WASHINGTON - The businessman arrived at the Treasury Department carrying a suitcase stuffed with about $5.2 million. The bills were decomposing, nearly unrecognizable, and he asked to swap them for a cashier’s check. He said the money came from Mexico.
For the past few years, authorities say, he and his family have popped in and out of U.S. banks, looking to change about $20 million in buried treasure for clean cash.
The money is always the same — decaying $100 bills from the 1970s and 1980s.
It’s the story that keeps changing:
_It was an inheritance.
_Somebody dug up a tree and there it was.
_It was found in a suitcase buried in an alfalfa field.
_A relative found a treasure map.
The first stop was the Federal Reserve Bank in El Paso, where authorities say Felhaber appeared with an uncle, Jose, and an aunt, Esther. In her purse, Esther carried $120,000. She told bank officials there were millions more, discovered while digging to expand a building in Juarez, according to U.S. court records filed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Felhaber was back at it again weeks later, this time at a Bank of America branch. Customs officials say he unsuccessfully tried to persuade a bank vice president to dispatch an armored truck to the Mexican border to pick up millions of dollars.
Soon after the Bank of America visit, a man bearing a striking resemblance to Felhaber walked into a Bank of the West branch. This time, however, authorities say the customer identified himself as Ken Motley and said he discovered millions while excavating a tree in Chihuahua, Mexico.
Bank employees refused to exchange any money, despite two follow-up phone calls — once with a Spanish accent, once without — to try to set up an exchange.
The mysterious Ken Motley also appeared at the First National Bank, telling employees that a friend had discovered $20 million buried in an alfalfa field, investigators say.
Felhaber says he is not Ken Motley.
