The Hidden Vaults Beneath the World Trade Centre

Underneath the complex sat a buried world of secure storage: bullion vaults, Law enforcement evidence vaults, basement archive storage, vehicle areas and secure offices handing sensitive government material. Beneath the towers and surrounding buildings were not just train lines and a retail concourse but rooms holding gold, silver, firearms, drugs, historical records, archaeological collections and elsewhere in the complex classified intelligence material. That matters because once the buildings came down, these were no longer tidy vaults or storerooms. They became part of a giant mixed debris field, and from that moment on the public record gets patchy fast. Some things were recovered. Some things were not. For a lot of it, there is no clear public ledger connecting what went into the vaults, and what came out.The original WTC sat over a huge multilevel basement structure, often called the bathtub. It tied together multiple buildings, loading areas, transit connections and underground service spaces. When you look at the Vaults under the WTC, they are not one neat chamber. It was storage spread across different buildings within one interconnected underground footprint.This is often why the story of the vaults gets muddled. A bullion vault under 4 WTC, evidence vaults under 6 WTC and sensitive government storage elsewhere in the complex all gets mushed together into one ‘secret vault’. The is actually messier but also more interesting. Different users, different materials, different recovery outcomes.The clearest vault in the public record is the bullion vault beneath 4 WTC. Reports said it held roughly 12 tons of gold and nearly 30 million ounces of silver, with values reported in the range of about $200 to $375 million depending on the point in recovery.What makes this vault different is that it was financially tracked and physically recoverable. Reports later said most of the bullion was recovered, though officials were careful not to clam 100% had been recovered. That wording does matter, ‘most’ is not ‘all’ and no single final public audit neatly tying every bar came out has ever been published. This however, is the most well known part of the underground world that the public were told about. Once you move away from the bullion and into evidence, archives and artifacts the paper trail starts to look very vague.WTC 6 before 9/11 - The US Customs House6 WTC, the US Customs House is where the story gets far more interesting. ABC reported (see article below) that 6 WTC contained vaults and safes holding guns, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and other evidence tied to criminal investigations. ATF also lost 2 evidence vaults there, reportedly containing somewhere between 200 and 400 weapons along with large quantities of ammunition.The evidence was real case materials, evidence for prosecutions, seized contraband and federal files. ABC quoted officials warning that if the evidence was not recovered intact, many cases might have to be dismissed.Beneath WTC 6 sat one of the most staggering cultural losses of 9/11 - The Five Points archaeological collection. Archaeology magazine says about one million unique artifacts documenting the lives of 19th century New Yorkers were stored in the basement of Six World Trade, and only 18 survived. Yes out of 1 million, there were only 18 recovered.National Geographic adds a brutal detail, when workers later recovered about 200 boxes from the Five Points collection, they contained only the paper records for the artifacts. The objects themselves were destroyed. In other words, the catalogue survived more than the history it described.This is one of the most haunting parts of the whole vault story. Under the same site that held gold and evidence, there also sat the physical remains of old New York ceramics, bottles, household items, personal objects and the archaeology of immigrant and working class life. Most of it is simply gone.Not everything historical in 6 WTC vanished. In the National Geographic article above it reported that in November 2001, workers salvaged the nearly complete collection of African Burial Ground artifacts stored there. One of the strangest and most interesting stories to emerge from the rubble involves ancient Iraqi antiquities seized by Customs. A Treasury Inspector General report says cuneiform tablets recovered from the ruins of the WTC included 45 moulded terracotta tablets, eight stone cylinder seals and nine amuletsA separate archaeological source says a group of 302 tablets looted from Iraq had been confiscated by US Customs, stored in the Customs House at 6 WTC, then retrieved, restored, translated and eventually returned to Iraq - see article below.6 WTC also housed the Ferdinand Gallozzi Library of the US Customs Service, which held documents related to US trade dating back at least to the 1840s. Multiple reports on cultural and archival losses after 9/11 note the destruction of those records.This is the kind of loss that disappears quietly but historically it is huge. Once records like that go, they do not come back. There is no recovery crew that can rebuild a 19th century documentary archive from nothing.Gold and silver from 4 WTC vault were mostly recovered. Firearms from 6 WTC were recovered in meaningful numbersThe African Burial Ground boxes were largely salvaged and the Iraqi tablets and related antiquities were recovered and restored.But the Five Points collection was essentially destroyed. The Customs trade records were also lost. Drug evidence and other seized contraband from 6 WTC do not appear to have been recovered. IRS files were reported as lost but there is no clean inventory of what did come back. This is the central pattern of the vault story, the durable, tracked or boxed items had the best odds. The loose collections, records and case by case evidence is where the public trail breaks down.One of the biggest impacts of the vault losses wasn’t financial - it was legal.Inside 6 WTC were vaults holding:Guns used as evidenceSeized drugsMaterials tied to ongoing federal investigationsWhen the building collapsed, that evidence was buried, destroyed or lost. And that created a serous problem.In criminal cases, you don’t just need to say evidence exists - you have to physically present it in court, with a clear chain of custody.Officials at the time said:If the evidence wasn’t recovered intact, many cases might have to be dismissed.There were also reports that ATF lost evidence tied to multiple investigations, with some cases only saved because duplicate evidence existed elsewhere. But the key point is, there was NO full public list of affected cases was every released.So we know cases were at risk and we know evidence was lost but we don’t know exactly which prosecutions were impacted.We know there was a bullion vault, there were evidence vaults. We know millions of dollars in metal, hundreds of weapons, seized drugs, historical records, archaeological collections and foreign antiquities were stored in or under the WTC complex. We know some categories were recovered and some were not.But there is no single public master inventory showing everything stored across all vaults and secure areas. No full public list of all seized contraband in 6 WTC. No complete public reconciliation of what was recovered from every category. No named public list of all cases affected by evidence loss.The underground story is not just that valuables and evidence were buried. It is that the public record of those valuables and that evidence is itself fractured. The vaults beneath the WTC held wealth, history, criminal evidence and state secrets. Some of it came back out. A lot of it disappeared into the rubble and the paper trail disappeared with it.Leave a commentShare

🔐 Cryptographic Verification

�� CONTENT HASHES: SHA-256: 9828dd462aea5c8af42db21f6062eb002174b6cb90ef914d3098449c1ef3cb3c BLAKE2b: 87415de6e4fec96d7b9ce7ef1aecd98ebc3e0f4c13ffd9c7875323b420390c2e MD5: 8fb4edce73df1e2441bcff79a56378b3 �� TITLE HASHES: SHA-256: 1c2b6f8770f5acdd39f37b525231cafdd82db9fe084623a5d67d45abdf48463f BLAKE2b: 30ce03dcba62ce496270e4af122c4051c945a3192ac77ef75e543b6d85baf31b MD5: b3fed262088924799bc4b7f056a7040b �� INTEGRITY HASHES: SHA-256: 16de83fcdff5ca82641a47dda1aa0aefd4928e00f4f95ff0cefd5c8bf5ea2290 BLAKE2b: b141b2062e806bd39c6e258de1055be6e57927f86680304bc7a454fa2f734aa0 MD5: 5125bad8c43615b353bafde4efc20844

Archived with ArcHive - Client-side cryptographic archival system