The New York Times has a profile of Timothy Mellon, who is both Robert F. Kennedy and Donald Trump’s biggest individual donor in the 2024 presidential election cycle. It appears that he’s a complete nut whose brain has been consumed by right wing lunacy. You can see what I mean by reading the whole profile, but I want to focus on just one part of it.
Timothy Mellon, a wealthy banking heir and railroad magnate, has reached the stratosphere of American political influence as the top supporter of Donald J. Trump, doling out millions to try to elect the former president and his allies.
But to his neighbors in a Rhode Island beachfront enclave, he is better known as the prime suspect in the Narragansett Runestone Affair.
A hulking boulder once positioned just offshore in Narragansett Bay, the runestone bears inscriptions that some believe were left by Viking explorers. It was the stuff of local lore and attracted visitors at low tide — to the consternation of Mr. Mellon, the pedigreed businessman whose home looked out on the rock.
And then one day it was gone.
A criminal investigation yielded a witness who had heard sounds of heavy machinery at night. Mr. Mellon refused to talk and hired a former state attorney general as his lawyer. Nearly a year later, the matter was resolved quietly: Mr. Mellon agreed to return the stone, and prosecutors agreed not to bring charges.
Now, naturally when I read this, my curiosity was piqued. Where did Mr. Mellon put the rock? One day it was there, the next day it was gone. There was an investigation and Mellon clammed up and hired a former state attorney general to represent him. And then suddenly Mr. Mellon produced the rock, apparently fully intact.
Since the New York Times didn’t address this question, I searched on WikiPedia and found this:
Town historian and independent columnist G. Timothy Cranston said that a Pojac Point resident had removed the stone, as he was tired of having tourists scouring the neighborhood and shoreline looking for the stone. He said that the resident, who was not named, was ordered by state officials to retrieve the stone after having sunk it in deeper waters off the coast.
We now know that the Pojac Point resident was an heir to the massive Andrew Mellon fortune, the aforementioned Timothy Mellon. Apparently he did not store the rock in a warehouse but hired people to pick up and dump the Narragansett Runestone in deeper offshore waters. When he realized that he might actually face criminal prosecution for this, he must have hired the same crew to go and retrieve it.
Of course I have no idea if the original crew was actually capable of retrieving it. It’s easier to dump something in deep water than to pull something heavy off the ocean floor. It could be that the original crew was only useful for pinpointing the location of the runestone and another much more expensive crew was hired to bring it to the surface.
I imagine this was all very expensive: the crews and the former attorney general. But he avoided prosecution and the rhinestone no longer sits in the water at the edge of his property. In 2015, it found a new home.
NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — About 120 people gathered in what is hoped will become Wickford’s upstaging of Plymouth Rock as Town Historian Tim Cranston and a person in a pirate costume unveiled the Narragansett Runestone.
Propped against a smaller boulder to achieve the best angle for showing off its mysterious inscription, the stone that some believe was carved by Nordic explorers predating Columbus sits in a nest of small cobblestones inside a rail fence surrounded by a lush grass carpet and a brick sidewalk.
Whether it was Vikings who carved it in the late 1300s or a teenager fascinated with runic characters in the 1960s, Cranston said it was “a bold fist in the air that says ‘I was here!'”
For the record, I don’t believe vikings are actually responsible for the inscriptions on the stone, but that’s not really the point. This is an example of how rich people, like Donald Trump and his biggest donor don’t have to live by the same rules and obey the same laws as the rest of us.
