When finders of a fortune are keepers of a pittance, : even a moral man wonders whether honesty is best

My Hollywood correspondent Duke Russell, who is by nature and education a moral and decent man, points out what he considers a rank injustice as reported in a recent news story.

It concerns the finding of more than $6 million in cash and gold for which the two finders received a paltry reward of $75,000 each.

“What would you do,” Russell asks, “if you found $6.22 million before that story broke? And what would you do now that you know how much the government is going to keep after giving you a laughable reward at a ‘brief ceremony’?”

Two San Francisco Airport car rental employees found the loot in the trunk of an abandoned rental car. It included $5 million in cash, and gold and platinum that later brought $1.22 million at auction.

They turned it in. Two years later, the government, after a ruling that the money was a drug payoff, denied the finders’ claims for the entire amount and cut them down to $75,000 each, which was presented at the brief ceremony Russell speaks of.

This neat swindle was based on (1) some cocaine dust found in one of the suitcases, and (2) the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which allows a reward of up to $150,000 for private citizens who help in the seizure of drug-related money.

Russell wants to know what ever happened to the old schoolyard rule--”finders keepers, loosers weepers.”

“This looks like a clear case of the government robbing two honest citizens in broad daylight,” Russell complains.

As I say, Russell is a moral man, and I’m sure he believes, as I do, that honesty is its own reward.

I could never take any money that wasn’t mine. As far as I can remember, I never have, except for a quarter I took once from my mother’s kitchen drawer. The fact that I still remember that with guilt proves my point.

If I found a wallet with several hundred dollars in it, I would return it to its owner, without expecting or accepting any reward. Well, in my youth, when I was on the beach, I would have accepted a reward, but I would never have thought of not returning the money.

But what about $6 million? Is that something else? Does that sum raise the stakes? Does it expose in us a greed that is not touched by a few hundred dollars, or even several thousand? Does the chance to make off with a cool $6 million suspend our ordinary honesty? Is it the big chance everyone is entitled to? Will God turn his head, and in effect say, “Go to it, kid! Don’t be a sucker!”

I have never been so tempted. On the other hand, I have had lost money returned to me. When I was a young man in Honolulu, I lost my wallet at the public library. Evidently it slipped out of my hip pocket when I was squatting to look at books in the bottom shelf. A Japanese woman found it and walked several blocks to the police station to turn it in.

I have always remembered that as my standard of honesty. One must be honest not only when it’s easy, but also when it’s hard. I had only $30 in the wallet, which would probably not have been a great temptation to that woman, but I doubt that she even looked.

But if I found a cache of $6.22 million in obviously dirty money, and I knew the government was going to give me a tip of hardly more than 1% for finding it, I might be tempted to keep it.

Of course, then I would be cheating the Internal Revenue Service, which I would never do. So I could send them half of it, anonymously, to preserve my conscience, and keep the rest.

But of course, that would be dishonest, too, I suppose, since the law requires me to turn it in.

But I agree with Russell that the government’s reward was miserly. A finder is entitled at least to half. I have often read stories in newspapers about some wealthy man whose lost wallet, with hundreds of dollars in it, is returned by some small and indigent street urchin, into whose little palm the old Scrooge grandly drops a coin, while newspaper cameras record this heart-warming event for the annals of human generosity.

Though most of us aren’t likely ever to find $6 million, it won’t hurt us to think in advance of what we’d do. But the hypothesis is never as pressing as the reality.

I faced a hypothetical dilemma recently when The Times gave me two tickets to the Super Bowl game on my promise to write a story for the Sports section. At that time, tickets were going for $1,500 or more, and as game time neared they went higher.

It occurred to me that I might sell the pair for $3,000 and say I’d lost them; but of course, I could never have done it.

In fact, I told myself, I wouldn’t sell them for $1 million. No way. I had a contract, and my integrity as a newspaperman was worth more to me than $1 million.

Of course, nobody offered me a million.

So I’ll never really know how honest I am.

If I happen to find $6.22 million in a car trunk, though, you can bet I’m going to give it some thought.

On $6.22 million I could retire to Crete and dance in the moonlight.