Knight Ridder Newspapers

MIAMI – Police searching for marijuana in the Miami area discovered an entirely different stash buried 4 feet underground Friday – millions of nickels that vanished last year en route to the Federal Reserve in New Orleans.

Talk about pay dirt.

“They’re still in the Federal Reserve bags,” said Miami-Dade County police spokesman Joey Giordano. “We think we got them all.”

If so, that would be 3.6 million nickels. Forty-five thousand pounds of nickels. Nine hundred bags of nickels, many bags still neatly clasped with red clips. Exactly $180,000 worth of nickels.

Officers looking for marijuana plants on a 5-acre farm first discovered an ice cooler filled with nickels then remembered that a tractor-trailer loaded with coins went missing just before Christmas, police said.

They questioned a man who rents 2 acres of the farm, a place bustling with chickens, goats and geese.

“He gave the impression that there may be a lot more nickels there,” said Randy Rossman, another Miami-Dade police spokesman.

Officers began digging and hit the jackpot.

Many questions remained unanswered Friday, including who buried the treasure and the whereabouts of the truck driver, Angel Ricardo Mendoza, now believed to be out of the country. Police called him a suspect.

Two other people were under arrest Friday night, Rossman said, but their names and the charges were not released.

Mendoza, 42, of Miami, disappeared several days after picking up the nickels at the Federal Reserve building in East Rutherford, N.J., on Dec. 17.

The Freightliner 18-wheeler that Mendoza was driving was found abandoned and empty at a Flying J truck stop in Fort Pierce, Fla., on Dec. 22.

A representative of Mendozer’s employer, Geler Transportation of Miami, said the company last heard from the driver on Dec. 20, the day the nickels were due in New Orleans. The nickels were being hauled under a contract with the U.S. Mint.

On Friday, officers showed up at the farm around dawn in response to a tip that marijuana was being grown there, a police spokesman said. They found 88 suspected marijuana plants – and the nickels, he said.

Before long, a task force consisting of Miami-Dade officers and agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI was at the scene, said Judy Orihuela, an FBI spokeswoman.

“We’re still trying to sort this out,” she said.

An armored truck pulled up to the site Friday evening as workers prepared to collect – and count – the coins.

Police spokesman Giordano said, “If only I had a nickel for every question about this case.”