Results tagged “wallet”

A woman whose wallet was stolen from her purse in Central Park in 1982 finally had it returned to her last week after a worker found it stuffed inside the hollow of a dying cherry tree near Rumsey Playfield at East 72nd Street. The cash was gone (except for a single penny) but the discovery was essentially a time capsule for Upper East Side resident Ruth Bendik, a 69-year-old health care professional. She vividly recalls realizing her Reagan-era wallet was lifted one day while in she stood in a crowd watching the New York City Marathon. Fast-forward to last Tuesday, when a tree-care supervisor for the Central Park Conservancy found it after he took down the tree, cut it into large pieces, and began to root around inside a hollow to finish the job. The blue leather wallet was encrusted in dirt but still contained retro credit cards from Bell Telephone and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Bank, as well as Bendik's employee ID from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (right). Bendik's $20, however, was nowhere to be found. The wallet was turned over to the police, who returned it to Bendik the next day, according to the Post. The thief remains at large, but the trees are obviously mixed up in this somehow.

10-year-old Kemoy Gourzang was walking to school in East Flatbush Friday morning when he found a wallet on the sidewalk stuffed with over $500 in cash. But instead of doing what we would have done at his age—blow it all on Transformers and Garbage Pail Kids—Gourzang took the wallet to his school's principal, who used a business card in the billfold to contact the owner. The unidentified man was so relieved to have it back that he gave Gourzang a $100 finders fee, which the honorable little lad promptly invested on a video racing game called Midnight Club 3. "I was pretty excited," he tells the Daily News. "I went straight to Toys 'R' Us." But Gourzang still has $50 left, and is apparently going for the title of sweetest little boy in all the land: The rest of the money will be spent on Valentine's Day, "to buy a Teddy bear with angel wings, milk chocolate and maybe a necklace. For my mom."