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Lady Luck smiles, frowns in Australia

Find a banknote in the street and you would smile, put it in your pocket and think it was your lucky day. But what about a wad of notes, or a bag of them big enough to buy a Ferrari?

Contrasting cases in Melbourne and Sydney have given pause for thought on the nature of luck -- and underlined once again that the good guy doesn't necessarily finish last.

Last month Melbourne police were shocked when phone repairman Jitendra Chirag, 24, handed in the A$10,000 (US$7,600) he had found in an unsealed envelope on the pavement.

"Not at all. Never, not even once," Chirag said when asked if he had considered just trousering the money and keeping quiet about his good fortune. "Put it this way, if I would lose that 10 grand, I would be devastated."

Just hours after handing the money in, the cash was claimed by a doddery old man who had dropped it on the way home from a bank.

This month Sean Clifford, who had a bright future in Australia's top investment bank, was told by a Sydney court that he might have got to keep the A$262,000 (US$200,000) he found in a bag in the street if he had done the honest thing and handed it to police.

The court gave Clifford a criminal conviction for "larceny by finding" and put him on an 18-month good behavior bond. The incident had already lost him his job at the prestigious Macquarie Bank. He had moved to Melbourne and was working in a cafe when his case came to court.

Lawyer Bernard Brassil argued unsuccessfully that the case against Sean Clifford should be dismissed because his client did not know it was a crime to keep the money.

"This is a case of a 23-year-old man who found a lifetime fortune and didn't know what to do with it. He was tempted and behaved quite erratically," Brassil told the court.

Clifford was undone by a work colleague who acted honestly when asked to park some of the cash in a deposit box in her own name. She called the police.

Police had received lots of calls from people claiming ownership of the loot Clifford had found, but discounted them all as opportunistic.

They speculated the rightful owner might not have come forward because the money was the proceeds of a drug deal or another illegal transaction.

Ironically, the windfall would have been declared Clifford's if he had done the right thing and handed it in.

The cash was forfeited to the government, which used part of it to prosecute Clifford.
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