Geriatric Gang Kidnaps and Tortures Financial Adviser

A gang of wealthy German pensioners has been charged with the illegal hostage taking, torture and grievous bodily harm of a financial adviser that lost AUD $4 million (USD $3.3 million) of their money.

It is alleged that two members of the group hit financial adviser James Amburn with a Zimmer frame, bound his wrists with duct tape and stuffed him in the trunk of an Audi A8 outside of his home in Speyer, western Germany.

The German-American claims that for the next four days he was subjected to torture, that included being burned with cigarettes, beaten and hit with a chair leg while he was “chained up like an animal” in an unheated basement.

In his own words, Amburn describes the attack:

Then they bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. It took them quite a while because they ran out of breath.

When they loaded me into the car I thought I was a dead man.
I was led into the cellar, I saw a folding bed and a WC reserved for me. They immediately went on about their money. I told them what I had told them before, that due to market conditions, unfortunately it was gone.

I was struck. Again and again they threatened to kill me. The fear of death was indescribable.

Amongst his alleged torturers was a married couple aged 63 and 66, who were both retired doctors, a couple aged 74 and 79, and a 60-year-old.

Amburn tricked the pensioners into allowing him to fax a bank in Switzerland. Amongst the text of the fax, he concealed ‘call. po-lice’, and then sent it to a Swiss bank, in the hope that it would be discovered.

On the third day of his captivity, Amburn made a bid for freedom when his elderly kidnappers allowed him a cigarette break. He ran out onto the street, but was grabbed by passers by when one of the pensioners yelled out, “he’s a burglar.”

He found himself back in the cellar until a bank worker discovered the hidden message and called for help. The raid that followed involved 40 police and a doctor (in case any of the pensioners’ medical conditions got the better of them). Amburn was found in his underwear.

Volker Ziegler, chief public prosecutor of Traunstein explained that the pensioners had lost all of their investment money in Florida property investments.

This was black money: they hadn’t declared it to the revenue authorities in Germany.

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[The Age]

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