We must be in the wrong business. Looks like the big money is in knickknacks, trinkets, and doodads.
According to court documents in a federal criminal case, Kristin Haynes, creator of the Dreamsicles line of collectible ceramic figurines (like the one pictured here) raked in nearly $3 million (and that's just counting the years between 1999 and 2006) from sales of her freaky-looking adorable little cherubs. (A recent eBay search shows these things sell for as low as 99 cents for a tiny used one, but certain individual pieces are listed for more than $100, and a set is going for $900.)
However, rather than stick around Washington state and pay tax on that income, in 2004, Haynes and her husband/business partner Scott Haynes, both now 56, moved to the tropical island of Roatan, off the coast of Honduras (a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States). Before enjoying the laid-back Caribbean lifestyle, the pair continued to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while never filing tax returns.
The funny thing? Kristin had written a letter of remorse to the court 12 years ago -- after Scott had been busted the first time for tax evasion. (In 1998, he was sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay $1.27 million in back taxes.) "He tells me again and again that we will never again find ourselves in this situation... I believe him," she wrote.