Couple finds buried treasure disguised as a ‘cable box’ — then spots a note with their neighbor’s name on it
Matthew told CBS that 'the reward is karma — good karma.'
A Staten Island couple made a discovery that most people only dream about. According to CBS New York, while doing some landscaping work outside their home, Matthew and Maria Colonna-Emanuel found what looked like an old cable box buried near a row of trees. It had sat there for years unnoticed — until a deer ate through the foliage and made it visible. "With the heavy snow we got this winter, a lot of them were falling down, they were top-heavy," Matthew told the Staten Island Advance. Being curious, they called Bamboo Bob Foley from the local landscaping company known as Touch the Earth Inc., to replace the trees. That’s when his crew realized the metal box wasn’t part of any wiring system at all — it was a safe.
Matthew said he always assumed the metal box had "something to do with electricity," but when the landscapers pulled it out and rolled it over, they noticed a dial on the front. Curious, he tried shaking it to see if anything was inside, but it didn’t make a sound. When Foley and his crew finished replacing the trees, they offered to help open the safe with a pickaxe. Inside were several zippered bags, Mathew said. "I thought we found buried treasure," he said. Foley agreed, adding that he and his team "were freaked out. It’s something you can’t make up." When the couple pried it open, they found stacks of soaked, decaying $100 bills stuck together and bags of jewelry glinting under the dirt.
"It was the most fragile dollars you could ever imagine. There are all these bags with hundreds and jewelry, diamonds, engagement rings, dozens of rings, gold with jade. It was stunning," Mathew said. The smell of damp cash filled the air as he peeled apart more bills, realizing there were thousands of dollars inside. Among the contents was a slip of paper with a Brooklyn address. When Matthew looked it up, he realized it belonged to one of their neighbors. "I knocked on the door and asked if they’d ever been robbed," he told reporters. The neighbor, still shaken, said yes — she and her husband had lost a safe almost seven years ago, during a 2011 burglary.
Police confirmed that a case had been filed that year involving about $52,000 worth of cash and valuables, including $16,300 in cash that hadn’t been damaged, according to the Emanuels. The woman’s reaction said everything. "She was shaking. They told her at the time she’d never see her stuff again," Matthew recalled. The Emanuels returned every item. Their neighbors declined to appear on camera but told local outlets they were both shocked and grateful. When asked why they didn’t keep the treasure, Maria said, "It wasn’t even a question. It wasn’t ours."
Acts like that remind people that honesty still exists, even when the temptation doesn’t make it easy. Experiments like the 2019 "Civic Honesty Around the Globe" project found something similar. Researchers left more than 17,000 "lost" wallets in cities across 40 countries and discovered that people were actually more likely to return the wallets when they contained larger amounts of cash, proof that honesty often outweighs temptation. The couple did keep the elephant, which Mathew said he "bought this elephant and said let's keep it there. It's a good luck spot." The couple says they haven’t received a reward, but Matthew told CBS that "the reward is karma — good karma."
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