What's the most amount of $$ you ever dropped/lost/misplaced??

[dorkzilla]

37. I'll share one with you...

My parents bought a house in foreclosure back in the 80's. They had a house down the block, but this one was situated on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in SoCal. The house was in rough shape, but the parcel was really nice so they bought it to tear it down to build their dream home. The sold their other house and moved in.

The reason the house was in foreclosure is because the guy who owned it before was in a Federal jail with a very long sentence--he worked for one of the big defense contractors, and was caught selling weapons secrets to the Soviet Union. The whole case was pretty cloak and dagger, although the details escape me, you knew the guy was bad news. Once or twice, the previous owner's mom showed up asking to come in so she could "look around". My mom never allowed her to, sensing that something was off, and especially knowing the reason the guy wasn't there anymore.

So the day came to start construction, so they rented a house up the street so they could keep tabs on construction. When the house was completely demolished and the new foundation was to be dug, my mom figured she'd be okay just stopping by once a week till the foundation was poured. After week 2, she looked around the job site and noticed that the foreman was not on the job. "Where's James?" she asked one of the laborers. "Oh, he quit! He is starting his own business". My mother didn't think anything of it, till a few days later when she and dad were on site again, and were expressing their happiness that James was able to start his own company...yadda yadda. At some point later that day, they were told that during the digging, James hit something with his backhoe and it turned out to be a very large safe buried under the concrete slab that was the crawlspace for the old structure, but that the safe was "empty". Empty...but James quit the next day to start his own company.