The Most Valuable Things People Just Up and Threw Away
We’ve all been dismayed to find we left a twenty in a pants pocket before doing the laundry, and the length of time we cried afterward depended on how broke we were. Well, multiply the despair you felt by the appropriate factor to understand how these people felt when they lost…
A $1 Million Lottery Ticket
In 2005, 82-year-old Edward St. John was digging through a convenience store trash can for lottery tickets, as he regularly (and alarmingly) did, when it finally paid off. He found a $1 million “Hold ‘em Poker” scratch-off that had been purchased earlier that day by Kevin Donovan, who had bought the whole roll and then thrown them away in an apparent and stunning display of performance art. Donovan soon died and his family sued St. John for the winnings, but they ended up settling for only about one-tenth of the prize, so he made out pretty good.
$5 Million in Diamonds
In 2015, while helping their boss move to a new floor of the New York jewelry store where they worked, some flunkies threw out three beaten-up wooden boxes that turned out to contain $5 million in diamonds. They were found by a building security guard, who turned around and sold several of them to another store in the same building. It turns out this is a crime, but he had to shoot his shot.
An Entire Art Installation
In 2015, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano staged an exhibit by a pair of Milanese artists intended as a commentary on Italy’s decadent (and corrupt) “age of plenty” and the mess it left for the Italian public to clean up — which is exactly what happened. When museum cleaners came upon the display, an arrangement of empty champagne bottles and confetti, they assumed someone had a sweet-ass party and threw it all in the trash. It’s unclear how much it was worth, but it was enough that someone had to go dig out every bottle, hoping no one saw them and mistook them for a raging alcoholic.
A Kidney
In 2012, an Ohio nurse returned from her lunch break to clean up an operating room where a young man had recently had his kidney removed to donate to his sister. Assuming the kidney had already been taken to its destination, she emptied the receptacle where the kidney had been stored — along with the kidney. This wouldn’t be even a little bit funny if the woman hadn’t eventually found another donor and won $650,000 in a lawsuit against the hospital, so while the new kidney is a “poorer match and of poorer quality,” we hope she at least got to buy herself a nice jet ski.
$600 Million in Bitcoin
In 2014, James Howell was cleaning up his office when he deposited one of two identical hard drives into a trash bag — identical except in that one of them contained his Bitcoin wallet. When he realized he’d thrown away the wrong one, he immediately tracked it down to a landfill owned by the city council, but they won’t let him search it. He’s suing for access, but in the meantime, he’s watched his bitcoin fortune surge to over $600 million that he can’t touch. The next time you’re having a super bad day, just be thankful you’re not that guy.