Man Makes $45,000 a Year off Betting Slips Taken from the Trash

If you saw Jesus Leonardo at the off-track betting parlor, you'd assume he was homeless. He's got long hair and a long beard and he spends all day going through trash.

But he's not homeless. He has turned going through the trash into a $45,000-a-year job.

Here's what Leonardo does: He takes the thousands of betting slips that get thrown into the garbage at the OTB every day and feeds them into the automated ticket machine, which scans tickets to see if they've won or lost. It turns out that every day dozens of people mistakenly think they lost a bet that they actually won and throw their tickets away, and so Leonardo gets the money from those winning tickets.

Leonardo tells the New York Times:

"This has become my job, my life," he said. "This is how I feed my family."

"At first, my wife thought I was crazy, but then she realized I was finding a lot of money in winning tickets, sometimes $200 a day," he said. "After a while, she didn't think I was so crazy."

The OTB parlors say Leonardo is welcome because he doesn't get in anyone's way, and Leonardo says he reports all of his winnings as taxable income to the IRS. Overall, Leonardo sounds to me like an American sports success story.