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Joshua P. Warren Daily
Joshua P. Warren Daily: The Great Gold Heist & Robert the Doll!
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Hello, I am Joshua P. Warren, and this is Joshua P. Warren Daily. I am joining you from Miami, Florida, and uh you know it's kind of funny. Last night I posted a tweet and said um it's 9 15 PM and almost eighty degrees here. Please don't hate me, uh because it's just amazing um to look at how relentless the cold weather is that just keeps um pouring into parts of the country, especially the the northeastern U.S. So uh I'm I'm very happy uh to be here in in this part of the world uh before I head even farther south uh down to Puerto Rico, which is um where I'll be flying to here in a couple days. But uh anyway, you know, I have such a weird tale for you, and you may have heard this before to some degree, but there's an update, there's some breaking news on this, and so um I think it's just uh I don't know, synchronistic that I'm in Florida right now when this news breaks, because th it's really a story that that begins almost eight years ago in the year 2010. And that was the first time I flew to Key West, Florida to do my big report investigation slash report on Robert the Haunted Doll. And you know, Robert the Haunted Doll, he he lives in a museum in Key West, Florida, and so I I flew down to Florida and um I spent time in Key West all by myself and vest investigating not not only Robert but the whole sort of mythos around you know Robert going to places in the community that had a connection, and everybody knows that you know Key West, Florida is a notoriously bizarre place. Um it kind of reminds me of the culture they celebrated in midnight in the garden of good and evil in Savannah, Georgia. Well, you know, you ramp that up about ten times, and that's Key West, Florida. There are eccentric people and strange things everywhere in Key West. So when I went down to Key West to do my big report that um was broadcast on Coast to Coast AM and speaking of strange, um I uh was also recording little moments from my investigation and then uploading them to Mobius to post on a website, and that was just sort of a special inside thing for you know the fans who really were closely following this whole situation. And I found when I got down to Keat West in 2010 that uh Wi-Fi was pretty sketchy there. Um it was hard to find uh a place with reliable public Wi-Fi, and I uh you know the the the data on my phone at that time was kind of wishy-washy. And so anyway, I finally found this um restaurant on the outskirts of town with a really nice, cozy, warm, kind of candlelit bar that just so happened to have really good Wi-Fi, at least the best Wi-Fi around. Uh I guess they were a bit ahead of the curve. And so um usually, however my days went, I would end up uh at this bar at the end of the day, uh taking advantage of their Wi-Fi, uploading videos and um reports and stuff so that Mobius could post them onto the website. And so there was this bartender there who saw me again almost every evening, and so we kind of became friends, and the the the night before I was going to leave, he said, Hey, um I I have these tickets here to the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum. Um he said, I have like two or three tickets so you can get in for free. And he said admission is usually like twenty bucks. And he goes, Do you want one of these tickets? And I said, Well, I'm flying out tomorrow. Um so I doubt I'll have a chance to use it, but you never know. And so it was kind of a you know flippant thing, and he goes, Here, just take one. So he gave me one of these tickets, and at that time I didn't even know who Mel Fisher was. Um so the next day it was one of those situations where I had to check out of my room at like 11 o'clock, but my plane didn't leave till three or four, and the Key West airport is so tiny, it's you can barely consider it an airport. And so I had a you know a few hours to kill, and so I said, well, you know what, I got this free ticket to go to this museum. Uh may as well do it. So I went to this museum, and that's when I realized that Mel Fisher was this man who was absolutely obsessed for years with finding this legendary wreck called the Atosha. And um he went through just epic struggles, and finally, against all odds, he found this shipwreck, and it just uh he was r rewarded with just oh my goodness, loads of treasure. Uh as a matter of fact, uh one of my great friends, and I I again you know how I am, I hate to uh you use uh her name right now, gave me a ring that has a coin from the Atosha on it, and uh it's just a beautiful, beautiful piece. So that's a whole different story, you know, the whole the the the the history of the Atosha, but uh Mel Fisher went on to be a very successful um shipwreck finder in in many regards. He he found a ship uh called the I think it was the Margarita or something like that. So anyway, you go into this museum, and as you're walking through, I mean, they just have tons and tons of jewels and coins and just wonder wonderful, wondrous things that are displayed all around that Mel Fisher, the great shipwreck hunter, found in his lifetime. And so I'll never forget this day in 2010 when I was walking by this uh display case, which was, I guess, um I I would call it the centerpiece of of the room, and it was like a clear blue site slash acrylic type display case, and there was a bar of gold in the middle of the display case that was worth over five hundred thousand dollars, and it was really cool because there was this little hole that was cut in the side of the display just big enough so that you could slip your hand into it, and you could actually grab that bar of gold and pick it up like four or five inches. And th this kind of reminds me of I've heard stories about how and I I have no idea if this is true, but I've heard that like one of the old ways of catching raccoons was to put something shiny in a hole and that they would put their hand in the hole and they'd grab it and make, you know, a fist, but then you'd trap them because they'd never let go of it and they couldn't pull their hand out. That that's probably BS. But anyway, they it reminds me of that because the idea was, you know, you could reach through this hole and you could, you know, just have an experience touching this bar of gold, and then um afterward you'd you'd release it and you'd withdraw your hand. And so once you did that, uh somebody would give you this little sticker that said um I lifted a bar of gold, and it was a little golden sticker, looked like Willy Wonka's little golden ticket, that kind of material. Yeah, and so that was really cool because how I mean, how often do you get the chance to look to physically reach in and touch and lift up, you know, an old bar of gold that's worth over half a million dollars and has that history. So I um I did that, of course. I got my little sticker, and I I I went through the whole museum and I left that day, and I thought, man, I'm glad that that dude gave me that free ticket because um otherwise I would have never even come here. Now knowing what I know now, I would have happily paid to go to the museum, but I was inspired to go there because he gave me that free ticket. So anyway, I did that to the and and then you know I flew back. And so when I got back home, I took the um the little sticker that said I I lifted a bar of gold and I put it on our refrigerator as a little memento. Uh at that time we were living in a house uh with a big stainless steel refrigerator, and we got into the habit of just like decorating that thing with all the gaudy mementos from all the places that we'd traveled to and stuff, and so it was just covered with things. So I had that sticker there, but it was in a pretty you know prominent spot. So my whole Robert the Doll experience was weird enough on its own, but that whole trip was kind of you know capped off by me going to the Mel Fisher Museum and having that experience. So you can imagine how shocked I was when I think seven days later, all of a sudden, the Mel Fisher Museum is in the national news. This place that I had just happened to r you could say stumble upon was now in the national news. And it's because that somebody stole that bar of gold. And I I was flabbergasted. I said, Are you kidding me? Somebody had gone into that museum that I'd never even heard of. That bar of gold had been there in that display for twenty years, as it turns out. But seven days after I went in there and touched that thing, somebody went in there and stole that bar of gold. And so there was like a manhunt going on, you know, who who who has possibly uh achieved this, who has done this. So the cops in Key West, they released uh surveillance footage inside the museum. Uh and I you you can imagine they probably thought they were gonna catch whoever did this very quickly. And so Mobius actually, he I think he was one of the first people to call me and said, Have you seen this footage? How weird it is So I watched the the surveillance footage. Now here's what you see when you watch the footage. Now, for one thing, the museum officially had already closed for the day. So I believe the museum closed at like five, so this was after five. So there are some people kind of milling around in the museum even after it's closed, which might make you think automatically there's some kind of an in inside job or something. But here is the weirdest part, and I'm not exaggerating this. You see this guy on the surveillance footage, and he walks up to the case, and he puts his hand out there and he kind of fiddles around for a minute, and then he walks away. And then he walks back like five minutes later, he reaches into that case and just pulls that bar of gold out like magic. And you're like, what the I mean, the guy, you you see him reach in, he he gets the bar of gold, and he just next thing you know, it's not in the case anymore, it's in his hand, and he just walks off. It is the weirdest thing to see this on the surveillance footage. So we're scratching our heads saying, How did this guy do this? You know, I I I I I I know a lot about science and magic and technology and engineering, and so do all my friends are like, how the fuck did this guy do this? Well, the only thing that I could think of was like maybe, maybe uh this was some guy with a knowledge of chemistry or something, and the first time he walked up he he squirted or sprayed some kind of chemical onto the uh case that softened it. But he had to let it you know work and cure for about five minutes or something, and then and then he came back and was able to to pop it out. I mean, I don't know. I really don't know. So I called the Key West Police Department. I was back in North Carolina, of course. I called them and I I got a um police lady on the phone who fortunately was uh very nice and very talkative, and uh I said, uh hey, you know, I have a radio show on News Radio 570 WWN C and um I'm intrigued to see what you know the latest is on this case. And she said, We are absolutely baffled. She said, We have no idea we ha who did this or how they did it or anything. It was the weirdest thing. And so I mean it was almost like something magical was captured on on on camera, frankly. That's that's how it looked. So I thought, my goodness, as if my trip to go down and research and investigate Robert the doll weren't weird enough. Um then it's capped off by this, right? That this just takes the cake. So now here we are, eight years later, and guess what? Dun dun news story comes out. So here is one of the news stories. Okay, apparently a couple of guys have been arrested in connection with this theft. Uh they arrested one guy who's forty-one, another guy who is thirty-two, uh the first guy is from California, the second guy is from Florida, and they say that they have uh they say it was in a plexiglass case. They're saying it was worth five hundred and fifty thousand dollars, seventy-four point eighty five ounces, and um so they say that they've arrested these two guys in connection with this crime. However, um they have r released no details whatsoever about how they did this, how they breached this case. So I am very interested in in and you know getting to the bottom of this and and finding out like how these guys got that out of there, because if you can, you know, if I've done a good job of telling you this story in this podcast, you can imagine here's a case with a hole in it that's just big enough for your fist to fit through, and there is this gold bar that's long and it's positioned so that you can twist it any way you want to, like some kind of puzzle, and you can't pull it out of there for for twenty years, nobody could pull it out of there. I mean, even if you wanted to, uh most people would never even try, though, I guess. So how do those guys reach through that hole? Or how did that guy, you know, reach through that hole and pull that thing out? So I'm thinking since they arrested two people, one of them was probably, you know, an inside job type dude who gave access to the other guy who was able to come in there and remove that thing. I don't know if he was like literally a magician or a chemist or what he was, but uh that's you know what I'm thinking. And I I I bet you that there's a good chance that the the details of how they pull that thing out of there may never actually be released. Because um that's the kind of information that would make it easy for criminals to potentially steal other things along those lines. But it's just so weird to me that uh, you know, I I I've talked about this, and I hate to say this too much because then I'll create a tulpa, but it's like I go somewhere and then I leave, and as soon as I leave, like some crazy stuff happens. And it's not necessarily always bad, sometimes it is, sometimes it's just weirdo stuff like this. Um but nonetheless, this is a an eight-year-old mystery, which is now um taking on a new light. So we'll see what happens. I will definitely keep you updated on this, and hopefully you find this as bizarre and fascinating as as I do. So uh anyway, here I am in Florida. Uh some things I guess kind of come full circle, if you want to view it that way, and so that's what's on my mind tonight. So uh anyway, um, you know, this uh this is a podcast that I do as often as possible. I try to do them daily. It's called Joshua P. Warren Daily. Uh if you go to Joshua P. Warren.com, you'll find more information on this podcast. It's always short. It's always free. There are never commercials or any stuff like that. Um and if you go to joshua pwarren.com, not only will you find a link to this podcast where you can subscribe or follow me on Twitter where I usually post when I have a new one, but I also hope that you will check out my big event that's coming up in May in Las Vegas. Man, I'm so excited about I I I at this point, everybody that I actually know and love has already made their arrangements. They're gonna be there. So this is this is it. This is the ultimate. Uh all that stuff is at joshuapwarren.com. So that's it for tonight. Thank you for your interest. Thank you for your support. Thank you for staying curious, and I will talk to you again soon.