Jerome Mcdougal

The Vault! Jerome Mcdougal

The Vault! is a fictional novel based on a real happening. On Valentine's weekend, 1952, persons unknown to this day broke a hole in the wall of the Pioneer Vault and spent three days inside opening four hundred fourteen boxes and collecting no one really knows how much money, jewelry, and government-issued gold certificates. They even went out and got themselves sandwiches and coffee several times during the weekend and left the empty wrappers and paper cups on the floor. Most of the boxes belonged to officials of some stature from Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, and who knows where else. Rumor has it one of them belonged to Jimmy Hoffa, and the owners of the Fisher Flower Company had twenty-eight $100,000 gold certificates in one of the boxes. The rest was mostly all undeclared cash. Reports said the persons only got away with about $5,000. The reason they opened so many boxes was that they were searching for the Fisher Flower Company certificates, however, they left over $25,000 in ones and change on the floor. I created a fictional storyline, charging some very unlikely people with the task of robbing the vault, while at the same time our two heroes find the loves of their lives. And through some humorous, very unlikely, and heart-warming experiences, they succeed in pulling off the biggest unsolved-to-this-day robbery in the history of the United States. Through my own research, I would guess the amount taken was somewhere in the neighborhood of $23,500,000 not counting the solid gold bars and jewelry. Some of it turned up in Las Vegas in 1980 in a pawn shop. Remember, back then, it was all silver and gold certificates worth much more today. If a person looks carefully at the cover picture you can see they knew which ones they wanted to open...someone had a list, I think... This book is very fun reading and exciting as five very unlikely persons travel to Seattle and meet through very implausible circumstances and the plan comes together and the vault is robbed. Exciting and intriguing. You just want to keep on reading until it is over and you still want to know what happened after that...