The Legend Of Jacinto's Gold

Thousands of Dominicans are hunting for a treasure that may not exist

- Joe Nocera​​​​​​​

1 The three short videos are shaky, a jumble of blurred images and muffled sound, giving the distinct impression they were shot surreptitiously. They show three people, two men in leather jackets and a woman wearing an elegant red coat, in the lobby of Credit Suisse Group AG’s Zurich headquarters. The person taking the videos is also a man, also in a leather jacket; his arm flashes on screen here and there. The men are from the Dominican Republic; the woman, a Swiss citizen of Dominican descent, is their translator. It’s fall 2017.

Two of the videos show the men riffling through documents before handing them to a Credit Suisse clerk. These documents are meant to offer proof that thousands of people from a Dominican family, the Rosarios, are the heirs to a multibillion-dollar fortune they believe resides mainly in Credit Suisse’s vaults and those of Banco Santander SA in Spain. The Rosarios are being led in this quest by their lawyer, Johnny Portorreal Reyes. Portorreal is the one shooting the videos.

In the third clip, the quartet is ushered into a separate area off the lobby. They walk toward an antique trunk that’s on display. Portorreal’s two Dominican sidekicks pose on either side of the artifact. “This trunk is from Jacinto Rosario’s era,” Portorreal narrates in Spanish.

Jacinto and his father, Celedonio, are the ancestors said to have gathered the treasure their descendants seek. Family lore holds that they owned a gold mine in the Dominican Republic and regularly sent gold to Spain in the early to mid-1800s. They turned some of it over to the monarch and put the rest in a bank. Much of it was said to have been moved to Switzerland about the time of the Spanish Civil War.