In January 1997, A Brink's Truck Carrying 3.7 ...

In January 1997, a Brink’s truck carrying 3.7 million dollars worth of coins and currency crashed on an elevated highway in Miami, Florida. The money flew everywhere. For nearly two hours, news cameras captured the mad scramble of residents as they scooped up cash, stuffing nearly five hundred thousand dollars in bags, boxes, pants, bras – anything handy, mind you – before the police arrived on the scene and put a stop to it. To date, of the half-million taken, only around twenty dollars have been returned. An eleven-year-old boy turned in eighty-five cents that he had found, and a single mother of six who worked at a five-dollar-an-hour sales job turned in $19.53 that she found. One man who stashed two bags of loot at home while he headed back out to the street to get more returned to find that someone had broken into his home and cleaned him out. Here’s the irony: I’ll bet if you could interview that guy, he would have said that he was violated by someone breaking into his house and robbing him, but that what he did in taking money was just opportunity knocking.

James Emery White, You Can Experience an Authentic Life (Nashville: Word Publishing, 2000), 110.