January 15, 2023 was the one year anniversary of a massive fire at my apartment building at 828 Shaw Street, Toronto. Tenants fled the building with the clothes on their backs and there was no opportunity to rescue anything including my cat, and my currency collection.
On January 16th several tenants returned to the building to beg fire fighters to rescue precious items. I returned in hopes of finding my cat, and retrieving more than $12,000 in paper money that was in a cupboard. The firefighters agreed to look for my cat and my cash. After a while, two fire-fighters that had gone into the building came out. They approached one of the many police officers that were on the scene to cordon off the street from the public, and after a few minutes I watched (from behind the barricade) 5 police officers and 3 fire-fighters return to the building. After a little while, they all came out and one fire-fighter approached me and advised me that they did not find my cat, but did show me a plastic bag stuffed full of soaking wet, filthy from fire residue -- money. (SEE PHOTO 1)
I say that they showed me the bag of money, because before they could actually hand it to me, they had to "document" what they were giving me. Therefore, the police removed every single note from the bag one at a time, and stacked them on the hood of a police cruiser (so the dash camera could record the number of notes, not the value) in broad day-light, in front of about 20 on-lookers, and a Toronto Sun videographer (who thankfully had the discretion NOT to make the tape public).
After the police officers put the notes back in the bag and handed them to me. I took a taxi back to the emergency accommodation hotel all of the tenants were put in by the Red Cross, and needed to clean my notes before I could even figure out what was there. This to me is the epitome of "money laundering" LOL (SEE PHOTO 2).
Of course after you 'do' the laundry ... you need to dry it. This is only ONE part of the floor in my hotel room. (SEE PHOTO 3)
At about 11:30 p.m. I get a call from the hotel lobby saying it was Toronto Police and they needed to talk to me. I invited them to my room. Apparently at some point someone realized that at no time did I provide any identification to prove the unit the money was retrieved from was mine (but I think they really wanted to know where I got it, not knowing that much of it was collector paper currency. I showed them my I.D. and explained to them that it was a collection and they went away.
Later I learned that while they were putting out the fire, my basement apartment filled to the 5ft. level with water causing almost everything on the basement level to "float", or be dislodged, and when the drains finally did take the water out, everything just fell where it did, and there was a good layer of "silt" covering the floors. It took 3 fire fighters, and 5 police officers to simply go into my unit and FIND my notes that were literally all over my unit ... on top of furniture, under furniture, and under the fine silt that had built up on the floor.
They did in fact almost get it all, but I managed to go back a few weeks later and found an additional $300 or so they didn't find.
To be honest, some of my notes looked better after being washed but it didn't matter. I had to put it all in a bank for a short time to show to a prospective landlord that I was an eligible candidate for housing in this metropolis of Toronto and had to start over. Although ... I did keep my FZM0002000!
Hope this was a true "Banknotes with a Story"!!
Cheers all,
cb
