him because he had spent so much time looking for what had happened to the railroad, and none of the people he had spoken to seemed to really know anything about it. But I knew everything about it.

It was an unusual move for me, but I replied to him on the internet that very evening. I told him I had been involved with the removal of the railroad in the late 1960s and would be happy to answer any of his questions. I expected a reply, but I never heard anything from him.

Several months later, I received a phone call from a fellow who claimed he was some kind of historian doing some research on the country of Haiti. He said he had seen the same post I had seen on the internet, as well as my reply. He said he also was interested to know what had happened to the railroad, so I told him all about it. When I was done, he asked me why I had been in Haiti in the first place, and he wanted to know what else I had been involved with while I was there.

I was hesitant to tell him about everything I had done in Haiti back in the 1960s, because I not only had been involved in removing the railroad but also had gotten myself involved in searching for hidden gold—gold that had once belonged to Christopher Columbus. My search for the Columbus gold had ended up in the Dominican Republic as well, and not everything I had done in those countries was exactly legal.

However, after my lengthy phone conversation with him, I got to thinking about it. It had been more than fifty years since I had been involved in removing the railroad in Haiti and gone after Columbus’s gold. I assumed there must have been some kind of statute of limitations involved, and since so much time had passed, I probably could tell him everything that had happened without getting myself prosecuted for removing historical artifacts. I knew the removal of the Haitian railroad in itself was a spectacular enough story, but the hunt for Columbus’s gold was far more interesting.

My treasure hunt on the island of Hispaniola was, in many ways, similar to some of the Indiana Jones–type movies I had seen; the only difference was that my adventure on the island of Hispaniola was a real adventure and actually happened, while those Indiana Jones movies were written for entertainment.

After giving it a lot of thought, I decided to write down everything I could remember, which was not a simple task, as my treasure hunt had transpired more than fifty years ago.

What you will be reading here is an outline of what happened back then. The manuscript consists of an introduction, a prologue, and twenty-three chapters, well over five hundred pages in all, and it is written just as I remember it.

Hispaniola is an island located in the West Indies, with two-thirds of the island occupied by the Dominican Republic, which is a Spanish-speaking country, and one-third occupied by Haiti, which is officially a French-speaking country.

At the time when all of this happened, the official language in Haiti was French, but the common language on the streets was a version of Creole locally referred to as patuá, or patois, and many Haitians who lived on the border with the Dominican Republic spoke both patois and Spanish.

My particular story started in 1966. I had an automotive parts rebuilding company located in Hialeah, Florida, and I also had started thinking about setting up a small precious-metals refinery to be located in the town of Miami Meadows, Florida.

I had, just by chance, purchased a small ten-ounce gold ingot from a wholesale jewelry dealer operating out of a small booth located at the Miami Jewelry Exchange in downtown Miami. The jeweler told me that the seller of the gold bar had told him it came from a secret hidden cache of Christopher Columbus’s gold. He said it was gold hidden by Columbus on the island of Hispaniola. The seller, a Spanish-speaking Haitian, had said that supposedly, a lot more of the gold bars were going to be available, all of them coming from that same secret Columbus cache.

The next thing I knew, the jeweler called me in the evening to tell me that his supplier had been shot dead. When he told me that, we both were nervous and began speculating on why he might have been killed. We didn’t know if it was because of his selling the gold bar to the jeweler or if it was some kind of professional killing, or it could have been about something else we knew nothing about. To say that the jeweler and I were both scared regarding it would be an understatement. The jeweler told me that witnesses said the killer was a well-dressed, muscular black guy wearing sunglasses.

Before I heard that the guy had been killed, I was excited to have been able to buy the gold ingot, because I felt as if I were holding an actual piece of history. I felt that it was a historical relic that came from the time of Christopher Columbus, and it was possible he could have held it in his hands himself.

In early 1967, I received a phone call from Haiti, from my old friend Eli Red Hoffman. Eli was what one would call a freelance wheeler-dealer, and he was, for a period of time, my mentor, as well as the best man at my wedding, but I hadn’t heard from Eli for several years, and I had sort of lost track of him. In his phone call, Eli said to me only that he wanted me to come to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, immediately.

Because of my past knowledge of Eli, I was sure that whatever he wanted me for would probably be something interesting—and possibly illegal.

At the time when Eli called, all I knew about the country of Haiti was that it was on the island of Hispaniola, the same island where my gold ingot had come from.

Back then, I had several Haitian auto parts customers I did business with. They all came regularly to Miami to see me, but when they did, I never dared to ask any of them if they knew my friend Eli. I was always afraid of what they might tell me if I asked, and I didn’t want to hear it, especially if any of them had had a problem in dealing with him.

After Eli’s call, I could not resist the chance for adventure, and I made the flight to Port-au-Prince. Thus, the grand adventure began.

Although all of these events transpired more than fifty years ago, in my story, I have done my best to accurately relate everything exactly as I remember it.

I make no excuses for poor grammar, as I am not a wordsmith.

PROLOGUE

My name is Matt Vercair. The date was November 22, 1963. In case you don’t remember, that was the same day President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. It also was the day on which I was supposed to get married. The wedding had been planned for the evening of November 22. I was twenty-five years old, and there I was at about eleven in the morning, walking down West Main Street in Stamford, Connecticut. I was walking toward a used car lot and auto wrecking business I used to run only a few months earlier. Why I was there in Stamford Connecticut on that particular day is kind of a long story, but it’s a story I’m going to have to tell you. I must tell you all this because it had a big impact on what was to happen to me only a few years later.

The story began back in 1960, when I went to New Haven State Teachers College. I went there with the intention of becoming a schoolteacher. However, by my second year, I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher; I simply didn’t have the temperament to deal with any wise-ass kids. So I had a long talk with the guidance counselor, and she suggested to me that lots of people just like me should be doing other things rather than becoming teachers. I agreed with her, and I decided to take some time off from school to see what I really wanted to do with my life.

Fortunately, my dad was a journeyman electrician as well as a teacher in Local 90, the electrical workers’ union in New Haven, Connecticut, which was lucky for me, because back then, getting a job in any trade union was strictly a father-to-son proposition. So my dad pulled a few strings, and the next thing I knew, I was going to make my fortune working as an apprentice electrician.

Ironically, the first job I was sent to was working on a new addition to New Haven State Teachers College, the same college I had just quit. So there I was, up on a scaffold, installing light fixtures in the ceiling, with all my former classmates waving and yelling to me as they walked to their classes.

It didn’t take long before I realized I wasn’t going to get rich as an apprentice electrician installing light fixtures, so I enrolled in the Local University of New Haven. They had what they called the Cooperative Program. It was a neat deal designed exactly for people like me. The program allowed you to attend college classes in the morning and work at your career-choice job in the afternoon, so for me, the program seemed too good to be true.

As soon as I was admitted to the college, I went to look for a part-time job. I knew I wanted to get a job at an automobile wrecking yard in Milford, Connecticut, called Medford Auto Wrecking.

Several years before, when I was 15 years old, I had visited Medford Auto Wrecking with my best friend, Thomas Andrews. We wanted to buy a couple of used automobile engines to build hotrods. One afternoon, Thomas and I sneaked into the wrecking yard, and because no one saw us, we had the opportunity to walk all around the place before we finally got caught. From what I could see before they caught us, Medford Auto Wrecking was a marvelous place. Not only did they buy junk cars and process them into scrap metal, but first, they removed all the vehicles’ useable parts, reconditioned them, and sold them as rebuilt. As we walked around the yard, I saw exactly how they did it. Medford Auto Wrecking had several small shops set up to do the parts rebuilding work. The moment I saw the operation, I knew right away that was the kind of business I wanted to be in someday.

So now there I was, coming from New Haven College and driving to Medford Auto Wrecking to apply for a part-time job.

I parked under some shade trees, and I walked over to what looked like a small, run-down one-bedroom farmhouse. It had a hand-painted Office sign over the door. I walked around several old greasy engines and transmissions lying on the ground and walked up three rickety wooden stairs to enter a room that had once been the living room of the farmhouse. Actually, I couldn’t enter the room; I had to stand in the doorway for a moment because the room was already full of people.

Slowly, I squeezed my way into the room, closing the door behind me, and it appeared no one even noticed me walk in. To my left and right were two occupied desks. Sitting at the desk on my left was a young fellow who was probably in his late twenties or early thirties, and he was screaming at someone on the telephone. I looked at him, but he hardly even looked up to notice me. At the desk to my right sat a pretty blonde girl. She was rapidly pressing all the buttons on her phone as she attempted to answer the incoming calls.

As I stood there, the blonde girl leaned back and yelled around me to the fellow at the other desk, the guy who was screaming into the phone. She said, Ronnie, lines two, three, and four are all for you.

Behind the blonde girl, sitting on top of an old scratched-up credenza, was a fellow I immediately recognized as one of the owners. He was a miserable bastard named John. He was the grouchy guy who had caught Thomas and me walking unescorted around the yard several years before.

John sat there on the credenza with his feet dangling. He was arguing with a distraught-looking Puerto Rican fellow. When he finally noticed me, he stopped arguing with the poor Puerto Rican guy and said to me, What the hell do you want?

I said, I’m here to apply for a part-time job.

We don’t need you, replied John. Get the hell out of here!

I replied to him, Sir, I know how to use a cutting torch. I looked him straight in the eye, and I could see by his facial expression that he didn’t care at all about what I said. He just gave me another disgusted look and went back to arguing with the Puerto Rican fellow.

As I stood there, I couldn’t help but hear their conversation. The Puerto Rican guy said, Mr. John, I only need a ten-cent-an-hour raise. I have a new baby.

John replied, You don’t deserve a raise. You’re fired. Get the hell out of here. I stepped aside as the Puerto Rican fellow left the office.

The office was dead quiet for a few seconds, and then Ronnie, the hyper young fellow at the desk on my left, turned toward us, saying, Well, John, that was a nice thing you did, firing the only good short steel torchman we had.

So again, I said, Sir, I know how to use a cutting torch. I know how to cut short steel.

That was how I first met Ronnie, and that was how I got that Puerto Rican’s job, which paid the lofty sum of $1.35 an hour.

I started work the next day, and that was when Ronnie introduced me to Midget, a young fellow who really was a midget. Midget was a good-looking young fellow with wavy black hair, and he stood about four feet tall. He later told me he was twenty-eight years old, but if not for a few wrinkles around his mouth, I would have guessed he was about fourteen.

Midget worked at the Medford Auto Wrecking yard as the head used parts remover, and he was dressed for the job. He had on a greasy, stained long-sleeved woolen shirt; a pair of dirty, wrinkled jeans that were way too long for him; and lace-up steel-toed work boots. To hold up his pants, Midget wore a wide brown leather belt, which had a big, round key ring with at least fifty keys hanging off it. He also had an oxyacetylene torch lighter hanging off his belt.

Besides being the official junkyard parts remover, Midget appeared to be Ronnie’s buddy and right-hand man.

Midget was anxious to show me that he was driving a neat junkyard car, an old 1941 Chevrolet with no doors or trunk. It had a built-in big wooden box with all kinds of junkyard tools. Midget also kept an oxyacetylene cutting torch in the car, which he used to remove metal parts as needed. Midget’s 1941 Chevrolet, besides having no doors or trunk lid, also had no muffler, so it always sounded loud. Whenever Midget drove it around, it was as if he were driving in a stock car race, and anyone could always tell where he was as he drove around the junkyard.

On my first day at work, I got into the passenger side of Midget’s car, and I saw that he had two comfortable seat cushions piled up on top of each other so he could see through the front windshield. He drove me to the end of the junkyard, which was a big open field with lots of old cars waiting to be cut up.

In the middle of the field, Midget introduced me to two black fellows. Their job was turning junk cars onto their sides to cut the car bodies and engines from the chassis. Both the torch men were jovial and friendly, and I could see why: one of them had a pint of whiskey sticking out of his rear pocket.

The two fellows worked as a team. After cutting loose the body from the car’s chassis, they then cut out the car’s engine, which just fell onto the ground. At the end of the day, all the steel chassis were dragged over to a big pile of other car chassis, and with a pole truck, they were piled on top of one another. The same was done with the engines, which were all put on a huge engine pile.

In my new job, I was called the short-steel torchman. I was supposed to cut up the pile of chassis into three-foot-long pieces, so the steel could eventually be sold as number-one and number-two scrap iron.

I loved my job. Every day I would climb up onto the chassis pile and start cutting with my torch. From my perch atop the pile of chassis, I watched as the two guys cut the cars up and sneaked in a drink or two from the bottle. Sometimes when they did that, they would forget to remove the gas tanks from the chassis they brought me. Usually, there was no gas left in the old gas tanks, just some stale fumes, but when the sparks from my torch accidentally fell into them, they would explode with a loud boom, and sometimes the explosion would blow me three feet up into the air. Every time a gas tank blew up, everyone working around the yard came running to see if I was still alive. It was great fun!

One day, when I was standing on top of the chassis pile, I saw a huge dust cloud out in the car-cutting field. From my position atop the pile, I recognized that it was my boss, Ronnie, driving a late-model Lincoln. I saw that he quickly hid the Lincoln behind some other cars and then got out, slamming the door shut. The two car-cutting guys quickly tipped the Lincoln over and cut it up into small pieces.

Later, Midget told me that Ronnie had been in a minor auto accident with the Lincoln, but because it was a stolen car and he had no papers, Ronnie drove it to the car-cutting field and made it disappear. I couldn’t believe Medford Auto Wrecking would do something illegal like that.

After a few months of working there, I heard that Ronnie’s grouchy partner, John, had a fight with another employee, the fellow running their starter and generator rebuilding shop. I heard that the guy just gave up on arguing with John over money and quit. I then asked Ronnie for the job of running the rebuilding shop, and he gave it to me.

Running the starter and generator rebuilding shop was a wonderful new experience for me. Every few days, the junkyard workers would dump a load of used starters and generators onto the shop floor. My job was to take all the starters and generators apart and fix them up. It was a great learning experience for me, and I loved doing it. I carefully repaired, tested, and painted each one, and it wasn’t long before I had all the shelves in the shop full of reconditioned starters and generators.

Once I was done, I found that I had lots of extra time on my hands. Ronnie also noticed I had free time, and he asked me if I would do him a favor and haul some cars for him. Ronnie told me that every week, he needed cars towed to a storage yard he owned in Stamford, Connecticut. He said that once I arrived at the Stamford yard, I would find late-model cars waiting to be hauled back to Medford.

I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe Ronnie would trust me to tow all these late-model cars all the way up the Connecticut Turnpike to the Stamford yard. But Ronnie did, and he gave me explicit instructions. He said the Stamford yard was located just a couple of blocks off the Connecticut Turnpike’s West Avenue exit.

Once I got there, I saw that in the rear of the storage yard was a large metal gate that opened onto a residential street called Annie Place. I found that the Stamford storage yard had about a hundred older cars. They were all stacked up one atop the other, except for the ones near the rear gate on Annie Place. That was where all the late-model cars seemed to be parked, where they appeared to be hidden from view.

Ronnie had explained to me that all the cars I was hauling to Stamford were eventually going to other auto wreckers located in the Bronx, New York. He told me the auto wreckers in the Bronx had their own keys to the rear gate.

After a few days, I noticed that all the cars I was hauling seemed to be new, and they didn’t appear to be junk cars at all. None of them seemed to have any real damage. I thought it was strange for a junkyard to be hauling late-model cars, so one day, after I brought a nice car back to the Medford yard, I watched to see what they did with it.

As soon as I arrived with the car, they quickly disassembled it, taking off all the good parts and saving the expensive front fenders, hood, and bumpers, which they loaded right away onto their delivery truck. Next, the engine and transmission both went to the engine storage building, and the rest of the car they quickly cut up for scrap metal. Within a half hour, the car simply disappeared. That led me to suspect that perhaps I was hauling stolen cars, and my boss, Ronnie, was running what was called a chop shop. The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that I was now part of a stolen-car ring, and that bothered me.

One rainy day, I was at the Medford yard, talking with Midget, when he confided to me that about once a month, he was given a list of cars by Ronnie. The list consisted of late-model cars that had parts needed by a large auto wrecking yard in New York. Midget said it was his job to drive to large Connecticut shopping centers along with five Puerto Rican employees from the Medford yard. At the shopping centers, Midget would drive around until he located the exact late-model car on Ronnie’s list. After that, Midget jimmied the car’s door open and, being a midget, crawled under the dashboard and hot-wired it. Then one of his drivers would get in the car and bring it to the Medford yard. It was my job to haul the stolen car to the Stamford yard, where Midget said it was later picked up and taken to be disassembled in New York. Midget told me that the guys in New York were doing the same thing he was. They were stealing cars in New York that had parts needed by Ronnie in the Milford, Connecticut, yard.

Fortunately for me, my stolen-car-hauling days were soon over, as graduation time at New Haven University arrived, and I quit my job at Medford Auto Wrecking. Surprisingly, several months after my graduation, out of the blue, my friend Midget called to tell me that Ronnie had stopped using the yard in Stamford. We both speculated that the FBI had probably gotten wind of his operation, and Ronnie was probably forced to close it down. At the time of Midget’s call, I was looking for a business to get into, so I thought it might be a good opportunity for me to ask my former boss, Ronnie, to lease me his now-closed Stamford yard.

At that time, I believed I knew enough about the auto wrecking business to profitably run the Stamford yard, making it into a normal automobile junkyard selling used auto parts. I also thought I could eventually run a small used-car lot up on the West Main Street parking area. I felt that after all my experience in working at the Medford wrecking yard, I knew something about the junk car business, and I was sure I could be successful at it.

When I went back to the Medford wrecking yard to see my old boss, Ronnie, and ask him if I could lease the Stamford property, Ronnie was as happy as could be to see me—maybe a little too happy about it all. Ronnie said he would lease me the Stamford yard. Just give me twelve hundred dollars in cash and another two hundred every month in cash, and you’ve got the place.

So I returned the following week with the money, which I had borrowed. When I asked Ronnie for a receipt for the payment, one would have thought I had put a dagger in his heart. He said he trusted me, and I should trust him, so there was no receipt.

As Ronnie took my money, he shook my hand and told me that the real name of the Stamford yard was West Side Auto Trading. He then gave me a photocopy of what appeared to be a current Connecticut junkyard license.

The next day, I drove the forty-five miles from my home in Westville, Connecticut, to my brand-new auto wrecking business in Stamford. I was so excited that I made sure I didn’t waste even a minute’s time in getting started. The first week I was there, I went out and started buying more junk cars for fifteen to twenty dollars each. I was trying my best to make the Stamford yard seem like a real automotive junkyard.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had made a bad mistake in getting involved with a swindler and car thief like Ronnie. I found that out when the FBI came to visit me a few times. They always said they were looking for Ronnie, and not only were they looking for him, but they also said they now had a file open on me as well. Then they asked me where my friend Eli Red Hoffman was. I told them I had never heard of anyone by that name. They both laughed, and I could see they didn’t believe me. But needless to say, I was disturbed to hear that the FBI had an open file on me.

Next door to the Stamford yard was a small tavern called the Dew Drop Inn. Every morning around eight or nine o’clock, I went there for a cup of coffee. There were always a half dozen local citizens sitting there having their first beer of the day. When I spoke with them, they all said I was nuts for thinking I could make a living from the wrecking yard next door. I didn’t pay too much attention to them, because I thought I was just listening to a bunch of unemployed local boozers. But I should have realized they knew what was going on in the neighborhood much better than I did. They all said I should be open for business every Sunday. I thought they were all just crazy and joking around with me. But when I first leased the place from Ronnie, I should have realized I was dealing with a crook right from the start. I should have checked to see if the name West Side Auto Trading was a legally registered name, because I later found out it wasn’t registered at all. Also, I should have checked to see if the junkyard license Ronnie gave me was legal, because I later found out that wasn’t legal either, nor did he even own the Stamford yard.

I found this out the hard way, when one day the Connecticut junkyard license inspector showed up and started yelling at the top of his lungs at me. He said he had warned Ronnie a million times that he couldn’t transfer the junkyard license to anyone. He said a junkyard license was a nontransferable item, and he threatened to close me down. At that point, I realized I had made a bad decision in trusting Ronnie. I realized he had conned me out of my money, and sooner or later, I would be in big trouble with either the Connecticut license people or the FBI. So after about fifteen months of working my ass off six days a week, I had little money to show for any of it, and I decided to close the place down.

I never had been able to figure out why, after so many hours of hard work, I had so few customers coming in to buy used parts, but I soon found out. One Sunday afternoon, I brought my fiancée up to the Stamford yard to show her my wonderful business. As I rattled the lock on the big metal gate on Annie Place, I saw about a dozen people jumping over the wrecking yard’s side fences and running away. Apparently, they had all been in my yard, stealing the parts for free. Now I knew why I had so few customers coming in during the week: everyone in Stamford just waited for Sunday and then hopped over the fence and stole whatever he needed. Then and there, I decided that wasn’t the business for me, so on the following Monday morning, I started to clean out all my personal belongings and put them in my car.

As I was doing so, a strange thing happened: the real owner of the Stamford yard unexpectedly showed up.

There I was, standing at the bottom of the concrete ramp in the wrecking yard, when I saw a short, well-dressed fellow jauntily walking toward me. He was wearing a dark blue pin-striped business suit, a long-sleeved white shirt, and sharp-pointed black shoes, and he had on a beautiful red-striped necktie. He looked as if he’d just walked out of a Wall Street brokerage office.

As he came walking down the ramp with his suit jacket folded over his left arm, he extended his right arm to shake my hand. As he got closer, I saw that he looked sort of like someone from the Middle East, with his dark complexion, angular nose, and slicked-back jet-black hair. When I saw his offer to shake my hand, I reached out and shook his hand, and then the fellow said, Hello, Matt. I’m Abby, and I have heard everything about you. Now, please get off my property.

He was smiling as he said it, and he was looking me straight in my eyes. I was sure he was waiting for me to have some kind of a shocked reaction, and I probably should have. Abby didn’t know I was ready to get off the property that day anyway, so I thought he was a little surprised when I said, OK, sure thing, Abby. I’m leaving right now.

As we both started walking back up the long concrete ramp to West Main Street, Abby asked me, What are you going to do now?

I said I didn’t know. Then, without any hesitation, he asked me if I would like to join up with him and his associate as a partner.

Abby said, I need someone young like you to help me manage my various business enterprises. He said he had already heard from several people that I would be the perfect candidate for the job.

I asked Abby who the heck had told him that, and Abby said, You know, your friends Ronnie and Red.

So once more, I heard the name Red. Who the hell is this guy called Red? I asked him.

You know, Eli ‘Red’ Hoffman, Abby replied. He’s Ronnie’s partner in the used-car business at Medford Auto Wrecking.

I didn’t remember anyone called Red, but it appeared this guy Eli Hoffman knew me. Since now I was technically unemployed and really had nothing better to do anyway, I agreed to listen to whatever Abby was going to propose. We walked back up the concrete ramp and into the little wooden office building.

Follow me. I want to sit down and talk, Abby said.

In the small office building, there were the two rooms. The front one was about a ten-foot-by-ten-foot square with a beat-up wooden office desk and three old wooden chairs. As we entered, I saw there was someone already sitting in one of the old chairs. He was an elderly gentleman with thinning yellowish-white hair, and I thought he might have been about eighty or eighty-five years old. He was just sitting there pensively with his hands folded in his lap, staring at the floor. I could see his pants were pulled up almost to his chest.

Abby said, Matt, I want you to meet my associate, Eichel Blumenstock.

Eichel looked up at me with big, watery eyes and a genuine smile, and he raised both his hands to shake mine. Abby stepped around to the back of the old, scratched desk and sat down behind it. Then he put his feet up and leaned back in one of the chairs. I thought Abby was acting as if he were a CEO of some major corporation, and that was when he made his proposition to me. Abby offered me the position of vice president of his corporation. I didn’t ask him exactly what the corporation was or what the duties of a vice president were, but it sounded pretty good to me, especially since I had no other job prospects. I listened to Abby and happily accepted the vice president’s position in his corporation.

Then, suddenly raising his voice, with a big smile, he took his feet off the desk and said, Now let’s go make some money.

I thought that sounded like a good idea, because at the time, I didn’t have any money. We all shook hands, including my new friend and partner Eichel Blumenstock.

Over the next year, I eventually managed no fewer than ten of Abby’s ventures, ranging from rebuilding car transmissions to be used in making farm tractors in Israel to supplying thousands of used tire casings to automotive tire recappers all around New England. Abby was also involved in buying lots of items at auctions, and he had just purchased the entire electroplating facility of Chase Brass and Copper Company in Naugatuck, Connecticut. I was to help him dispose of the equipment. He also dealt in scrap metals and taught me the business. To my surprise, my job also included the removal of precious metals from US government surplus, and another one of his businesses involved the rebuilding of used automobile wheels, which was quite a business. Tire dealers used rebuilt wheels in the winter to mount snow tires. We were so busy in the wintertime that we could hardly keep up with the demand. Besides all of this, Abby was also running the used-car lot I used to have on West Main Street at the Stamford wrecking yard, and it became my responsibility to keep that business running smoothly.

Once a month, Abby and I would drive to White Plains, New York, and he would look for a sizeable new-car agency. Then he would strut in like a big-shot car dealer, and after talking for a few minutes to the sales manager as I watched, he would buy all the used cars they had in their back rows. Abby paid them fifty dollars for each car, and at first, I thought his idea was crazy, but I soon learned that the car agencies were all happy to have him clean out their older cars, and for Abby and me, it was a steady stream of inexpensive used cars. My job was to make sure all those older cars were running and made it to our Stamford lot. Whenever Abby and I were on the road, he would leave Eichel Blumenstock sitting in the office at the Stamford yard, where he sold the used cars for between $100 and $125 each.

After several months of doing the books on our used-car operation, I noticed that about eight cars were missing, so I reported the loss to Abby. Abby then became very serious, and he spoke sternly to Eichel. Eichel, where are all the missing cars? Tell me. Where are they?

Eichel looked up at Abby and answered, Abby, they are all there on the highway in New York. Eichel, being a devout Jew, did not work or do anything manual, such as driving a car, on Friday after sundown, so if Eichel got stuck in traffic on his way home to the Bronx, he simply got out of the car and removed the license plate, putting it in his jacket pocket. Then Eichel would walk home, even if it took him all night. Eichel simply abandoned whatever car he was driving, leaving it standing in the traffic on the highway.

By December 1962, I felt I had had more than enough of Abby and Eichel. I was burned out and tired of keeping up with all of Abby’s business ventures. Another reason I needed to make a hard decision was because I was thinking about getting married, and running Abby’s businesses was requiring all my time. So I seriously thought about resigning from Abby’s corporation. What had started out as an interesting job had begun to wear me out. There was no question: I loved all the great learning experiences, but by January 1963, I felt that enough was enough, so I finally sent my letter of resignation to Abby.

In March 1963, two months had passed since I resigned from my involvement with Abby and Eichel. I still needed to earn a living, and while I was deciding what I wanted to do, I began buying some factory excess merchandise and selling it to several surplus dealers located on Canal Street in Manhattan. Because of my experience with the dealers on Canal Street, I made it my business to drive from New Haven to New York every Wednesday morning to see them.

One Wednesday, as I was driving up the turnpike, I noticed my old West Avenue exit, the exit I always had used to get to my wrecking yard and car lot. The exit sign became like a magnet, forcing me to turn off the highway and drive past my old car lot. I was anxious to see what was going on there. As I exited the turnpike, I told myself I was doing it strictly out of curiosity, and it would only take a minute for me to take a quick peek. I had already heard through the grapevine that Abby had turned our used-car lot over to Eli Red Hoffman, the guy I had heard so much about for several years. He was the fellow the FBI said I knew, but I didn’t. Now was my opportunity to finally meet this guy Red in person.

When I got to my old car lot on West Main Street, I noticed there were a lot more cars for sale there, and they were of a much better quality than when I had been there. I noticed as well that the front door of the little white office building was wide open, so I pulled my car onto the lot, took a deep breath, got out, and walked into the office. Finally, there he was, Eli Red Hoffman, sitting there behind my old, scratched-up desk, which I saw had been moved slightly. Other than that, the office appeared the same as it had when I was there, except there was now a pay phone hanging on the office wall.

Eli Hoffman appeared to be a jovial guy. He was around fifty years old and somewhat overweight. When I introduced myself, he stood up and said with a big smile, I’m very happy to see you again, Matt. Eli said he had met me years ago back in the old Medford Auto Wrecking yard. He’d thought I was a good worker then, and he had always kept track of me and what I was doing by talking to my old boss, Ronnie.

Eli was wearing a slightly food-stained shirt with a button missing on his potbelly. He had on a well-used leather belt about three inches too long for him, and he was also wearing what looked like JCPenney green work pants. Eli’s hair had obviously once been red, and his face once had had lots of freckles—obviously, that was why they referred to him as Red.

Eli said he was surprised I had lasted as long as I had in working with a character like Abby. He said he thought Abby was a ganef, which meant thief in Yiddish. It was funny that he said that, because I remembered Abby once saying the same about Eli. Hearing from Eli that he had always been involved with my former boss, Ronnie, scared me a little, as I knew Ronnie had been involved with stolen cars. I sat down anyway in front of that scratched-up desk, and we began talking. Throughout our entire conversation that day, it appeared to me that Eli was just as interested in learning everything about me as I was in learning about him. It also seemed Eli knew everyone I knew in the business, and he seemed to know everything I had ever done while working with Ronnie and with Abby. Before I knew it, we had sat there all morning and all afternoon just talking, and while we were sitting there talking, Eli sold two cars to customers.

When it started getting late, I told Eli I needed to call my fiancée, who was staying at my home in Westville. I told him I needed to tell her I would be coming home late that evening. Eli said I should use his pay telephone hanging on the wall of the office. I looked at Eli’s pay telephone and saw that it was a standard phone with coin slots on top, but Eli’s phone appeared to have a wire hanging out of it. Eli saw me looking at the wire and said, You just dial your number, and when the operator tells you to put in the money, do it, but as soon as you hear the ding-a-ling of the coins, pull the string, and your money will come back.

I did what Eli said: I pulled the string, and it worked, just as Eli had said it would; all my money came right back. After I made my call, Eli told me that if I came along with him, we could walk down the street and have supper for free at the restaurant he partially owned.

As we walked down West Main Street, Eli said that an old friend of his had asked him to loan him money to open a restaurant. Eli said he knew the fellow was a lousy businessman, and he didn’t want to lend him any money. However, Eli said he owned a bunch of old used restaurant equipment he had bought at an auction for nearly nothing, stuff he was considering throwing in the trash. So instead of lending the guy money, Eli gave him the load of used restaurant equipment, and now, Eli said, he could eat for free as long as the guy stayed in business. Eli said, I just hope the guy stays in business long enough for you and me to eat up the cost of my investment.

At the restaurant, Eli introduced me to the owner as well as everyone else, including a few bums and a local bookie, who were all having supper there. Eli then told the owner to put me on his tab. I felt that was a good start, as it meant I ate for free whenever I came back to Stamford. It also meant that from that day forward, Eli wanted me to begin working with him.

It was a good move for me, because after I worked with Eli for a while, he not only became my best friend but also took me under his wing and became my new mentor. Eli started teaching me all the secrets of the used-car business, even taking me to meet all his contacts on Jerome Avenue, Bronx,New York.

After a few weeks of our working together, Eli invited me to his home in Bridgeport, Connecticut. At Eli’s home, I met his wife, Doris, and their son, and it wasn’t long before I felt as if I had become a family member. From that point on, I felt that Eli Red Hoffman had become my best buddy, and we worked together beautifully. The only problem I had was that sometimes I cringed at the things Eli did. For example, Eli had no qualms about buying cars with no legal registration papers. He would just hand me a pile of old titles from cars that had long ago been sold for scrap.

My job was to find titles that somewhat matched the cars Eli wanted to sell. If I found a title that was close in description and year, it was good enough for Eli, and he used it to sell the car. Those were the days before VIN numbers were used. However, the matching up of car titles wasn’t the only bad thing Eli did. I was later to find out Eli was involved in a lot more illegal stuff than I could have ever imagined.

One day Eli asked me to drive down to Miami, Florida, with him, so I went. In Miami, Eli introduced me to two of his customers, a couple of airplane pilots who owned an old C-46 cargo plane they flew every few weeks into La Paz, Bolivia. We got a room at the Miami Airways Inn, which was just off Thirty-Sixth Street, right near their office at the Miami International Airport. During supper, I learned that their main business was smuggling used cars and guns into Bolivia. Every month or so, Eli supplied them with one good used Ford Taurus automobile. The two pilots told me the Ford Taurus was the most popular car for them to smuggle into Bolivia. They said they liked it because it was small enough that they could lift it right inside the cargo bay of their airplane. They showed me that they also had a big box full of old, worn-out handguns that Eli had mailed to them. They were handguns I had seen Eli buy from people on the streets in Stamford for ten dollars each, and now I watched as the pilots paid Eli fifty dollars each for them.

It was kind of exciting to see how Eli did his crazy business. That evening, the two pilots asked me if I wanted to go on the next flight with them to Bolivia. I told them I didn’t have my passport with me, but they told me I didn’t need a passport. They said they flew in and out of La Paz at night, and they paid everyone off at the airport. It all sounded intriguing, until I saw the condition of their C-46 aircraft, so I thanked them for the offer but declined to go. I said I had to go see my mom, who was leasing a small hotel on Miami Beach. It was a damn good thing I did, because Eli decided to go with them, and he later told me they lost one of the plane’s engines on their approach to the La Paz airport. It happened while they were flying at night over the Bolivian mountains. Eli said that as they all watched as the plane’s engine caught fire and burned out, they thought they would crash and were saying their prayers. Then the pilot yelled that they should push the Ford Taurus out the cargo door to lighten the load, so they did, and somehow, the pilot managed to land the plane in La Paz. Eli told me, The Ford Taurus is probably still sitting on some mountaintop in Bolivia, and one day we will see it on a TV program, and they will say aliens put the car up there.

After watching how Eli operated, I wondered where he had learned to do all the crazy things he did, and I wondered how he’d gotten involved with so many wacko people who seemed to skirt the law the same way he did. It was a question I always wanted to ask him, but I was too embarrassed to bring it up. Then one day Eli and I were discussing something, and he began to reminisce about his past. He said that when he was a teenager, he had a good friend who was a photographer living in Miami Beach. Eli said once he drove to Miami Beach from Bridgeport to visit with his photographer friend, and his friend invited him to go to one of Miami’s most exclusive restaurants. Eli knew they were in a restaurant that neither one of them could really afford, but he assumed his friend was paying. Right after they ate, when the bill came, Eli’s friend doubled over as if he were in mortal pain, yelling that there was broken glass in his food. The waiters and restaurant managers quickly hustled Eli’s friend into an inner office where there was a sofa to make him more comfortable and to keep the other customers from hearing his constant screaming about glass in the food. The restaurant managers had to decide if they should call an ambulance or not. They also had to consider all the bad publicity it would bring with the guy screaming about having glass in his food. Fortunately for them, after a half hour or so, Eli’s friend miraculously started to recover, and somehow, the bill for the meal was forgotten about. It appeared Eli’s photographer friend was one of his early teachers.

Once, when I told my mother about everything I was doing with Abby and Eli, she said I was getting an education better than I could have received from an Ivy League university.

So on November 22, 1963, around noontime, I was in Stamford, Connecticut, walking on West Main Street back from Eli’s restaurant, having just eaten free steak sandwich. Suddenly, Eli came running out of our little office building, yelling, They just shot President Kennedy!

Hey, Eli, I said, stop joking around with me. Tonight’s my wedding, and you and Doris are coming, and you can’t get out of it. Like it or not, you are supposed to be my best man, and Doris is supposed to be our witness.

Regardless of the president being shot, they both did come to the wedding that evening, and everything went as planned.

About two weeks after my wedding, I was visiting Eli and Doris at their home in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when Doris asked me an unexpected question. She said, Matt, where are you planning on taking your new wife for your honeymoon?

What honeymoon? I asked.

Eli said, Matt, I have a perfect idea for you. I need someone to go down to Miami, Florida, for me. I own an auto wrecking company there, and I need someone like you to go down there to find out what’s going on. I think the manager is stealing all my money. Once you straighten the place out, you can take over and run it for me. You never know—perhaps you and your wife will like it and want to live in Florida.

Doris said, I think that going to Florida would be a really good honeymoon for you and your wife, and besides that, it would give you the opportunity to get to see your mother again.

Eli and Doris knew they had hit a soft spot in my heart when they mentioned my seeing my mother. When my dad had suddenly passed away in 1961, my mother, who was a registered nurse, had gone to Israel, but because she didn’t speak Hebrew, they’d said she couldn’t work there, so she’d returned to the States. On the ship, she’d met a real estate broker, and she’d leased a small twenty-four-room hotel on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. It was right across the street from the really big hotels, such as the Sterling, the Carillon, and the Deauville.

Eli said, To make your honeymoon trip even more enticing for you and your wife, I have a nice 1959 Plymouth sedan you can use. Eli also said he would give me a set of the Connecticut junkyard dealer license plates to use, so the car had liability insurance. That was the clincher, and I went home and told my new wife I had decided to take her on a honeymoon to Miami Beach.

The trip to Florida turned out to be a real adventure for us. We started the trip in early December 1963. I decided to show my wife what a frugal husband I was, so the first evening, at around ten o’clock, against her wishes, I rented a twelve-dollar room in a mom-and-pop motel somewhere in Georgia. It was freezing cold, and after three hours and many unsuccessful attempts, I realized the room’s gas heater just wouldn’t work, so I decided we should sleep in our clothes, and my wife reluctantly agreed to do it. Then the toilet overflowed, and my wife started crying. To sop up the water, I pulled out the carpet from under the bed, only to find someone’s old pair of shoes sitting on it. So at about three o’clock in the morning we checked into a Holiday Inn, which cost me an additional thirty-five dollars a night, but it even had a coffee maker, and better yet, my wife finally stopped crying.

The next day, we arrived in Miami Beach, and my mother was so happy to see us she put us up in her best room; it even had a television set. Mom’s hotel was called the Norman and was located right above an auction gallery. The gallery opened every evening, and they auctioned everything from kitchen utensils to diamond rings. Today the Hotel Norman is still there, but the old auction gallery underneath it is gone; it’s now the Norman restaurant.

One morning, I was waiting on the sidewalk for my wife to come downstairs from the hotel. Just as she came down, I saw a police cruiser stop, and the officers motioned for her to come over, so I also walked over to them. The cops asked me who I was, and I said I was her husband. They told me to prove it. It seemed the Norman Hotel already had quite a reputation in Miami Beach, and they didn’t want to believe me.

After a while, we felt bad for using up one of my mother’s best rooms, so my wife looked for us to rent a house trailer to live in. I told her we needed a place close to Eli’s auto wrecking yard.

The day before we left my mom’s hotel, a big black limousine pulled up in front of the Deauville. The hotel was right across the street from us, and I saw all four Beatles get out and go into the hotel. They were in the United States to make their US debut on The Ed Sullivan Show.

The next day, we moved to a trailer park on Northwest Seventy-Ninth Street in Miami. I had never lived in a trailer park before, and it was an eye-opener for both of us. Everyone we met was always offering us a beer. Once we settled in, I made my first visit to see Eli’s wrecking yard.

The yard was called ABC Auto Wrecking, and it was located on Northwest Forty-Sixth Street, near Northwest Thirty-Seventh Avenue, in Miami. As soon as I got there, I immediately recognized the manager, and it was no wonder Eli thought he was stealing all the money. The guy’s name was Barry, and he had been the former used-car salesman back at Medford Auto Wrecking in