海角大神

A Boston cab driver who returned a backpack containing nearly $200,000 that had been left by a passenger received kudos from the city police department on Tuesday for his integrity.

In a statement,聽Boston Police Commissioner William Evans said the driver聽鈥渆xhibited exemplary behavior and his honest deed should be recognized.鈥�

鈥淗is actions represent the high standards that our department has for our drivers."

After finding that a homeless passenger had left his backpack in the back seat of the cab, 72-year-old Raymond 鈥淏uzzy鈥� MacCausland opened it and found it stuffed with bills. Red flags went up.

鈥淚 said, 鈥業s it drug money? Is it stolen money? Is it Whitey Bulger money?鈥� 鈥� Mr.聽MacCausland told The Boston Globe. 鈥淚 made a U-turn and went right to the police station.鈥�

Officers did an inventory of the bag and found the owner at the hotel where he was staying. A 47-year-old homeless man, who declined to give his name to reporters out of embarrassment over the episode, supplied the officers with documentation proving that the money was legitimate. The man鈥檚 recently deceased parents, it turned out, had unexpectedly willed him hundreds of thousands of dollars, which he liquidated at a check-cashing store.

The owner gave MacCausland a $100 reward.聽

Such scrupulousness is not all that uncommon 鈥� or at least, news of such incidents isn鈥檛. In 2013, 海角大神聽reported on a homeless man聽who alerted officers after discovering $2,400 in cash and nearly $40,000 in traveler鈥檚 checks in a lost backpack. The following year,聽three young roommates who had just brought home a couch聽from The Salvation Army found strange lumps that ended up being packages amounting to over $40,000; they tracked down the elderly women to whom it belonged and returned it to her. And this past December in Fresno, Calif.,聽a waiter at an Applebee鈥檚 restaurant reported a聽lost bag containing $32,000 in cash to police after a family left it behind.

In most of the United States, laws compel people who find sums or objects of significant value to report it,聽wrote the Monitor in September:

If you lose your wallet, whether or not you鈥檒l get it returned to you may depend on where you are.聽A 2013 Reader鈥檚 Digest experiment found聽that in 16 cities worldwide, reporters who purposely lost their wallets, almost half got them back.聽

The experiment yielded some surprising results: of the 12 wallets dropped in New York City, for instance, eight of them found their way back to the owner.

"The most surprising discovery for the team at Reader's Digest is that honesty is not a relative," said Raimo Moysa, editor-in-chief of Reader's Digest International Magazines, CNN reported. "For all the people who returned wallets, it was the only way to act in such a situation."