It Never Rains Like That At My House

From The San Jose Mercury News

Shower of $100 bills in Sunnyvale, Ca

Amid the crushed soda cans, plastic bags and soiled cardboard, a shower of $100 bills started raining from the ceiling.

Workers at the Sunnyvale recycling station ran giddily about early Tuesday morning, catching the cash and stuffing the money inside a plastic bucket. They had even found a body among the hundreds of thousands of tons of recyclables sorted at the SMaRT plant over the years. But a shower of cash? Never.

"It just kept coming," Geronimo Martinez, 57, a supervisor at the station, said Wednesday, "more and more. It was crazy. I thought at first it was a joke."

All told, they retrieved $3,200 — and now Sunnyvale police are sorting out the mystery of how dozens of Ben Franklins ended up in the trash.

Pilger said the money has been booked with the city's Department of Public Safety. If the cash goes unclaimed for 90 days, it will be turned over to the city's general fund.

SMaRT station general manager Richard Gurney said the cascade of money is surely the best find to date at the sprawling — and very smelly — facility, where workers sort recyclables from Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto.

Sometime between 8 and 9 a.m., sorters who earn nearly $14 an hour discovered a few of the $100 bills getting sorted in a machine called the "in-feed conveyor belt," Gurney said. The piles of junk then snaked throughout the spacious building, finally getting shot from a conveyor belt, like a mechanical shower head attached to the ceiling.

Martinez started grabbing bills, stuffing them in a bucket. A few others came to help.

Gurney said the bills appeared to be real. Employees tested some of them with a special pen used to spot counterfeit money.

Martinez and Gurney are well aware of the rumors circulating that some employees were secretly stuffing wads of cash in their pockets. As far as they know, none of those stories is true. Police didn't return calls for comment.

"This is becoming a big fish story," Martinez said.

Although the money was found in the recycling, keeping the cash could be considered theft because California law requires anyone who finds lost property to make reasonable efforts to find the owner.

Besides, Gurney said, turning over the money to police was "the right thing to do." Sure, Martinez admits, it would have been nice to pocket some money — "I thought about eating at Red Lobster," he joked.

But his conscience, as well as his company's no-scavenger policy, got the better of him.
Instead, he said, "I ate at Taco Bell."