By Michael Martinez
CNN
(CNN) — A Las Vegas cabbie had no second thoughts when he found $300,000 in cash in a paper bag in his cab this week.
He made sure it was returned to the forgetful owner.
“I don’t care from $10 to higher. My dignity is not for sale, and that’s the way I am. That’s the way our parents taught us when I was a kid,” cabbie Gerardo Gamboa told CNN affiliate KVVU. “All I wanted to do was just call my dispatcher and return it, and this is the only chance I have to show cab drivers in Las Vegas are not bad people.”
At first, Gamboa didn’t look into the bag because he surmised it contained chocolate, he said.
When he did open it, he was stunned Monday at the six bundles of $100 bills inside.
He took the small fortune to the office of his Nevada cab company, and with the assistance of police and a casino, they found the person who forgot the bundle in the cab.
It was a poker player, whom officials weren’t identifying this week, the affiliate reported.
“He was grateful. He was very understanding; he wasn’t irritated. To a point he was irritated, but he wasn’t mad or aggressive or anything. Maybe a little more embarrassed than anything. I mean, he left $300,000 in a cab, but he was an awesome guy,” Yellow Checker Star field operations manager Joel Willden told the news outlet.
The chief operating officer of the cab company described the sum as the most found in a cab in his 32 years in the business.
Yellow Check Star made Gamboa its Driver of the Year, the affiliate reported.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2013 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.
