Quote:
Originally Posted by adm
Depends on how "Sovereign Citizen"* the group is, just because they know something does not mean that they will tell ANYONE connected to a Government. Do not under estimate how opposed some of these groups are to Governmental Authority. I will note that roughly $35,000 in gold is less than a kilogram.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovere...tizen_movement |
Francois Morel St. Patin (PC), known to all and sundry as 'Nonc' Morel, is not a Sovereign Citizen, in so much that he knows well that their legal arguments are probably so much hogwash ('Nonc' Morel doesn't know much about the law, but he's a keen judge of hogwash).
He is, however, very sympathetic to their views as regards the unnecessary interference by government officials and '
revenooers' into the affairs of peaceful folk who keep to themselves and don't bother anyone.
Mr. St. Patin is so dedicated to his policy of mutual non-interference with the US Government that he has thoughtfully avoided appearing on any official document since the end of his military service. In the Vietnam War.
He lives in a shack on swamp land that
probably belongs to him by inheritance, if it were valuable enough for anyone to have done any checking, and hasn't been reporting missing or anything, but as far as the federal government is concerned, they have no idea where he is and what he might be doing (and no interest in finding out). The local sheriff of his parish would know, if anyone asked, but he knows well enough that the St. Patins live out there and while odd, are decent people, with no more than the ordinary share of wild young 'uns and damn fools, and 'Nonc' Morel is a nice old fool, though crazy as a coot.
Quote:
Originally Posted by adm
Yes and no. Thirty seconds with a Dremel, and any serial number on the bar is gone. The subset of people who only want to trade in silver or gold will not care about that, and after it it is put in a safe with other bars, they lose individuality. Even if the shop owners are willing to play ball with law enforcement, without serial numbers, they can only point to the guy who gave them to him.
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To be sure, but paying in precious metals would be a pretty good way to get police to look Eldorado Commodities Inc., the precious metals investment firm that Leonard Carillo had some business dealings with.
If he pays cash, it's suspicious, but it might be suspicious in connection to any of a dozen shady transactions in Mr. Carillo's past. Giving the police a clear indicator that precious metals were involved would be... sub-optimal from an operational security perspective.
Of course, under significant stress, with extremely tight time constraints and
easier access to unregistered stores of gold than suitcases of cash*, it's
entirely possible that an Eldorado Commodities executive might have made an error in judgment.
As for silver, I hadn't considered it, but obviously, that's something they might buy and sell as well. Their South American connections are mostly concentrated near the Andean Mountains, in Chile, Bolivia and Peru, and so far, I had only considered the illegal gold mining they had interests in, but it's not as if Eldorado Commodities would avoid buying silver, either.
Due to the lower price, compared to gold, however, I'm guessing that the dollar value of any reserves they have in gold is substantially greater than any hypothetical silver reserve. As in, they obviously have enough silver at hand to pay $35,000, but in gold, they have more than a hundred times that amount.
*They can get both and should, obviously, have an emergency store of cash. But gold that hasn't been creatively accounted for yet is an unavoidable side-effect of their day-to-day business and, so, probably the first untraceable currency they think of.