Restaurant gets money back, despite cabbie

$5,000 | Woman finds it, tells driver -- night gets 'interesting'

The bag Ginny Narsete found on the back seat of the taxi bore the logo of a Mexican restaurant, but the contents "didn't feel like a taco," she said.

"It felt weird," added Narsete, 57, of Lisle, who was riding the cab to a train station Thursday night and had planned to take the bag to the trash as a favor to the driver. "It felt heavy."

Ginny Narsete of Lisle, pictured with husband Jim, found a bag containing $5,000 lost by a restaurant manager.
(Keith Hale/Sun-Times)

Narsete looked in the La Bamba bag and found two bundles of cash totaling $5,000, along with a bank deposit slip. The money had been dropped accidentally by a La Bamba manager who had meant to take it to the bank.

Narsete, who owns her own small cabin rental business in Ohio, said she didn't even consider keeping the money. She told the driver what she had found and asked him to take her to a police station so she could turn over the cash.

But she said the cabdriver began acting strangely, insisting that the money should be taken to a cab stand, and drove Narsete around and around, running up the fare.

"He wouldn't let me out of the car," Narsete said.

Narsete phoned her husband for advice, and Jim Narsete got on the phone to yell at the driver to take his wife to a police station -- or he'd call 911.

At the station, police determined that the cash did indeed come from La Bamba and called the restaurant, which gratefully took back the money.

"There are good people in this world," said Ramiro Aguas, co-owner of the La Bamba chain, which has 19 locations, including one downtown and another in Lincoln Park. "It was very nice of her to bring that money back."

Narsete doesn't want any reward -- she said she was just glad to help. Her only regret now is telling the cabdriver what she'd found because she may have put herself in an unsafe situation.

What happened to the driver? At the police station, he took Narsete's last $20 for the fare, and disappeared into the night, she said.

"The police ended up driving