Man stumbles across $17,000 on sidewalk

ROLLING MEADOWS, Ill. – Robert Adams craved an ice-cold drink after finishing his shift on a sweltering workday, but not having enough money to buy the burrito he also wanted left him with two obvious choices: Stop at the ATM, or find a bag containing more than $17,000 in cash.

"I wanted to get a large horchata, which is almost like a rice or coconut milk," Adams told the Daily Herald (Arlington Heights) for a story published Wednesday. "I would have grabbed a chorizo burrito, too, but I didn't have enough money."

That changed Monday when the Chicago-area man stood at a Chase ATM in Rolling Meadows, looked down and discovered on the sidewalk near a newspaper box a clear plastic bag containing receipts, checks and $17,021 in cash — mostly $20 and $100 bills bound by a rubber band.

"I see this plastic bag. It's clear plastic and it's half full of money," Adams said. "I figure this is a joke. Somebody took some napkins and made it look like money. This has to be a setup. People are going to look at me and start laughing."

Adams said he never had the urge to keep any of the money.

"It's not my money. I shouldn't take it. I don't care if you put another zero on there, I wasn't raised to take money that isn't mine," said Adams, a 54-year-old single man who lives in Arlington Heights and credits his deceased parents for teaching him right from wrong. "If I saw you drop it, I'd say, `Excuse me, sir. I think you dropped something.'"

The word "Chase" was printed on the bag, so Adams carried it inside the nearby branch.

"I walk up to the teller and say, `I think you might have left this outside,'" said Adams, figuring an employee left it behind after restocking the ATM. But employees told him the machine is filled from inside and the money didn't belong to the bank.

Adams then called police, who along with bank officials later determined the money was meant for an ATM in Midlothian and had been under the care of Loomis, an armored truck company. Rolling Meadows police took the money to the station, where it was picked up by a Loomis official.

Loomis officials said they were investigating, but have not said whether Adams will get a reward.

"I really don't know what happens with this situation," Adams said.

Onesimo Santillan, owner of the Senor Taco restaurant where Adams originally was headed to indulge his cravings, said the actions of his longtime customer don't surprise him.

Sugar Ray Leonard’s shocking revelations

Sugar Ray Leonard’s depiction of himself in his upcoming autobiography is hardly flattering. He describes himself as a philandering husband, an absentee father and a substance abuser. Perhaps most shockingly, he revealed he was sexually abused by a prominent, but unnamed, boxing coach while preparing for the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.

He was hardly the All-American boy that his carefully crafted image portrayed him to be.

“I’ve done a lot of things in my life that I’m not proud of,” Leonard said soberly during a telephone interview.

He goes into great detail about them in his new book, “The Big Fight: My Life In and Out of the Ring,” co-written with Yahoo! Sports writer and editor Michael Arkush, not out of any sense of duty, but out of a desire to lift a burden from his own back.

Clearly, though, this is no self-help tome. Leonard, 55, didn’t write to help lift the spirits of the downtrodden who are battling the demons he once did. If it is a self-help book, it was written to help one man: Ray Charles Leonard.

“I finally got to a point in my life where I wanted to be totally transparent with my family, my wife, my kids and let go of that burden of pain that I carried inside of my chest for so long,” Leonard said.

This book isn’t the first time he intended to tell the story. More than three decades ago, Leonard hired Pat Putnam, one of the greatest sports writers of the time, to tell his tale.

Leonard, though, couldn’t bring himself to commit to the project and it was eventually scrapped. He was unable to address two separate instances of sexual abuse, because he hadn’t come to terms with them himself.

It was difficult even decades later, long after the coach who allegedly had abused him had died. He said he began to discuss it with Arkush, but couldn’t go into the details. At first, Leonard says, he told Arkush a sanitized version of the story.

He wrote that it wasn’t until he saw actor Todd Bridges on “Oprah” that he decided to write the entire truth.

In the book, he describes the abuse by writing he was in a car across from a recreation center with an Olympic coach. They were ostensibly there to discuss the significance of a gold medal.

“Before I knew it, he had unzipped my pants and put his hand, then mouth, on an area that has haunted me for life,” Leonard wrote. “I didn’t scream. I didn’t look at him. I just opened the door and ran.”

Leonard has been perceived as a heroic figure in boxing since winning the gold medal in 1976 and going on to a career in which he’d defeat legendary fighters such as Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Roberto Duran, Thomas Hearns and Wilfred Benitez, among many others.

But there is nothing heroic about making an allegation such as he did and then failing to name names. It creates needless speculation about who did it and innocent people, who presumably only helped Leonard and assisted him on his way to superstardom, have become suspect.

Leonard, though, insists he’s handled it appropriately and doesn’t believe he’s necessarily cast aspersion upon innocent men.

“The people who are innocent, they know they’re innocent and they won’t even think of it, precisely because they’re innocent,” Leonard told Yahoo! Sports. “The people who are the perpetrators, if I would say their names, reveal their names, that would cause a lot of pain and suffering for their families and their kids. I didn’t think I had to do that. I could state what happened to me without going further and naming names and creating more pain for anyone else.”

Leonard said he told his first wife, Juanita, about the abuse, but that she didn’t respond in a way that would encourage further discussion. He said he later told his current wife, Bernadette, at a time when he’d had too much to drink.

Leonard, who said he hasn’t consumed either drugs or alcohol in nearly five years, said he resorted to substance abuse as a way of making the pain and the embarrassment he felt over the sexual abuse go away.

“When you’re a boxer, there is a lot of downtime and long periods of inactivity,” Leonard said. “The drugs I took and the alcohol I consumed, they were my own way of putting a Band-Aid on things. They were a long-term Band-Aid. That’s what I felt like. I was an emotional wreck and I needed something to help me.”

Leonard, who said he had wanted to go to the University of Maryland and pursue a career as an X-ray technician rather than becoming a boxer, said counseling has enabled him to come to terms with his past.

Why smokers gain weight when they quit

WASHINGTON: Scientists say they've finally discovered why smokers tend to gain some weight when they kick the habit.

It turns out that nicotine can rev up brain cells that normally signal people to stop eating when they're full, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

The weight connection isn't huge: On average, quitters gain less than 10 pounds. Still, it's a worry that many smokers cite when asked why they don't try to quit. Now the question is whether the discovery might lead to better treatments to help them quit without worrying about weight.

Yale University associate research scientist Yann Mineur stumbled onto the connection while studying a nicotine-related substance in mice - and the animals suddenly started eating less.

Nicotine hooks onto a variety of receptors, or docking sites, on the surface of cells. That's how it triggers addiction in one part of the brain.

But when it comes to weight, the Yale research found that both nicotine and the related drug cytisine were activating a different receptor than the one involved in addiction. This one is located on a small set of neurons in the hypothalamus, a region that regulates appetite.

When they gave nicotine to mice without that cellular pathway, it didn't help them lose weight like it did normal mice.

Smoking causes cancer, heart attacks and a host of other ailments so worry about modest weight gain shouldn't deter someone from quitting. But smokers who do have that concern should try nicotine-based smoking-cessation treatments, said study senior author Marina Picciotto, a Yale professor of psychiatry and neurobiology.

The other drug used in the mouse experiments, cytisine, is sold in Eastern Europe for smoking cessation but not in the U.S., and she'd like to see if there's data on the weight of smokers abroad who've used it.