Adorably Honest Man Does the Right Thing to the Nth Degree

What happened to this Brooklyn man sounds like the opening scene of an indie movie, set in, well, Brooklyn:

Walking near his home at 7:30 a.m., a 28-year-old grad student looks down to find a bunch of money. Instead of scurrying off heart thumping, with the new found stash of bills, John Larsen, waits around to see if the panicked person who dropped the wad will return. When the person doesn't show up, Larsen, then dutifully posts an ad on Craig's List hoping to return the money to the rightful owner.

(And then, in the movie version, all kinds of things would happen. Deep, esoteric things with myriad character lines that intersect and so forth. But this is real life, so ...)

Larsen is the honest man's honest man! Who would think, well, the money sort of smelled like perfume so it made me think it may have been a single mother's money? Larsen, that's who!

As New York magazine reports, it has already been two days and nobody has claimed the money (about a few hundred dollars), though two responses came in from the ad. (It didn't belong to either.)

Lest you think Larsen thinks he's so much better than all of us, he said that if the appropriate party doesn't surface, he'll consider keeping the money, in like, a month's time, which may have been the motivating factor for his posting the ad: to relieve the guilt of knowing he wanted to keep the money all along.

Whatever the case, we still think it's pretty awesome.

Photo courtesy of Dan4th@Flickr.com.