Armored Car Spills $311,000 Bonanza

With only about $3,500 in hand, police and Wells Fargo Armored Service Corp. officials seemed doubtful Saturday that much more of a total of $311,000 that fell out of an armored truck on the Long Island Expressway would ever turn up.

“There are people now who have a lot of money that they didn’t have before 5 p.m. yesterday,” a manager of Wells Fargo’s regional office in Lyndhurst, N.J., said Saturday.

Westbound traffic on the expressway came to a sudden halt Friday afternoon when two money bags plopped out of the back of the truck as it went over a bump and burst open, police said.

Police recovered $996 on Friday, picking bills off the ground and accepting money that people turned in. A Wells Fargo official said company employees retrieved about $2,500 from the ground.

The Wells Fargo manager expressed distaste for the people who had seized cash that was not theirs. “It was like they hadn’t eaten in days. It was like throwing out a piece of meat to sharks. People were just grabbing money from each other.”