The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Rick went back to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where the Laginas had grown up, to put in the last of his thirty-five-plus years working for the US Postal Service. Marty, meanwhile, had spent that time running an energy business that made and managed natural gas and coal investments. As a consequence, he was loaded. In 2004 he’d sold his company, Terra Energy—which had been extracting natural gas from shale since the mid-1990s—for $58 million.

  THEN IN 2007 an ad listing for sale all of David Tobias’s Oak Island holdings appeared in Islands magazine. Marty, who at the time was flush from the sale of Terra Energy three years earlier, told me he was vacationing in Florida when he spotted the ad and immediately called Rick to let him know a big piece of Oak Island was for sale. Rick’s recollection was that he had seen the ad and made the call to Marty. Either way, the Islands ad turned out to be both quite misleading and the Lagina brothers’ point of entry to Oak Island. The real estate agent who was supposedly handling the sale had overstated his position, Tobias told the Laginas. All he was offering for sale was one small parcel of what he owned on Oak Island, lot 25. The brothers went in together to buy the lot, “to get a foothold on the island,” as Rick put it, and eventually were able to persuade Tobias, who was now eighty-three years old and on his last legs, to sell them all of his property on Oak Island as well as any rights he had acquired through Triton Alliance. Marty put together the consortium that made the purchase, making the Laginas and their partners Craig Tester and Alan Kostrzewa fifty percent partners in Oak Island Tours with Dan Blankenship.

  It was during my first one-on-one conversation with Rick that he asked about my trip to Oak Island in 2003. I remarked that I had spent the majority of my time on the island sitting with Dan Blankenship in his basement office. “Lucky you,” Rick told me. “I’ve never been there.” You’ve never been in Dan’s office? I asked. Rick shook his head. “I’ve never been invited.” I had simply assumed that Rick and Dan were tight and that the old man had welcomed not only the enthusiasm but also the financial backing the Lagina brothers had brought to Oak Island. Rick said no, that Dan believed he and Marty had “backdoored” their way into the treasure hunt, and he had never forgiven them for it.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Back when the Laginas were trying to buy the Tobias holdings on Oak Island, Blankenship, who had the right of first refusal on his longtime partner’s shares of Oak Island Tours, had chosen the offer by “the Italians from Michigan” over a higher one offered by a Swiss property-development company. I never saw any sign of friction between Dan and Rick during the weeks I spent on the island in the summer of 2016, and in fact about a month after I left Nova Scotia in late August, Rick was invited into Dan’s basement, where a scene was shot for the show in which Dan was displaying various artifacts.

  I had spent enough time around Rick by then to be certain that he mostly meant anything he said and that the man he appeared to be on television stuck very close to the person he was. Marty thoroughly enjoyed the performance aspect of the show as well as the celebrity it had brought him. Rick generally did his best to ignore being famous. When I ran into him around the hotel where we were both staying, Marty would regularly steer our conversations toward some subject other than Oak Island. His older brother’s fascination—obsession might not have been too strong a word—with Oak Island was just as ardent off camera as on. He could talk about Oak Island for hours on end and I rarely heard him speak about anything else.

  Marty was a complicated character, a very bright fellow and a polymath of sorts, an engineer who liked to quote poetry and had a repertoire suitable for just about any occasion. He was fanatic about exercising and kept in splendid shape, often highly competitive, and a good deal more sensitive than he let on. When I asked him about being in the energy business Marty told me: “It’s made me hated my whole life. People think we’re the worst, the exploiters, the polluters.” He told me a story about a meeting in northern Michigan in the middle of winter at which the people who had shown up “to call me names” all left their gas-guzzling SUVs running in the parking lot, so they would stay warm inside. “You get really familiar with people’s hypocrisy in the energy business,” Marty said. He had recently switched to wind-driven turbines, starting (along with Craig Tester) a company called Heritage Sustainable Energy that was poised to become the largest producer of wind energy in the state of Michigan. “And yet people still hate us,” he said. “People think we’re killing birds, we’re giving the people who live nearby headaches. You better learn to live without love if you want to be in the energy business.”

  THE LAGINAS AND THEIR PARTNERS had accomplished almost nothing on Oak Island during the next several years after buying out Tobias. They were blocked by the fact that Canada’s Treasure Trove Act had been revoked by parliament, which meant that nobody anywhere had a right to search for treasure within the national boundaries. Both brothers told me it had been a long and boring process—and a very expensive one too, Marty said—to sort through this obstacle, but in 2011, three years before The Curse of Oak Island began shooting, Canada had replaced the Treasure Trove Act with what it called the Oak Island Treasure Act, meaning that Oak Island had been singled out as the only place in Canada where one could be licensed to search for buried treasure. The deal was that the partners in Oak Island Tours would get 90 percent of any findings, with 10 percent going to the Canadian government. Canada also would keep any artifacts. The problem being, Marty told me, no one had ever defined what “artifacts” meant.

  Marty claimed that neither he nor Rick had been interested in the television show when Kevin Burns first approached them. Burns was up to that point best known for a number of Emmy-winning documentaries and reality shows, most notably Ancient Aliens and The Girls Next Door, about Hugh Hefner’s relationships with his three much younger live-in girlfriends. Rick and Marty each told me they had turned Burns down flat when he first approached, and each then explained changing their minds with exactly the same words: “Kevin Burns is very persuasive.” Burns had apparently tailored his appeals to the brothers’ individual motivations for investing in Oak Island. The show would spread the legend of Oak Island worldwide, Burns told Marty. Then he pointed out to Rick that the production would attract not only investigators and theorists from all over the planet, but also the best people from the applied sciences. By the summer of 2013 the brothers and Burns had a deal with one another and with the History Channel, which had agreed to finance a five-episode first-season tryout. Those episodes started running on television in January 2014 and were so successful that the network promptly ordered another ten that were produced and edited in time to start running during November of the same year. A third season of thirteen episodes began running in November 2015. From the start, the participants in the new Oak Island treasure hunt had included Blankenship and his son Dave; Charles Barkhouse, whose family had been in Mahone Bay for generations; Dan Henskee, whose story had been a significant section of my Rolling Stone article; Marty’s business partner, Craig Tester; and various younger members of the Lagina and Tester families. When Kevin Burns called me in the spring of 2016, he said he wanted me to join the group for “four or five episodes” of the fifteen the History Channel had ordered for the show’s fourth season. It sounded like a sweet deal: I would be getting paid while doing research for a book, all expenses covered, during a summer month when Nova Scotia’s south shore offered some of the loveliest and most dramatic scenery on the planet.

  BECAUSE THE EXACT LOCATION of the Money Pit had been lost for decades and the area around it was riddled with other shafts and connecting tunnels, many of them collapsed, Dan Blankenship had urged the Laginas and the show’s producers to approach the problem through 10X. He pointed out the obvious connection to the Money Pit; when air was pumped down one shaft, bubbles rose on the surface of the water in the other. Additionally, they were the only two holes on the island where freshwater floated on top of saltwater. The Laginas and their partners had agreed to send
a robotic high-definition camera down 10X to see what might be found. The camera they used, the Spectrum 90, was built to withstand an underwater depth of as much as 1,000 feet and had the capacity to pan, tilt, zoom, and enlarge images by as much as forty times their actual size. Afterward, Dan joined the rest of the team in what I recognized as the shack that once housed the offices of Oak Island Tours but was now known for the purposes of television as the War Room. Dan was ninety years old when the scene was shot and I could sense the depth of the old man’s emotions as he looked into 10X for the first time in more than thirty years. When Dan began to tell the others he believed he might be seeing the top of a tunnel and then an anchor, though, I felt myself grimace, reminded of all the things that Dan had told me he saw in the still pictures from the video that had been shot in 10X in 1971: the chests, the old tools, the body lying on its side. I hadn’t been sure I was seeing any of those things back then and I felt more than a little doubt that Dan was seeing a tunnel or the anchor onscreen now. I wondered if he was being set up for a crushing disappointment, but I knew he’d risk that to satisfy his curiosity.

  Marty supervised an operation at 10X that relied on a technique he had seen employed in drilling oil wells; it involved using compressed air to bring up whatever was down there. Mostly, that appeared to be a great deal of water. Jane Blankenship had died in 2011, and I saw her surviving husband’s vulnerability for the first time ever when Dan showed up at 10X wearing his deceased wife’s old straw hat, with the bright blue-and-white ribbon still attached. This was a proud man who for most of his life had been better at controlling fear and concealing pain than just about anyone I had ever met. Now, as I listened to him admit his “obsession” with Oak Island, I could hear someone desperate to see a solution to the mystery in the short time the ninety-three-year-old had left.

  Straining the sediment from the muddy water pumped out of 10X had produced only a single tiny scrap of metal. A decision was made then to send a diver down the shaft, and from that point forward nearly all the drama connected to 10X involved finding someone who could get to the bottom of it.

  The first to try was a former military policeman named Dan Misiaszek, better known as Frog. He and his wife, Kathy, had dived as a team in search-and-rescue missions all over the planet. Together they had decided to try 10X wearing rebreathers that would provide an ideal blend of nitrogen and oxygen. Before the two dove, geophysicist and sonar imaging expert Brian Abbott arrived to explore the path of the dive and the obstacles it would present. Of the latter, by far the most difficult would be the bar of a bit that had slipped off one of the many drills claimed by Oak Island, now wedged crosswise in the lower, 27-inch-diameter pipe at the bottom of 10X. Negotiating it would be, at best, a tight squeeze. A backup diver and an EMT team would need to be present in case an emergency situation developed.

  Frog went down alone first. Kathy followed in a bucket lowered by crane, riding with Rick Lagina, who was wearing nothing but jeans and a work shirt as he was submerged to the chin in water that was forty-one degrees Fahrenheit.

  Kathy Misiaszek never really joined the dive because her husband had gotten stuck in the lower pipe, wedged between the wall and the drill bar. The man sounded sincerely frightened for a few moments before he worked himself loose and began the climb back to the surface, aborting the dive.

  After the Misiaszeks called it quits, Brian Abbott came back to 10X to do a more thorough sonar exploration of the shaft’s floor. As he studied the resulting images on a screen where they all appeared in red and black, Abbott was struck by what he described as objects with edges cut at 90-degree angles. “Mother Nature doesn’t make rectangular things,” he said, speculating that what he was seeing might be a chest, probably the same one Dan Blankenship had described seeing himself more than thirty years earlier. He had also found a stand-alone column, made of wood he believed, Abbott said, and an opening in the wall of the chamber at the bottom of 10X, 7 feet tall and 5 feet wide, which he suspected might be the entrance to a tunnel.

  The scanning sonar was again sent down the shaft. The technician operating it, Nick Burchill, confirmed Abbott’s observations, adding that there were two posts, not one, and that he also thought they were wood. He saw the rectangular structure Abbott had found as well, Burchill said, describing it as 2 feet by 2.5 feet with a curved top. He too thought it was a chest. “Ninety percent certainty,” Burchill said. He had also seen an object that looked to him like human remains, Burchill told the Laginas. It was all tremendously exciting, especially for Dan Blankenship, who said he was convinced that there was the preserved corpse of a man lying on his side who had been chained to a post down there.

  It was what they heard from Abbott and Burchill that sent the Laginas and their partners in search of someone who could get down there. Eventually they were led to John Chatterton, whom Marty described as “the most qualified diver we could possibly find.” Chatterton, who had dived shipwrecks that included the Lusitania, the Andrea Doria, and the Titanic, listened to the litany of other failed attempts to get down 10X, described it as “a very challenging and interesting dive,” then assured the Laginas that he would make it successfully if that were “humanly possible.” Chatterton was lanky and handsome with graying sandy hair, and he never seemed to blink. “To describe someone as oozing confidence is a cliché,” Marty would tell me over breakfast one morning in July 2016, “but Chatterton oozes confidence. I mean it actually comes out through his pores.”

  The day of Chatterton’s dive Mahone Bay was about to be struck by the biggest wind and rainstorm it had seen in years. Marty Lagina and Craig Tester were going to have to follow the dive by video conference from their offices in Traverse City, Michigan, where their flight to Nova Scotia had been grounded by the impending storm. Chatterton himself, though, was unfazed. “I like that,” he said when advised of what weather on the ground would be that day. “It makes me feel like I’m getting away with something.”

  He had decided to go down 10X in a water suit (through which warm water would be pumped) and steel-toed boots, Chatterton said, wearing a Kirby Morgan helmet through which umbilicals would feed his trimix, with just one very small “bailout” tank attached to his waist. His partner, Mike Huntley, would go down into 10X as well, but would stop at the bottom of the wider section of the shaft, and remain floating in the water there unless Chatterton got himself into trouble and needed help. Shortly after Chatterton reached the drill bar at a depth of 204 feet, it sounded as if Huntley might have to rescue his partner. Chatterton still sounded cool when he reported that “I’m having a little trouble turning around here,” but there seemed to be some agitation in his voice when he added a few moments later that his breathing and communication apparatus was caught on the bar. Something that approached actual strain entered his tone when he said, “My hose is hung up.” Chatterton’s nerves were as steely as advertised, though, and within a minute or so he had maneuvered past the drill bar and continued his descent. Only another minute passed before those listening on the surface and in Michigan heard Chatterton say, “I’m standing on the bottom.” He was the first person to reach the chamber since Dan Blankenship’s last dive in the 1970s, and the first in a position to actually explore it.

  Chatterton’s first report was discouraging to those listening: The “post” that Blankenship had first seen more than thirty years earlier, and that had been confirmed by both Abbott and Burchill, was metal, not wood. It was stuck in the clay of the chamber’s floor, Chatterton said, and standing next to it he could feel that the water in the chamber was moving, not still. The increasingly glum listeners perked up when Chatterton suddenly announced, “I’m in the tunnel.” Then a moment later he said that the opening he had stepped into “appears very much rectangular.” The walls were clay and rock and the ceiling was crumbly and irregular, the diver reported. It narrowed ahead and he would have to crawl to continue.

  Chatterton began his climb back to the surface soon after this, and the next time his
voice was heard the diver was sitting in the Oak Island War Room in his hoodie sweatshirt, providing what was described as a “debriefing” to the Laginas and other members of the cast. The cavern was somewhere between 10 and 12 feet tall, Chatterton said, and the pipe—not post—was the only vertical object in it. What had been described to him as a “chest” was, he believed, a rock, and where he had been told the body might be he had found instead a sinkhole. He was all but certain that the chamber at the bottom of 10X was a natural formation, not a man-made one.

  After hearing all of this, Marty Lagina said he was ready “to put an X in 10X,” but his brother Rick resisted, and so, of course, did Dan Blankenship. Chatterton’s search of the chamber had been too brief and too limited to make a final determination about what was down there, Rick argued. The ensuing back and forth established the dynamic between the brothers that would play out repeatedly during the first three seasons of The Curse of Oak Island: Rick led with his heart, while Marty stayed in his head, the romantic versus the rationalist, the man of faith vying with the man of science.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  After the exploration of 10X, of the second-largest block of screen time during the first three seasons of The Curse of Oak Island had been devoted to the theory that the original work there had been done by the Knights Templar. I’d found the Templar theory thrilling back in 2003, when I’d worked it into my Rolling Stone article. The claims that this ancient order of warrior-monks had conveyed a treasure that might include the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant, or both, from Jerusalem to Scotland to Nova Scotia and buried it on Oak Island added such a rich layer of possibility to the island’s legend that I found it nearly irresistible, even admitting its unlikeliness.