There Are Some Days the Paper Really is Worth $3.00

Newsstand prices of newspaper print editions can be prohibitive, especially if you're like me and haul three newspapers in every morning. Thankfully, home delivery affords steep discounts to newsstand prices. If I were to pay newsstand price for my daily NYT, WSJ and NY Post it would be $10, a hefty outlaw for f anyway, but prohibitive on a retiree. Online reading? Not exclusively for me.

Even adding up the home delivery prices, I'm probably paying upwards of $600 a year for the three print papers. On my demise, a forensic accounting analysis of my finances will probably lead the accountants to have no wonder how I outlived my money.

But until then, I live for the days I can sit down with a good read. And one was delivered yesterday by Michael Wilson, a NYT crime reporter who has written a gem of s piece regarding mammoth tusks in the East River.

Everyone loves a treasure hunt. It is the original found money. Robert Service wrote an epic poem decades ago that started off: "There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold..." It was about Sam McGee from Tennessee who headed for Alaska and was never warm again. Well, at least not until he was cremated.

Now we have strange things done by the men who dive for gold, or at least something that can be turned into money, Bitcoin or real dollars. In this case, the treasure was expected to 50 tons of mammoth tusks, a haul that is the last thing you'd expect to be found in the Est River, but hey, someone said they were there.

And that was someone, Jim Reeves, on what apparently is a "massively popular podcast," The Joe Rogan Experience. Jim claimed that after reading an unpublished manuscript he can tell you there are 50 tons of mammoth tusks! down there, dumped by no less than the Museum of Natural History, the last organization you'd expect to be perpetrators of river pollution.

But hey, it's on the Internet, so it must be true. At 74 years-old I vastly underestimate how people are influenced by what they read, listen to and see on the Internet.

It's a winding story, but Mr. Wilson tells it well. It starts with the podcast by "The Joe Rogers Experience" and when it's done there are characters worthy of Damon Runyon bobbing around the East River in January. Baby it's cold in the water then.

Joe Scuba, Dirty Water Dan have left their homes in Georgia and New Jersey, hopped on board a surveying vessel named The Red Rogers out of Staten Island and dropped anchor off 65th Street.

Actually, two vessels made it to the spot alleged to have 50 tons of mammoth tusks! under the East River. One of the divers, Mr. Koehler—Scuba Jake to you—was supposedly drawn to the novelty of exploring the East River, "Not many people probably have been down to the bottom of the East River that are alive." No shit.

Watery East River as a Haystack

 I'm not going to spoil Mr. Wilson's story by giving up all the details   here. He did all the work, and it was considerable, tracing how even   the plausibility of mammoth remains might be in New York, let   alone 50 tons of it at the swirling waters off Hell Gate. Buried or   sunken treasure, matey, always exciting..

 There is enough to add that they did find concrete blocks, rebar,   tires, multiple Citi bikes and even a car, presumably one that would   be hard to start.

The concrete blocks might have something to do with anyone reaching the bottom of the East River who never lived to tell us about it. Concrete booties were really a favorite way the mob used to dispose of bodies of those who met the outplacement criteria. Remember the scene in the movie Billy Bathgate? I suppose, eventually lime became preferred to getting seasick with a stomach full of linguini and expresso coffee.

Bikes should be no surprise. I've heard that the canals in Amsterdam are full of bikes that have been disposed of by heaving them into the water. The car is a bit of a surprise. I'll assume it was stolen?

What did they find? I won't spoil it, but for my money it's just one more search that's failed to turn up either Jimmy Hoffa or Judge Crater. If it had, we would have heard about it. 

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