Truth is Stranger than Fiction
We Buy Broken Gold
By Clancy Martin
From the article:
My Uncle Pat claims the Martin family fortune has its origins in a World War I gold scam. I won’t apologize for this because I never saw a nickel of the family money. It was squandered by my father on Florida real-estate deals and my other uncle’s failed plan to buy a majority stake in Hudson’s Bay Company, Canada’s chain of department stores. After the scheme collapsed, this uncle died suddenly, though he somehow left a sizable chunk of money to his family. My Winnipeg cousins thus grew up rich: one of them raised Arabian horses and another was briefly Canadian ambassador to Thailand. I grew up in a rented three-bedroom house on a lower-middle-class street near the river in Calgary, Alberta, one of ten kids: my mother had divorced my father and, with the common sense characteristic of the family, married a man with seven children of his own and a failing business.
This story is so fascinating that you might almost forget that it’s about how people get scammed selling their gold. And that’s the point of it. Though I do love a good story teller.
Me? I tend to stay away from anything questionable that I’m sure…I don’t understand. That, and I have trust issues, lol.
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/swindle-fraud/we-buy-broken-gold