Some things wash ashore for a reason.

Some men come back from a war with medals. Richard Pozniak came back from Korea in 1953 with calloused hands and the conviction that the only honest way forward was to outwork everyone in the room.

He found work in Brooklyn behind the wheel of a tow truck. For years he ran the borough at hours when the rest of the city was asleep, hauling wrecks off the Belt Parkway in the rain, pulling cabs out of intersections at three in the morning, learning the streets one accident at a time. He worked for a man who came to think of him like a son. And when Richard got married, that man didn't hand him a wedding card. He handed him a hundred wrecked cars and told him to go build something of his own.

He built it twice. The first yard ran in Brooklyn through the sixties. A junkyard in Brooklyn in those years wasn't just a junkyard, and the men who lasted were the ones who knew which questions not to ask. He lasted seventeen years. He kept his nose clean. By the time he sold the place, his handshake was worth more than most people's signature.

In 1970, with a family in tow, he drove south to Fort Pierce, Florida and opened Treasure Coast Salvage. Within a few years he held the contract to pick up every wrecked vehicle on the Florida Turnpike — three hundred miles of asphalt, end to end. He bought a house on a canal a few miles in from the inlet and named his boat The Lazy Lady. In the early eighties he sold the yard and walked into the saltwater. He fished. He fished hard. He became one of the best offshore captains working out of Fort Pierce, and he stayed on the water as long as the water would have him.

Anybody who was on the Treasure Coast in those years knows what else was coming in off those waters. He fished for marlin and came home with marlin. He kept his own counsel on the rest. We'll say only what he would have said if you'd asked him on the dock — which was nothing.

He could find anything. A transmission buried in a six-acre wreck pile. A sailfish twenty miles past the inlet. A reason to keep going on a morning when there wasn't one. The eye he had is the kind you can't teach in a single sitting. It has to be handed down the slow way, in a yard, with your dad pointing at things and saying that one. Not that one. That one.

He's gone now. The eye isn't.

It went to his son, RJ. And now, slowly, the right way, it's going to RJ's son, Tre. The shop the two of them run today doesn't live in Fort Pierce. The Smuggler's Ghost operates out of St. Augustine — America's oldest city, three hundred miles up the coast from where Richard Sr. first set up. The latitude is different. The work is the same.

About the name

The shop is named for a figure who isn't anybody in particular.

There has always been a Smuggler's Ghost on this coast. He was a rum runner in 1928 making the Bimini crossing in a forty-foot Stuart. He was a Bahamian sloop captain in 1822, easing into the inlet at half-tide with cargo he'd never list on the manifest. He was every wrecker on the Keys reef in 1840 who got to the wreck before the inspector. He was a hundred men. He was nobody you could name in a courtroom.

We call the shop The Smuggler's Ghost because everything we sell came up out of his world. The brass off the boats he ran. The instruments off the vessels he survived. The sporting gear of the men who fished alongside him and never asked. The oddities and the manifests and the cargo that washed up on beaches the morning after.

He's the one who left these things behind. We're the ones who go looking.

What we sell, and what we don't

We don't sell what people need. No feed, no seed, no domestic supplies. We sell what travelers brought in and left behind — pulled from estates, auctions, boatyard cleanouts and back rooms up and down the Florida coast. Every piece gets a sentence of provenance and an honest word on condition. If something is chipped, we say chipped. If the drag washer's gone, we say so. If we don't know the year, we say probably.

Most of what we bring in stays in the back room. What goes on the site is what we're willing to let the rest of the world have.

Salvaged with love. Sold with stories.
— RJ and Tre Pozniak
A Pozniak family operation. Founded on the Treasure Coast in 1970. Now in St. Augustine, Florida.