Hector Beerlioz posted:

My father's coworker was lead out of the lab one day by the NCIS.

There's a machine they use that heats up gold and other metals so it begins to evaporate and the particals land on slides making gold mirrors.

After a while a bunch of gold particles get caked onto the housing and have to be scrubbed off. He asked those in charge what to do with the leftover gold and they told him to dispose it since it's technically waste. He asked if he should recycle it, but they said all the gold had to be thrown away.

What he did was take all the gold scraping, did some chemistry to purify it and turned it into a solid gold nugget the size of his fist.

He took it to a pawn shop and turns out they have to report everything they buy for over $10k. Well he got reported and the Naval Criminal Investigative Services arrested him one day at work.

Dad says he can probably get off with a good lawyer but he'll never work at the lab again. Apparently he was a really really valuable employee, lol.

Moral of the story, if you work for the government lab, throw away their gold and don't pawn it off.