Immigrant's honesty pays off with glory -- and grousing

LOS ANGELES -- On a lonely evening in Los Angeles, Ascension Franco Gonzales had the kind of moment Mexican songwriters put to music and transform into myth.

The ballad, or "corrido," would tell the tale: How last Aug. 27 an armored truck lurched, its back doors flipped open and out tumbled a bag containing $203,000. And how Franco, an illegal immigrant dishwasher, picked it up. And he gave it back the next day.

But it's doubtful the corrido could capture the fallout of that fateful decision, the knuckleball trajectory of integrity's consequences.

"Everybody says I'm an idiot," said Franco, who still washes dishes at a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles.

Well, not everybody. Two Hollywood moviemakers think he may have a tale worth telling.

"A poor fellow finds money, and gives it back. That's a profoundly moving story," said Paul Mazursky, writer of films such as the Oscar-winning "Harry and Tonto."

"It has the power of a fable -- of myth," said screenwriter-novelist David Freeman. "I mean, you would think, finding the money, just having it, that creates troubles. But once this guy decides to give it back, that's when the craziness begins for him."

The day

It was Aug. 27 at 7th Street and Grand Avenue.

Franco, a boyish 23-year-old, was waiting for the bus when the $203,000 fell. No one else was around. He picked up the clear plastic bag and, to be safe, poked through trash canisters for a garbage bag to hide it.

"I won't deny I needed the money. That I thought about it," Franco said.

But if he did take the money, would anyone back home really believe he had found it?

The next morning Franco called the police, who asked questions. Could they tell the media? No, he said, fearing publicity would lead the Immigration and Naturalization Service to his door. They agreed to meet him at a park. He stuffed the money into his laundry bag.

One of the officers, Sgt. Rick Sanchez, had yet more questions. He also asked, again, if the police could alert the media. Again, Franco said no.

Sanchez persisted, telling Franco he could get some job offers. Franco relented. As Mazursky tells it -- in a scene that "made the movie " -- Franco asked for only one thing.

"After the cops took the money, he was looking at them, and they said, 'What's the matter? Is there anything else?' He said, 'Can I have my laundry bag back?'" said Mazursky, cracking up.

Glowing newspaper stories about Franco appeared across the country, as well as in Latin America, Asia and Europe.

When the news reached Tepeapulco, his hometown about 90 minutes northeast of Mexico City, strangers approached his family to congratulate them on his honesty.

"I cried of joy," said his mother Paula Gonzales, 47, when she saw her son on television.

The criticism

Others called him "un buey" -- literally an ox, figuratively an idiot.

His father, Liberio Sergio Franco, 49, said friends and strangers told him his son "should have come back with the money."

Even one of Franco's uncles, Gonzales said, called him an "idiot for returning money God had secured for him."

"It's easy for people to tell you what you should have done," Franco said. "It's not their life. I tell them it's so easy, huh? They weren't in my skin."

The dream

Franco brushes off criticism. More galling is the suggestion he lacks the drive to succeed.

To suggest Franco lacks ambition is to miss the dream that drove him to the United States.

When he was about 8, he noticed how hard his mother worked cleaning houses.

He told her when he grew up, he would make her a big house so she wouldn't have to work.

Two years ago, he came to California to raise money for his mother's house.

The man who would be heralded for his honesty saw no contradiction in crossing the border illegally.

Franco works hard -- 10 hours a day, six days a week --at a Chinese restaurant for about $1,300 a month. He sent $600 or $800 a month home.

Mazursky and Freeman had entered his life in October, though they had to wait to meet him. He was too busy working.

Although Franco trusted the police not to turn him in to the INS, he feared the publicity might lead to his arrest.

INS officials have said they have bigger problems to worry about than an undocumented immigrant who did a good deed. A rumor spread in Tepeapulco that Franco was even given citizenship for his act. He had gotten no such thing.

The reward

But the armored car company did give him a $25,000 reward. Most of it he sent to Tepeapulco, where his parents raised the shell of the house he had promised as a little boy. Franco still needs about $10,000. He'll keep working until he gets it, he says. Then he'll go home.

"Yes, they criticize him," his father said. "But many also congratulated us for having such a son. They speak to us with respect. And those who talk bad, they see the house, and their mouth falls."