If I had a nickel for everytime this happened to me...
 

http://tinyurl.com/6cgzl

A wife in cuba...jeeezzz I wonder where he is with all the money.

Stupid FBI!

where is he going to exchange 3.6M nickels? theyre pretty heavy.

I don't know maybe he will fill is basement up...HEHE

How big would the raft have to be to haul 45,000 lbs of nickels to Cuba??

They are probably loaded in a container headed for some place overseas right now. The only foul play here was letting this driver haul a government load.

I saw this on the news, and its the same truck stop/gas station I always use when I get off the turnpike kinda freaked me the fuck out.

My bet is that he will be visiting alot of Coinstar machines across the nation, before he goes to cuba.

why do you guys automatically assume the truck driver is guilty?

It's not possible that when the trucker stopped at the rest stop he was killed/taken away by a gang formed to get the cargo?

Just saying keep an open mind. This guy might be dead or in grave danger.

That said, I think either he was killed by a group taking the cash or he was in on the plan. How the hell is 1 guy going to move some 45,000 lbs of nickels around by himself so quickly and discreetly.

I thought about that... In NJ there's also Penny Lane at Commerce Bank, which doesn't charge the astronomical rates that Coinstar does... :) But I suppose that'd be too obvious. :D

Nickel Slot MAchines in Atlantic City, here we come... and parlay that into some real cash, like quarters :D

Let's convict and execute him before we know what happened. I love negativity.

Because it's much more entertaining to think about a person absconding with a few million nickels, and what he could do with it... Him being beaten and left for dead on the side of the road, while a gang of roving coin thieves take off with the change, isn't nearly as amusing... at least in my world :)

Whoever did this it had to have been planned. How else do you haul off that many nickels and a truck driver without having any witnesses?? They had to have some method of hauling away that many nickels. Also I think the little comment about a wife in Cuba leads everyone to believe that he already has somewhere he can go to be somewhat beyond the FBI's reach so why wouldn't he be at least a partner in the crime?? I do hope he's ok if he wasn't involved in the thieft.

Whoever the guilty party is, I bet they're sell them as nickel bags. :D

If it would have been pennies, the FBI would be questioning David Copperfield. ;)

I doubt he absconded with them. If he did, he would have had to sell them for say $100,000 to some sort of gang that deals in this sort of thing. To give up your livelihood for say 3 years pay really isn't a wise move.

id say whoever has them is visiting the nickle slots.. evreywhere.. a guy could easliiy use up that much fairly quick.. ill bet he coudl make a fortune selling them to old people on there way to the casinos on bus trips.. here granny ill sell you this luck mickle bag preroled for play for a mere %5 extra......

just my 5 cents.....

hate to break this to you all, but he aint going to cube with $180,000, or Castro would want the lot.

My vote is for him being in on a scheme. Stopping at a rest stop where there are already 18 wheelers parked would make it easy, or at least easier, for a group of guys to un/reload all those nickels into an 18 wheeler. That'd be a helluva lot harder to find since the damn things are everywhere. From there it's as easy as using a lot of coinstars and banks, spread over a large area, to cash small sums at a time. All in all, something like that would be fairly easy as long as the group was somewhat careful in how they moved.

It wouldn't be hard at all. As stated above, the driver was already moving the coins alone while on his route. It would only take one other person with the know-how and a truck to do accomplish it. The driver has the know-how by definition. It'd take a while to transfer the coins, sure, but for $180k the time spent would be worthwhile to a thief.

What I am wondering is why didn't this truck have a GPS system in it for the feds to track when it went off course? You'd think this would be standard for vehicles hauling money around.

What is the composition of a nickel. Are they worth melting down?

The truck could very well have had a GPS system onboard, though I don't know if it did or didn't. But if the driver's hauling stuff long distances, you'd expect him to stop at a rest stop or something for food/bathroom/stretching legs. And if there was a tracker on it, and the driver knew it, he'd probably also know that they wouldn't think anything of his stopping there.

Why is there only one person in a truck hauling money anyway? Brinks uses at least two people per vehicle, don't they?
Insurance fraud on the part of the hauling company?

Whoever would steal that many nickels, is an utter moron. No doubt about it.

If you unloaded it at nickle slots you could make back a great deal of moolah.

The money is found.....but where is the driver?


http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

Miami Police Recover Millions of Nickels

MIAMI (AP) -- Police hit paydirt Friday, digging up 3.6 million nickels that disappeared along with a trucker who was supposed to deliver them to the Federal Reserve Bank in New Orleans.

Authorities found the $180,000 in coins buried in a 4-foot hole in the back yard of a suburban Miami home. The nickels, still stored in their Federal Reserve bags, were in a wooden box, covered with a plastic tarp.

Investigators would not say how they knew the coins were there, and gave no information on the owner of the house.

They continued searching for the trucker, Angel Ricardo Mendoza, who disappeared in December after picking up the coins in New Jersey and setting out on the 1,100-mile trip. His rig was found empty Dec. 21 at a truck stop in Fort Pierce, Fla.


© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

That is crazy. It is almost an ingenious form of robbery.

Most likely for the same reason why none of the 18 wheeler transports that haul nuclear waste around the country have them. The same reason why none or very little of the containers that come into our ports every day aren't scanned. The same reason why nothing is really secured around our country. (They use rent a cops who really don't have a clue and call it security) Because the government doesn't pay attention to what's going on here at home. (At least they won't until something else blows up) Which is where their attention needs to be anyway.

For a very good reason. If the government can track the truck, so can other people.

Sorry, but that argument really doesn't make sense. It's not like someone will be sitting at home in front of their internet GPS tracking station and think "Oh, I have never before considered hijacking a treasury transport truck, but because I can easily monitor this one I think that I will begin my life of crime now!"

A thief who wants to commit such a crime can track the shipment just by getting in their car and following it. If the thief knew that the shipment was being monitored in real time via GPS then I think it would be more of a deterrent. If any deviation from the route or disappearance of the GPS signal would draw immidiate police presense to the last known location, it would make the crime considerably harder to pull off. As it was, the culprits had plenty of time to conceal what they'd done. I only hope that the driver was an accomplice and not an innocent victim.

What the hell are you going to do with all those nickels. You know how long it would take to cash all those nickels. Well if they were smart they would go to more than one bank several different times. But it is even dumber to steal that many nickels.

^^^
Nickel slots at the casino!!! :lol: :crazy: :D

What does make someone turn to a life of crime? Fun, necessity, opportunity......I'm not saying this is something that a thief could pull off without planning but it would be possible with a little digging into how their GPS system would work.