2008-11-10 11:31:17
By JOE MILICIA, Associated Press Writer Joe Milicia, Associated Press Writer
Sat Nov 8, 2:55 pm ET
CLEVELAND A contractor who found $182,000 in Depression-era currency hidden
in a bathroom wall has ended up with only a few thousand dollars, but he feels
some vindication.
The windfall discovery amounted to little more than grief for contractor Bob
Kitts, who couldn't agree on how to split the money with homeowner Amanda
Reece.
It didn't help Reece much, either. She testified in a deposition that she was
considering bankruptcy and that a bank recently foreclosed on one of her
properties.
And 21 descendants of Patrick Dunne the wealthy businessman who stashed the
money that was minted in a time of bank collapses and joblessness will each
get a mere fraction of the find.
"If these two individuals had sat down and resolved their disputes and divided
the money, the heirs would have had no knowledge of it," said attorney Gid
Marcinkevicius, who represents the Dunne estate. "Because they were not able to
sit down and divide it in a rational way, they both lost."
Kitts was tearing the bathroom walls out of an 83-year-old home near Lake Erie
in 2006 when he discovered two green metal lockboxes suspended inside a wall
below the medicine chest, hanging from a wire. Inside were white envelopes with
the return address for "P. Dunne News Agency."
"I ripped the corner off of one," Kitts said during a deposition in a lawsuit
filed by Dunne's estate. "I saw a 50 and got a little dizzy."
He called Reece, a former high school classmate who had hired him for a
remodeling project.
They counted the cash and posed for photographs, both grinning like lottery
jackpot winners.
But how to share? She offered 10 percent. He wanted 40 percent. From there
things went sour.
A month after The Plain Dealer reported on the case in December 2007, Dunne's
estate got involved, suing for the right to the money.
By then there was little left to claim.
Reece testified in a deposition that she spent about $14,000 on a trip to
Hawaii and had sold some of the rare late 1920s bills. She said about $60,000
was stolen from a shoe box in her closet but testified that she never reported
the theft to police.
Kitts said Reece accused him of stealing the money and began leaving him
threatening phone messages. Marcinkevicius doesn't believe the money was stolen
but said he couldn't prove otherwise.
Reece's phone number has been disconnected, and her attorney Robert Lazzaro did
not return a call seeking comment. There were no court records showing that
Reece had filed for bankruptcy.
Kitts said he lost a lot of business because media reports on the case
portrayed him as greedy, but he feels vindicated by the court's decision to
give him a share.
"I was not the bad guy that everybody made me out to be," Kitts said. "I didn't
do anything wrong."
He's often asked why he didn't keep his mouth shut and pocket the money. He
says he wasn't raised that way.
"It was a neat experience, something that won't happen again," Kitts said. "In
that regard, it was pretty fascinating; seeing that amount of money in front of
you was breathtaking. In that regard, I don't regret it.
"The threats and all that's the part that makes you wish it never happened."