The Hitz fortune did not vanish in a robbery. It vanished in a signature. Facing a tax dispute in the 1950s, Othmar Hitz was advised by his lawyer, Rafael Naranjo Ostty, to transfer everything he owned, properties, companies, accounts, into the lawyer's name, with signed counter-documents stating that the assets really belonged to Hitz. My grandfather described what happened to those counter-documents in four words: they “disappeared, of course.”
Great-aunt Elisy remembered the family begging Othmar to put something in Switzerland, in his own name, anywhere else. His answer never changed: “Go to Naranjo Ostty, my lawyer, as I trust him like my own brother.” On the tax matter itself, the lawyer's reported advice was simpler still: don't pay anything, I'll settle the matter. Per the family's account, he did not settle it.
What the 1966 press found
When Othmar died in 1958, leaving an empty grave and a misspelled will, the will named Naranjo Ostty executor of the estate, with a reported fee of one hundred thousand bolivars. La República's Luis Arismendi, in the most detailed reporting of the era, laid out the questions the investigative police could not answer: who had taken the closed Caracas will to Switzerland, under what authority it was opened there, and why the people who should have known its contents claimed ignorance. The same coverage noted the executor was also, by then, defense counsel to the deposed dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez.
The estate's design made it uniquely takeable. Much of it sat in bearer shares, acciones al portador, instruments that legally belong to whoever physically holds the paper. Othmar had used them to hide assets from the government. The result, as the Caracas press documented in January 1966, was a fortune that could change hands like a coin: one lawyer in the case simply declared himself president of two Hitz companies because he happened to be holding their shares. The device built to protect the fortune from the state delivered it, paper by paper, to whoever's hands it was in when he died.
Nothing in the design was accidental, and that is the coldest fact in the archive. The fortune was hidden so well that when its owner died, it stayed hidden, from his own daughter, for the rest of her life.
The heiress got one settlement out of Venezuela, as my grandfather told it: the equivalent of two thousand dollars, on condition of leaving the country. They took it and moved to a chicken farm in the Tuy Valley. The estate stayed behind, in other people's names. Where it went is the last dispatch.