WASHINGTON (AP) — The businessman arrived at the Treasury Department carrying a suitcase stuffed with about $5.2 million in petrified, nearly unrecognizable bills. He asked to swap it for a cashier’s check. Money like this normally arrives after a bank burns or a vault floods. It doesn’t just show up at the visitor’s entrance on a Tuesday morning. But Franz Felhaber’s banking habits had stopped making sense to the government long ago. For years, authorities say, he and his family have popped in and out of U.S. banks, looking to change about $20 million in decaying $100 bills for clean cash, offering ever-changing stories:

• 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.

That buried treasure stands to make someone rich. It could also send someone to jail. Felhaber’s is a customs broker. His company, F.C. Felhaber & Co., navigates the customs bureaucracy in El Paso, Texas, where tens of billions of dollars in Mexican goods enter each year. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say he unsuccessfully tried to get a Bank of America armored truck dispatched to the Mexican border to retrieve the money. Weeks later, they say he gave a fake name at two banks while inquiring about exchanging millions.

Once, the explanation was that he discovered the money while excavating a tree in Chihuahua, Mexico. Another time, the story was that it had been buried in an alfalfa field, investigators say. Felhaber denies nearly all of this, including giving a fake name. But he is tough to pin down on details. At times he acknowledges helping exchange a $20 million inheritance. Minutes later, he contradicts himself and says there’s nowhere near that much. And he has no idea where the money came from.

Read the whole incredible article. It’s hard to believe this guy has been under the radar for this long.