A cab driver in Las Vegas is $10,000 richer just for doing the right thing.
Gerardo Gamboa, who says he has been driving a taxicab in America's gambling capitol for the past 13 years, discovered there was a brown paper bag stuffed with $300,000 in cash when a Bellagio doorman handed it to him as he was picking up a passenger last week.
Driver at first mistook cash for candy
Before he looked inside the bag, Gamboa believed that it contained candy bars.
"What kind of chocolates are they? Are they good ones that I could buy some for my wife as a present?" Gamboa recalled asking himself in a quote published by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Then he quickly realized that the inconspicuous brown bag contained something much more valuable than high-end confections; it contained money and lots of it.
"My God, this is cash money," Gamboa, a Nevada resident for over twenty-five years, was quoted by the paper as saying.
Driver commended for his morality
Once he realized what was in the paper bag, Gamboa immediately got in touch with the cab company for which he works. The company contacted the Las Vegas Police, who were able to find the money's rightful owner within a few hours.
And while many people might associate Las Vegas with vice, in this case a Sin City denizen was noted for his honesty. Gamboa was given a reward of $10,000 for returning the bag.
The Review-Journal reported that this isn't the first time a large sum of cash has been forgotten in a taxi.
"This is the largest amount we have found in my 32 years in this business. Recently, we found $9,000, but that’s no longer a big deal," commented Bill Shranko, chief operating officer for Yellow Checker Star.
In 2012, another driver working for a different company found - and returned - $222,000 that a passenger left in his vehicle.
Twitter detectives get on the case
As soon as news broke that the unidentified passenger was a poker player who got picked up at the Cosmopolitan and dropped off at the Palms Place Towers, some Twitter users set about trying to find out the person's identity.
News reports said that the passenger was a 28-year-old man who plays poker, however since there is no poker room at the Cosmopolitan, it was assumed that the unfortunate chap who lost his bag of money must also be a gambler.
We weren't able to ascertain whether or not the amateur social media detectives had any luck, but we know the poker player / taxi passenger certainly had fortune on his side this week.
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