Even if it's no comfort to the millions of people who, unlike him, never have such luck, at least there are always some out there who do luck out. My friends in Dallas get stories like this a lot, if rarely on this kind of a scale.
One time, some penniless Iraq vet found an old-looking pamphlet at a garage sale in Ohio somewhere. He bought it for $8. Someone convinced him to send it down to a prominent auction house in Dallas, where it was authenticated as an original copy of the Federalist Papers from the year 1800. It brought something like $88,000 and CEOs of the auction house in Dallas even ordered the seller's fee waived, so that the guy could take home the whole $88,000, this being all the money he had in the world. Auction houses make their money from buyer's fees, which are usually not flexible, and seller's fees, which are completely at the discretion of seller and auction house to work out. The auction house in the video selling the Navajo blanket, Moran, probably made themselves $300,000 if they took a standard 20% seller's fee off the top from this guy, plus another $300,000 from the blanket's owner as a buyer's fee as well. I notice that part of the story seems to have been left out. I'm sure the guy was over the moon to walk home with $1,200,000 net in any case, but if the auctioneer felt like giving him an additional break on the seller's fee, they certainly could have done so and still made out just fine.
Another time, I was asked to help out when some Romanian sent a photo of a 1921 US twenty dollar gold piece to the people in Dallas. They asked me to authenticate it before getting it sent over. I told the Romanian guy to fly up to Germany at his earliest convenience and I'd take a look at it for him. Not only could he not afford the flight up here, he couldn't even afford a bus (a day and a half at least, too). He waited 6 months until a friend he knew had to make the trip by car, and he hitched a ride here to Düsseldorf. What a story he had, too.
His grandmother had risked death during the communist era by not turning all gold she owned over to the Ceauşescu regime. I have worked with their Central Bank before, and I know they still have hundreds of thousands of old gold coins they seized from the population. The grandmother had hidden one coin away the whole time, an American $20 gold piece. After Ceauşescu was gone, the kid did what research he could, and found that his grandmother's coin was a rare year (1921), but that there were many fakes of this piece, and he knew no one who could tell him in Romania who could tell him for sure if it was genuine or not. When he finally made it here to Germany, he showed me the coin. It was in bad shape, but definitely genuine. I arranged for it to be sent to Dallas, and it brought $42,000. He told me his family could live for four years on that kind of money. I made sure Dallas waived his seller's fee as well. Financing a new swimming pool is one thing. Putting food on the table is another thing entirely.
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