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The crazy tale of the pimp, the ransom and the lost F.P Journe watch worth $100,000 The crazy tale of the pimp, the ransom and the lost F.P Journe watch worth $100,000

The crazy tale of the pimp, the ransom and the lost F.P Journe watch worth $100,000

Thor Svaboe

Talk about a conversation piece. The loss and eventual return, against all odds, of a F.P Journe Centigraphe S, now worth $100,000 USD, was a tale that made my jaw drop. Particularly given it involved a pimp, a ransom and a desperate chase to be reunited with this watch of a lifetime. The man at the centre of this wild story was my good friend Leonardo, aka @watchleo, a Boston collector who first shared this story through his private Instagram account. Below, Leonardo gives Time+Tide the whole story.

F.P Journe

The tale unfolds

“Two years ago, one fateful summer day, I was sitting in the relatively empty First Class carriage of an Amtrak Express train going from New York to my Boston home after spending a nice weekend in the Big Apple visiting friends.  It wasn’t unusual for me to take this three-hour fast train ride several times a year – it’s faster than flying and drops you off in the middle of Manhattan.

“It also wasn’t unusual for me to take my backpack and one or two watches with me on the visit. Wristwatches have long been a source of pleasure for me ever since falling in love with my father’s Seiko 5 Sport orange dial diver’s watch at the age of six. Seeing him wear that watch on his wrist evoked a sense of masculinity and style that always reminded me of him. It was what set me off into a lifelong watch-collecting journey and the pursuit of that elusive ‘perfect watch’.

“At some point during the train ride, I made the odd decision to rearrange my bag while in my seat. This forced me to take everything out of it including my watches in their carrying cases. Among them was my F. P. Journe Centigraphe Sport in aluminum. It was placed inside a soft Audemars Piguet egg-shaped carrying case that was balanced between my leg and the seat armrest. As I repacked my bag I didn’t notice that the case in which the Journe was in had rolled onto the floor out of my line of sight.

“Now, I know what you are thinking: how could I have possibly have overlooked repacking it? How can one just forget a watch that at the time had a value of about $40k USD? I may have been distracted with the sudden arrival of my stop and the urgency to get ready to disembark. At any rate I lost my train of thought as fast as I had lost the Journe in a moment of airheadedness I surely will never outlive.

The shock

“By the time I got home and finished dinner, I was well relaxed with a glass of chilled California pinot noir in hand when I proceeded to casually unpack my backpack.  As I approached the bottom I started to get a sinking feeling in my stomach. Something dear to me, something that should have been there for me to wear that night wasn’t there. I finished my last sip of wine with a panic-stricken chill running down my spine.  ‘Where the…F*CK…is my Journe?!’. With both palms of my hand I wiped my face over and over, up and down, thinking of the endless combinations of possibilities. My mind for a moment became a supercomputer doing the maths over and over, generating calculations and probabilities of who, how and where.  It didn’t take that long for me to come up with the most obvious conclusion:  I had lost my watch on the train.”

The chase

“Over the following hours and days I was in frantic pursuit of my lost treasure.  I was in touch with the Transit Police of NYC, Amtrack, the Journe boutique, Boston Police and so on.  No effort was spared and, by the end of that first week, I had more people involved in its recovery that was probably warranted. But f*ck it, it was my Journe!”

 

“Days turned to weeks and weeks turned into months. As time went by my hopes of finding it began to fade and two and a half years passed. But there was still one tiny fact about the watch I knew I still could cling onto – the aluminum Centigraphe was a very unusual watch, both rare and expensive. Journes are also known to be finicky and I knew if that watch was ever found and something poked at it long enough it would eventually get sent out for service and there it would be stopped and flagged as stolen or lost. Even if the Journe didn’t break, its rarity would make it an oddity to sell, surely raising suspicion since the watch didn’t have its proper box and papers.”

The turning point

“Being a reasonably prominent watch collector, over the years you meet a lot of people in the game. Dealers begin to remember your name in order to sell you pieces. I estimate that I’ve bought close to 600 watches in my life, over 300 from one dealer in Boston alone. In other words, people knew me and many knew I was missing a nice watch.

“But two Fridays ago, as I ate my morning yoghurt, granola and fruit, I began to receive WhatsApp messages from multiple dealers through the country. Before I could finish my breakfast I was getting pictures and questions asking me if the watch they were being offered was mine. After a quick check of the serial number and a few discrete questions, lightning had struck. I had found my Journe!”

“Here is the thing about watch dealers. While many have become great friends, just as many want to turn a profit on anything they can get their hands on… even if they don’t necessarily have their hands on it (yet). Many dealers that morning were offering the watch as theirs to other dealers who were then sending it to me. It took some three hours to sort out who was the one dealer who actually had the watch in his possession and if he still had it. As it turned out, the watch was still in Boston. It had never left my city. In fact, it was still in the sock drawer of the person who had found it two and a half years ago on that train.”

The pimp and his sock drawer

“In a further colourful twist, it turned out the watch had been found by a man who was described to me as an actual pimp. That’s right, a man with a ring of prostitutes had found my watch on the train and, for some odd reason, deemed it unimportant and without obvious value. The watch had been stashed to one side of the top drawer of his bedroom dresser next to his socks.  What were the odds?  Not once in two and half years had he even worn the watch, let alone tried to sell it.  It was only one day he woke up bored – presumably due to the pandemic being bad news for sex trafficking – and with time on his hands, dug up my Journe and proceeded to Google its worth…

“During these two and a half years, the Journe had propelled to more than double what it had been worth the day I lost it. The pimp ran to the jewellers’ building in downtown Boston, a place notorious for second-hand jewellery stores and sketchy watch dealers alike. He went from door-to-door to see who would offer the most money for his prize.  Fortunately for me, not many of those dealers recognised what they had in front of them. But it wasn’t too long after that that my phone began blowing up.”

“The F.P. Journe Centigraphe in aluminum was a limited edition with only about 184 pieces ever made. The only one without box and papers on the planet was mine. By the time I had discovered this, my watch has been bought and sold three times (!) and was well on its way via FedEx to NYC 57th street to be resold again. If it were not for my friends in this business with whom I had formed relationships, I would surely have lost it. I did have to pay some money to the dealer who had originally bought it from the pimp in order to reimburse him for his loss. But relatively speaking it was not a lot of money and was the least I could do to make it right and close the circle. Mostly importantly I had been reunited. My beloved F. P. Journe was back home at last and I didn’t even have to size the bracelet!”

F.P Journe 

“I think had it been a Rolex, Audemars Piguet or Patek, I probably would have been forced to accept the watch as being lost forever as it would’ve been too difficult to trace. But with the Journe I always felt I had a chance to see it again one day, due to its extreme rarity.

“In retrospect, I also feel that maintaining a good relationship with the people who I have done business with for so many years contributed to my good fortune.  Call it karma, but what goes around comes around. But I won’t try my luck twice with this watch.  This time it’s staying with me for good.”

The F.P Journe Centigraphe S, an unlikely Haute Horlogerie sports watch

F.P Journe

Not many of us equate F.P Journe with sports watches. Indeed, this watch seems a highly unlikely marriage, like an alien spaceship landing outside La Scala in Milan in order to attend an opera. The F.P Journe Centigraph S  feels like haute horlogy embracing futurism in an ultra=light case of aluminium – a metal that’s not used that regularly in watchmaking. A wild juxtaposition is quickly apparent as soon as you look at a dial that seems starkly modern and traditional at once with its grey background and bright pops of red in the hands and traditional numerals on the delicately detailed registers. The manual wind F.P. Journe 1506 movement will dazzle you with its hand-finished layout and a combination of hand winding and timing to 1/100th second.  Just make sure you keep it close.