I get it.  You’re old, you’re upset that your whole plan for retiring comfortably has been taken out back and shot.  This has happened to exactly 100% of people.  There are options out there – readjust your retirement lifestyle, get a part-time job, heck, you can even get a reverse mortgage and screw your heirs.  What you do not do, under any circumstances, is kidnap your financial adviser and beat the crap out of him for four days.  Since you’re reading this here, some old people actually did that very thing.

During his confinement in an unheated cellar, Mr Amburn claims he was burned with cigarettes, beaten, had two of his ribs broken when he was hit with a chair leg and chained up ‘like an animal.’

He says he was fed only two bowls of watery soup during his four days in the dungeon.

‘I was led into the cellar,’ recalled Mr Amburn, ‘And 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.

Okay, seriously. It’s not funny that a guy was hit over the head outside his house, bound, thrown in a car trunk, driven out to a lake house, chained up in a cellar and beaten.  Unless that guy was Bernie Madoff, but he wasn’t.  It’s kind of awful, and wouldn’t even bear mentioning here if not for a few things:

• The youngest of his attackers was 60, the oldest 79
• He was hit over the head with a walker
• When he was being bound up, the attackers had to stop because they were out of breath
• He notified police by writing “Call police” on a fax to a Swiss bank; ‘police’ is German for ‘policy’ so his rookie monolingual captors never knew
• When German SWAT showed up to rescue him, a doctor had to come along to help the kidnappers into the SWAT van because they are seriously that old
• Chief public prosecutor Volker Ziegler said: “They were angry because they invested money in properties in Florida and he lost it all.”

Ultimately, their plan was a rousing success, because they each face up to 15 years in jail for all that.  So their golden years are taken care of, after all.  Still, no one else should do this, even if they are old and it’s funny when old people do anything. But seriously, Florida real estate? They’re lucky they didn’t owe money on that deal instead of just losing everything.

Go read the article, though.  Look at a picture of the house he was held in.  It would seem pretty clear that these people were not exactly reduced to paupers, and they kidnapped him in an Audi, so wtf.

(h/t Jess)