Not many investment theses begin with a childhood Christmas memory. John Chachas’s does. Every year, his family made the journey from Ely, Nevada, to San Francisco for the holidays. Ely sits in a remote stretch of the Great Basin, roughly six hours from the Bay Area by the roads of the time. The trips were significant events. And of all the impressions San Francisco made on a boy from the Nevada high desert, one remained vivid for the rest of his life: a nearly eight-foot gilded Buddha standing on the ground floor of Gump’s, surrounded by jade and Asian art.
“That Buddha made such an impression on me growing up,” he recalled decades later. The impression stuck. Chachas went on to Columbia and Harvard Business School, built a career as a deal-banker at First Boston, Merrill Lynch, and Lazard, and by 2005 was a seasoned banker with an eye for value that extended well beyond typical deal metrics.
That year, Hanover Direct decided to sell Gump’s. Chachas assembled a group of investors and put together an $8.5 million bid, contributing $500,000 of his own money. The deal closed. For arranging the transaction, he was owed $250,000. He asked for the Buddha instead. The store’s president later recalled agreeing mostly to avoid writing a check. Nobody, he said, “realized how fine a thing this was.” A 2007 appraisal put the Buddha’s value at $240,000, roughly equivalent to the cash fee. On paper, a lateral trade. In practice, Chachas had identified an asset that the people managing it had not fully understood.
Gump’s changed hands again in subsequent years, struggled against e-commerce competition, and filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2018, closing its doors just before Christmas after 157 years. The bankruptcy liquidation covered everything on the floor. The Buddha, per Chachas’s original agreement, was not for sale. He had it swapped out for a $25,000 replica and took the original home.
In May 2019, Christie’s Hong Kong offered the statue. The auction house described it as an “important and monumental” example of Qing dynasty religious statuary, the largest known of its type, tracing its lineage to a 1957 buying trip to Kyoto. An undisclosed buyer paid 31.3 million Hong Kong dollars, roughly $4 million.
Chachas used the proceeds to buy Gump’s intellectual property out of bankruptcy for $650,000 and relaunched the store in October 2019. He had funded the rescue of an institution he first encountered as a child with an artifact he had taken instead of a paycheck fourteen years earlier.
How a childhood memory became a $4 million return is partly a story about patience, partly about knowing what a thing is actually worth, and partly about the kind of instinct that can only come from paying close attention for a very long time.