Garden Crime and buried treasure
One of America's most notorious ‘spammers ‘ - the underground entrepreneurs responsible for the deluge of adverts for Viagra, pornography and high-interest loans which swamp e-mail inboxes - may have buried his illegal gains in his parents' garden. AOL, the e-mail giant whose millions of customers were among Davis Wolfgang Hawke's targets, has won permission to dig up two acres of Massachusetts in the search for gold bars and platinum believed to have been stashed there. The company won a £6.7million judgment against Hawke last year, but he skipped bail and disappeared, so AOL is sending in the diggers.
At one time, Hawke and his partners earned more than $600,000 a month by sending unwanted sales pitches over the internet for loans, pornography, gold rings and prescription drugs. He lived a nomadic life, travelling around in an old police car, and told journalists he buried his valuables.
What would you expect to find buried in your garden – another garden?
Dewstow, a garden in Monmouthshire, is emerging after sixty years underground. The garden belongs to farmer John Harris and his family. Some years ago, seeing that the future of farming was uncertain, the Harris family developed a golf course on their land, which formed part of the old Dewstow estate. Ten years they managed to buy the other half of the estate to create a second golf course – what they didn’t know was that Henry Oakley, a very rich man, had built a garden there already. Sunk under the ground was a fantasia land with tunnel systems, caverns and tufa grottoes, Italianate fountains, formal pools and natural ones dripping with ferns and artificial stalactites. Water flowed from one cavern to the other, often turning the paths in between into a series of stepping stones separated by delicate channels of water. Some of the tunnels were almost pitch black, others were lit by glazed skylights. One of the more ambitious caverns was lit by a great glass dome above ground. Now the gardens are being restored as a tourist attraction.
Digging photograph by madaise used under a creative commons attribution licence
Other articles you may find interesting
writers shed, aphrodisiac 1, aphrodisiac 2, beer, buried treasure, dictator, football, giant gnome, gnome on the go, gnomes in song, hedge, men and sheds, minister shed, mummy, murder tree, musical shed, orchid smuggle, pilferage, plant theft, pole dancer, shed man, unusual sheds, weird gardens 1, weird gardens 2, weird gardens 3
aerators, agri fab trailers, allotment cultivators, articulated hedgecutters, bird feeders, boules sets, car pressure washers, conservatory water features, Garden Strimmers, Garden Rotovators, Garden Hoovers, Fertiliser Spreaders, Echo Brushcutters, Backpack Sprayers, Atco Garden Shredders, Mowers, Atco Lawn Mowers, Ride on Mowers, Brushcutters, Echo Chainsaws, Petrol Brushcutters, Gardena Hedgecutters, Gas Patio Heaters, Garden Chain Saws, Cylinder Mowers, sunloungers, timber sheds, viking garden shredders, wildlife boxes, wooden benches, rockery stone, garden monoliths, garden pebbles, garden urns, garden pots