Felicia Lettieri, a 72 year old grandmother visiting the Big Apple from Italy, and half a dozen members of her clan, grabbed a couple of midtown cabs on Christmas Eve.
Unfortunately, when Ms. Lettieri got out of her cab, she left her purse and another bag behind. In that bag was $21K, some expensive jewelry, and some of her gang’s passports.
Can you feel that sinking sensation she must have felt when she discovered her loss?
Yeah.
Me, too.
Gone, Baby.
She went to the cops.
Oddly enough, they didn’t taser her.
But they did tell her “not to get her hopes up” about getting her money back.
Maybe they figured that was shock enough.
Hey, this is America, man.
Finders, keepers…
But just then, a White Knight rode in to save the day.
OK.
He wasn’t exactly a knight; just a part-time cabbie, trying to hack it through medical school.
I imagine having an extra $21K wouldn’t have hurt him any.
We’ll never know, because when he found Ms. Lettieri’s stuff in his cab, he never bothered to count it.
He found her ID’s and got a pal to drive him out to her Patchogue address, 60 miles away, so he could return her stuff to her.
Finding nobody home, he left her a note with his phone number: “Don’t worry about your money. It’s safe.”
Then, when the good lady called, the cabbie drove out a second time and returned the lost items. And he refused to accept the reward she offered him.
Here’s a regular guy who went out of his way to save the Christmas of someone he didn’t even know.
Just because it was the right thing to do.
The decent thing.
The kind thing.
Makes you kind of misty, doesn't it?
Make a great movie. Time was, Jimmy Stewart would have played The Cabbie and Frank Capra would have directed it...
Except, the reason our hero returned the goods and refused the reward was that he’s a devout Muslim, whose mother had always taught him, “Be honest and work hard.”
The cabbie’s name is Mohammad “Mukul” Asaduzzaman.
From Bangladesh, originally.
Not many “news” papers ran this story.
Quite a few of those that did OMITTED the cabbie’s name, and the fact that he is a Muslim. (We can’t have any Muslims portrayed as NON-terrorists, now, can we?)
So this is a guy some people would round up and incarcerate “indefinitely,” without counsel, without habeus corpus, no hits, no runs.
Just errors.
On the other hand, maybe they should lock him up.
He clearly doesn’t understand how we do things in America, and guys like him ---- hell, they ruin the class curve.
sj
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