This was written by Kraig (Matthew) Roberts on a now defunct forum:
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[To most people, Robert Simpson Jacob aka. Crazy Jake, was little more than a con man who swindled unsuspecting city dwellers out of their life savings with tales and stories of gold and buried treasure, the location of which Jake held the key and offered them fabulous wealth if they would invest in his schemes to recover it.
Jake did not swindle these people based on a lie, per se, he did so on a half truth, or to be more to the point, a belief Jake held that he just hadn't had time to be able to prove yet.
Crazy Jake was without a doubt, one of the most complex men I had ever met. His story, and the story of his dealings with investors in his schemes all came together and collided head on with history and destiny at a place called Peters Mesa in the winter of 1983-84.
Sometime in the fall of 1983, two men appeared atop Squaw canyon on the west end of Peters Mesa. Crazy Jake had a camp at the head of that canyon overlooking LaBarge canyon and Marsh Valley below. These two men set up camp there and would remain for the next three months. Their names were Ellis Schmidt and Mike Hill and they worked for crazy Jake. As far as Jake's employees went, they were mild by comparison but not two men you would have wanted to turn your back on for very long. Neither man were accomplished outdoorsmen and neither man knew much about Arizona or the deserts and mountains and the many dangers that are always present in the wilderness. They had been dropped off at Jake's camp by Jake's packer, Jerry Sherwood, and Sherwood would continue to drop them supplies and water on a regular basis over the next 90 days. I learned the men had come from Washington State and had been referred to Jake by two of Jake's former employees, Jesus and Sanchez Gurrerro. The Gurrerros and Hill and Schmidt had all met in various jails and prisons in and around Seattle. Jake had warned Hill and Schmidt I would be on the mesa and had given them orders to do their best to drive me off Peters Mesa and the mining claims Jake had filed in his girlfriend, Nancy Cochran's, name.
In conversations with these two, I gained a certain amount of their confidence and learned Jake had sent them to his camp to guard his mining claims and look specifically for what Jake called a "drop hole" in the mountains that led to an underground passage into the Lost Dutchman mine.
Jake had told Hill and Schmidt that he had located a cave filled with gold bars, some 20 tons of gold and needed investors money to finance a scheme to remove the gold from this hidden cave, pack it out of the mountains and get it out of the country to the Bahamas where he would convert it into cash and make himself, his employees and investors, fabuously rich.
Jake's urgency for raising money from investors was prompted by the Wilderness Act deadline of December 31, 1983. On that date the Superstition Mountains officially became wilderness and Jake's plans of mining claims, treasure caves and schemes to extract gold and treasure from the mountains would become much more complicated if not impossible.
No one knows for sure exactly how much money Jake took from investors in his cave of the gold bars scheme, but the unofficially tally was some 2.3 million dollars.
The ironic thing about the scheme is, Jake actually believed the cave existed, he just could not locate the entrance that he knew was somewhere on Peters Mesa. Some years before Jake had been given a gold bar by an acquaintance of Bill Barkley who told him of the cave and it's rich treasure in gold bars. The man told Jake if he could locate the cave and retrieve the gold, he would split the wealth with him. The man died a few years after he told Jake about the cave but could not direct Jake to the cave because the man had never himself been to the location. He had been given the gold bar by a man named -------.
By the end of 1983 Crazy Jake felt certain he had pinpointed the area where the cave with the gold bars lay hidden, in fact he believed he knew the very hill and canyon where the cave was located. But he could not find the entrance he was sure was there. In an elaborate attempt to try and lay claim to the area, he had his 24 year old girlfiend, Nancy Cochran, file about a dozen mining claims, blanketing Peters Mesa from Charley-Boy canyon in the south to Pistol Canyon in the north. Jake became desperate to find the entrance And as the wilderness deadline closed in on him, his desperation became fanatical. This was the period when he took the most amount of money from his investors, the time when he openly declared war on everyone who had a camp on Peters Mesa, Chuck Kenworthy and Jake got into a shooting scrape up there that could have easily turned deadly. Walter Gassler was caught in the middle of Jake's fanatical attempts to clear the mesa of everyone else and claim the treasure for himself. It was an intense and dangerous period, a time when Jake truly earned his nickname of, "crazy".
The thing that always struck me the hardest about Jake was he truly believed the cave and mine were there. He swindled investors out of their money but not with an outright hoax, because Jake actually believed he was on the verge of finding the cave and treasure. Maybe people can believe so deeply in something that it clouds all reality from their thinking. If so, that fit Crazy Jake in the fall and winter of 1983. Even after Jake had been convicted and spent 8 years in prison, in ill health and dying, he had Jerry Sherwood pack him back into his camp in the mountains to make one final last attempt to locate the cave and mine. That is not the act of a man who created a hoax and did not believe in what he was telling his victims.
Robert S. Jacob believed in the cave of the gold bars not simply because someone gave him a gold bar and told him a story. Jake was to intelligent to fall for that and invest his life in the endeavor of trying to locate this dream.
He believed in the cave because of things he found that fit with that gold bar. In one of my last conversations with Jake before he passed away at his home in Phoenix, he showed me a photo of the gold bar and a photo of a small symbol carved in a rock in a remote area of the mountains. The symbol on the rock was the exact same symbol that had been stamped on the gold bar. Jake, or one of Jake's men had found the symbol on the rock many years after Jake had been given the gold bar, and the man who had given Jake the gold bar, never mentioned the rock or the symbol to him.]
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While I don't give much credence to much of what Aurum writes, I believe there is some very good information on Crazy Jake in this post. I suggest everyone do their own research into the man.
Three people who probably have the most accurate information on Crazy Jake will be at the Rendezvous. That would be Tom Kollenborn, Greg Davis and Bob Corbin, who was involved in the prosecution of Jake. I believe there will be many people at the event who knew Jake personally, including Kraig Roberts and Clay Worst.
Joe Ribaudo
