The waiter returned half a million dollars to a resident of New York forgotten on the table

A Manhattan resident, who accidentally forgotten an envelope with a check for $ 424 000, on a table in a pizzeria, was saved from being destroyed by a student waiter, to whom she did not leave a tip.

Фото: Depositphotos

When the waiter Armando Marcay went to the table in Patsy's to clean up after the customers, he didn’t find there 20% of the bill that could be a tip. The only thing he found was a folded envelope, writes New York Daily News.

He could just throw it away with napkins and other garbage, but decided to open it. Seeing the logo of the bank, the young man was alert. And then he paid attention to the amount.

It turned out that the envelope was a check for $ 424 000.

“We usually just put leftover items in a lost and found box,” he said. “But I wasn’t going to do it with a check for a million dollars.”

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First, Markay handed it to the owner of the pizza restaurant Frank Brije, with whom they decided that a millionaire came to the establishment. But, of course, they quickly realized that this was not the case, and decided to track down a visitor who had forgotten a check for such a sum.

When the search was not successful, the owner of the institution and the waiter turned to the journalists. As a result, the visitor found the publication Dailu News.

It turned out that 79-year-old Karen Vinakur is not a millionaire at all. The woman is a pensioner, a former social worker and volunteer who recently sold her apartment. The check was for a down payment on a new home. She went to the pizzeria for lunch with her daughter, right after looking at another housing option. If it weren’t for Armando Marcay’s act, the woman could have literally ended up on the street.

On Sunday evening, Vinakur looked in her wallet, in the zip compartment where she kept the check, and found it empty. Still, she did not panic, deciding that she would simply go to the bank and ask to cancel the check. The bank turned out that it was impossible to cancel it immediately - you would have to wait about 3 months, only if no one receives the money during this time.

“My world just collapsed,” the woman says.

Vinakur, who devoted most of her pension to volunteering in Laos, helping disadvantaged women and children, called her daughter, who immediately began to look for a check in household garbage. She also called the real estate broker and was going to go to the pizzeria, but the broker told her that she had already called the establishment, and there they do not know about the check.

“I kept thinking that she called the wrong person,” Vinakur admits. In despair, she returned home.

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Markay and Brija continued to wait for someone to come for a check.

“I knew for sure that this wouldn’t last long. Even a billionaire would not want to lose that amount,” Brizha said.

When Vinakur received a call from the Dail News, she dropped everything and jumped into a taxi. The first thing she said was to admit that she felt terribly awkward not leaving a tip for Markai. According to her, Vinakur and her daughter did not like the waiter’s response to their remark about the small number of photographs of women on the walls.

“It was a very stressful day,” Vinakur said.

Even with an impressive down payment and a pension, as well as an impeccable credit history, she was unable to obtain a bank loan sufficient to fully purchase the house, due to the fact that she paid for her daughter’s education tens of years ago and is still repaying this debt.

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