Craig Sexton of 1-800-Got Junk has seen all kinds of weird things in the many estate clean-ups he's done. There was a fridge of rotted cheese and rotted cans of salmon.
But nothing prepared Sexton for what he found in the suite above an old deli called the Lido in east Vancouver in February.
"Under a rug we found a thousand dollars," he said. But that's not all, a caretaker discovered a paper bag in a closet was filled with $400,000 in cash.
The bills date back to the 1930s depression era, making them worth over $50 million in today's dollars.
The find raises the obvious question as to where the cash came from.
The co-owner of the building, Jonathan Kerridge, doesn't know much about the previous owner, an old lady named Margeret Rothweiler had lived here since 1940's, before dying in February.
She and her husband Chris had run the business but it had been closed for years.
Kerridge and his business partner Paul Murrary have imagined all kinds of scenarios about where the money came from: bank robberies, Bootlegging, Nazi war criminals.
The money was from that era. Why would someone keep that kind of money in a bag in a closet?
Turns out it wasn't anything as sinister as the junk collector first thought.
"All us Rothweilers always hang onto our bucks eh?," said Jack Rothweiler, the nephew of Margaret and her late husband, Chris.
The money at the Lido has gone to Margaret's side of the family. Much of it was made from playing the ponies and investing in real estate in the neighbourhood.
"Margaret knew how to hold on to a buck. (I'll say) Yeah,'' said Rothweiler "That's a family trait. I've got some squirreled away too."
With a report by CTV British Columbia's Peter Grainger
