Brink’s Money Keeps Changing Hands

It’s been easy come, easy go for some residents of the impoverished Miami neighborhood where $500,000 spilled Wednesday from a Brink’s truck.

Lt. Bill Schwartz, a police spokesman, said officers had heard that some of the windfall was already being redistributed.

“One man grabbed a considerable amount of cash in a bag, took it to his house and threw it in the living room,” Schwartz said. “Then he ran back to the scene to scoop up some quarters - I guess he needed to do a lot of laundry - and when he returned home his house had been burglarized.”

A woman who had appeared on television boasting of how rich she had become entrusted the money to her boyfriend, neighbors told the police. “When she came home, he had moved out, lock, stock and barrel,” Schwartz said.

The debate about whether it was proper to profit from the accident has raged ever since scenes of the chaos appeared on local television. It is an issue all the more poignant in a city struggling with a $68 million budget deficit and allegations of malfeasance and mismanagement at the highest levels of local government.

For Joe Clein, a bail bondsman who has run his business from the neighborhood since 1961, there was an element of justice.

“I don’t know which is more moral,” Clein said, “to return the money and leave your children impoverished, or maybe send them to college and enrich the family for generations. It’s hard to feel sympathy for the insurance companies when you live in grinding poverty.”