Truly, a different era.
Half the guys in my high school in NY dressed like this.
Posted on 02/28/2025 2:15:00 PM PST by Kid Shelleen
The methamphetamine was wearing off as soon-to-be South Philly legend Joey Coyle sipped coffee on his Front Street steps on the morning of Feb. 26, 1981.
He was waiting on the mailman, who was carrying his $700 paycheck, but his next binge couldn’t wait.
Coyle persuaded two young neighbors to drive him to his drug dealer’s house, but the dealer wasn’t home. On the way back, Coyle was riding shotgun and scanning the South Philly sidewalks for metal scraps when he spotted it. ---SNIP--- He had hit the South Philly lottery: money that literally fell off a truck.
The haul: $1.2 million, more than $4 million in 2025 dollars.
(Excerpt) Read more at inquirer.com ...
No, no one does.
Truly, a different era.
Half the guys in my high school in NY dressed like this.
PING
You’re giving me bad flashbacks.
No, but it is a variant on a theme.
People who have never learned to handle money do not know how to do so.
They typically go on spending binges, and end up back where they were in a few years. In this case, he had run through over half the money in less than two weeks.
It pretty much seems to work out that the same 20% of the population end up with 80% of the money, over time. Allowing people who work for wealth, instead of working at stealing wealth, is the “magic” of a free market system.
The rule of law enforces property rights at its best. Prevent in random violence is the basic function of the law.
Yup, I do. One of my friends wanted to make a video game of Joey Coyle finding money and then having to escape all sorts of bank security people. The only issue is neither us knew how to make games.
We sure do.
I was a teenager when this happened, outside of Philadelphia. Irv Homer, the greatest talk show host ever, and drive-time guy on WWDB, took caller after caller on “what would YOU do if you found that money?”
We were all riveted to this story, even after Joey was arrested.
It was saddening to hear that he committed suicide.
Yep. I think I even saw the movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107594/
In a way, I always felt sorry for Coyle. He was addicted to drugs. He ended up hanging himself when he was 40 years old.
I remember it well. What a sensation in the newspapers. Things weren’t going too well for Joey before he scored that wad, and soon went downhill afterware. Thanks for the memories!
You nailed it; and this seems to be a permanent feature of humanity around the globe and over centuries. One thing that contributed to my becoming a conservative was reading, in my early 20s, in the Will Durant histories of the world about a “benevolent” emperor in a long-ago Chinese dynasty who appeared to sincerely believe that he could make Chinese society more fair by confiscating the money from the wealthy and dividing it evenly among everyone. Within two years, the rich had most of the money back, and the poor were poor again. The emperor was brokenhearted.
I may be fuzzy on the details, since I read it half a century ago, but that piece of Durant's research made a great impression on me. I have lived long enough to see redistribution of wealth tried again in this country—minus any naive attempt at benevolence. Here, the announced good intentions were just cover stories for unconscionable graft. Didn't work this time, either.
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