Six dusty containers packed with $100 bills sitting in a London, England, bank vault - a total of $150 million in U.S. currency - are just waiting to be returned to circulation.
All the bills need is a little cleaning to get some ink off of them and they'll be good as new. But that will take a little investing on your part.
Sound too good to be true?
It is, but that didn't stop a well-known Dayton, Tenn.-attorney and his friend from sinking at least a half million dollars into liberating those "bills."
Longtime Rhea County attorney Arnold Fitzgerald and local businessman George Lambert had been friends for more than 40 years when, in 2008, they met a California man and some people in the United Kingdom who introduced themselves as having ties to a South African man named "Ebenezer Bonaparte."
The investment plan revolved around $150 million in U.S. $100 bills supposedly stuffed into four containers stashed in London, where they were to be cleaned of ink or dye for distribution to investors, including Fitzgerald and Lambert.
A Tennessee Court of Appeals opinion issued in April stems from a review of an August 2014 bench trial in a lawsuit filed against Fitzgerald by Lambert over more than $550,000 the latter invested in the scheme court records describe as "crazy." The appeals court reviewed the facts and testimony from the August 2014 trial en route to the April opinion.
According to court records, a California investor, "Donald Brindley," told Fitzgerald the money came from Bonaparte in South Africa and was transferred to the mint in London.
Fitzgerald first sent money to Brindley in 2008. Fitzgerald testified that he invested $517,000, but was unable to provide paperwork to prove it.
In 2011, Lambert gave money to Fitzgerald to invest with Brindley, who at the time was to "obtain certain paperwork including a diplomatic license, powers of attorney and an anti-terrorism certificate before the money could be moved from the customs to a bank, cleaned, and ultimately distributed," court records state.
"Lambert was promised a return of $25 million for his investment of several hundred thousand dollars," the same amount Fitzgerald testified in 2014 that he was to get, records state.
Court records document dozens of checks written by Fitzgerald for hundreds of thousands of dollars with no receipts or clear explanation what the money was for or where it went, and meetings in Knoxville at which "large bags of cash" were handed over to facilitate getting the barrels of cash cleared for a return to U.S. soil.
Lambert gave money to Fitzgerald to deposit into a trust account the Dayton lawyer used to hold money that didn't belong to him, he testified in the 2014 trial. Fitzgerald wrote checks from that account to convert to cash so the money could go to Brindley for paying "investment"-related expenses. The checks were written, for less than $10,000, to acquaintances and friends to cash at a number of different banks.
The money was supposedly used by Brindley to become a qualified "diplomat" and obtain a power of attorney from the alleged owner of the currency, Bonaparte, to purchase chemicals to remove the ink or dye on the bills. Brindley testified that he'd never seen the containers of cash, never got back his own investment but remained convinced the money was real, according to documents.
Others, not party to the lawsuit, also reportedly invested in the scheme, including Fitzgerald's nephew, Andrew Tucker, and Bledsoe County General Sessions Judge Howard Upchurch, an attorney and longtime Pikeville, Tenn., resident, records state.
An attorney in Upchurch's office, Justin Angel, now a criminal court judge in the 12th Judicial District, was asked to fly to Chicago to deliver money to Brindley, records state. There was no indication that Angel invested in the scheme.
According to testimony, no one, including Fitzgerald and Brindley, ever got a return on their investment.
Lambert died within days of the trial court's initial August 2014 order. After Lambert's death, the trial court entered an order substituting his estate as the plaintiff in the case.
Fitzgerald was ordered by the state Court of Appeals to pay more than $500,000 to the estate of the late plaintiff, Lambert, who gave Fitzgerald money to invest in the effort.
Tennessee Appellate Court justices hinted loudly at the unusualness of the case in the first line of the opinion, stating, "The evidence presented at trial can only be described as astonishing."
Even the trial court level judge, Jeffrey Hollingsworth, described the investment scheme as "crazy," documents state. Hollingsworth said both men should have recognized it for the poor investment it was. Hollingsworth, a Hamilton County Circuit Court judge, sat on the case after Rhea County Chancellor Jeffrey Stewart recused himself.
"This court neither believes the money exists or that Fitzgerald believes that," Hollingsworth said in his 2014 ruling. "The whole scheme is, for lack of a better term, crazy.
"However, the same reasoning applies to George Lambert," Hollingsworth continued. "The craziness of the scheme was, or should have been, as evident to him as to anyone else."
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The opinion issued in April by the Tennessee Court of Appeals in Knoxville reversed part of Hollingsworth's 2014 Rhea County Chancery Court ruling that awarded Lambert's estate $33,840 for principal prejudgment interest and attorney's fees pursuant to a promissory note, while dismissing Lambert's remaining claims of fraud, intentional misrepresentation, violation of the Tennessee Securities Act of 1980 and unjust enrichment.
In the initial trial, Hollingsworth ruled that Lambert hadn't proved his claim for "unjust enrichment" in seeking an award of $556,567, and it is this portion of the trial court's judgment that was reversed on appeal. The Appellate Court awarded the $556,567 to Lambert's estate, according to documents.
Fitzgerald disagrees with the ruling and wants the Tennessee Supreme Court to consider the case, according to his lawyer, Chattanooga attorney Dan Ripper.
"From Mr. Fitzgerald's perspective, he always believed it was an appropriate and legitimate investment. He never felt that he was doing anything that was going to cost anybody any money," Ripper said Tuesday.
The attorney for Lambert, Hoyt Samples, did not return calls seeking comment.
Ripper said the appeal process involves filing a petition with the state Supreme Court requesting review of the case.
Contact staff writer Ben Benton at bbenton@timesfreepress.com or twitter.com/BenBenton or www.facebook.com/ben.benton1 or 423-757-6569.