https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box-theft.html

WHEN DOES A BIRD DING DONG?

The singing bird

For over a decade, Mr. Poniz’s Box 105 sat at the bottom of a seven-foot shelf in Wells Fargo’s Highland Park vault, accessible via a metal-barred door with an old-fashioned crank. But halfway up a different wall in the vault was another Box 105 — a product of the bank’s having consolidated several branches’ safe deposit boxes into a single location and having kept their original numbering. Bank employees got them mixed up, and emptied the wrong one.

“There’s no question that Wells Fargo drilled the box and took the contents out of it, put in storage and then returned it,” John North, a lawyer representing the bank, said at a court hearing last year. “The underlying dispute is, was everything returned or not?”

That isn’t really in dispute. When Wells Fargo employees opened Mr. Poniz’s box, they created an inventory that included 92 watches. When workers at the bank’s storage facility in North Carolina counted the items, they listed only 85. Also missing were dozens of rare coins that were listed in the first inventory, but not the second. According to Mr. Poniz, photographs and family documents also disappeared.

“My impression about safe deposit boxes was that it was like you were putting things in Fort Knox,” Mr. Poniz said.

Credit

Andrew White for The New York Times

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“My impression about safe deposit boxes was that it was like you were putting things in Fort Knox,” Mr. Poniz said.

“My impression about safe deposit boxes was that it was like you were putting things in Fort Knox,” Mr. Poniz said.CreditAndrew White for The New York Times

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Oddly, the bank returned to him five watches that weren’t his. “They were the wrong color, the wrong size — totally different than what I had,” Mr. Poniz said. “I had no idea where they came from.”

New Jersey law requires a bank to bring in an independent notary when it opens and empties a safe deposit box, and to place the box’s contents in a sealed package signed by the notary. The disappearance of the coins and watches suggests that Wells Fargo — which in recent years has admitted to systematically ripping off customers with fake accounts, hidden fees and a variety of unwanted and unnecessary financial products — didn’t follow that law.

“Wells Fargo is reviewing the facts and circumstances of this case,” said Jim Seitz, a bank spokesman. “We cannot comment further due to pending litigation.”

Mr. Poniz hired lawyers. One of them, Kerry Gotlib, said he pressed the bank to find the missing items. It couldn’t. He asked for a financial settlement; the bank said no. So Mr. Poniz sued in New Jersey’s Superior Court.

Wells Fargo sought to move the case into arbitration, a venue that keeps disputes out of the public record and tends to favor companies over the individuals challenging them. For nearly two years, the two sides battled over that request, until a judge ruled in November 2018 that the case should remain in court. Wells Fargo appealed, prolonging the dispute.

The lawsuit appears nowhere near resolution, and Mr. Poniz already has run up tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. “The bank has spent a tremendous amount of resources and put them into defending the case, instead of stepping forward and saying, ‘We made a mistake here, let’s make it right,’” said Craig Borgen, another lawyer representing Mr. Poniz.

The watches that vanished were the largest and most visually striking in his collection, Mr. Poniz said. There was a Tiffany watch that tracked the moon’s phases on its gold dial, and an early Breguet engraved with the coat of arms of the Duke of Orléans.

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The highlight was a rare 19th-century pocket watch, whose face was dotted with pearls and rubies and concealed a pop-up bird, slightly larger than a thumbnail, that twittered and sang. Such “singing bird” watches rarely come to market. One of the last, in 1999, was sold at auction for $772,500 to the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva.

Mr. Poniz, who spent a decade working at Sotheby’s and now consults for Christie’s as a horological expert, had hoped that the singing-bird watch would one day be the centerpiece of an auction of his own collection. He considered the trove to be his retirement fund.

“My impression about safe deposit boxes was that it was like you were putting things in Fort Knox,” he said. “Nothing could happen to it.” He doesn’t think that anymore.