Ballad of the Poor Samaritan

On a lonely evening beneath the skyscrapers of downtown 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 now-familiar 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 how he gave it back the next morning.

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

“Everybody says I’m an idiot,” said Franco, who is still washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant in South Los Angeles. Well, not everybody. His mother back in Mexico is very proud. And 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 like the Oscar-winning “Harry and Tonto.” “Most of the rich guys I know, they wouldn’t be giving it back.”

“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.”

It was Aug. 27, about 8:40 p.m., at 7th Street and Grand Avenue, when temptation belly-danced into his life.

Franco, a boyish 23-year-old with a self-deprecating sense of humor, was waiting for the bus when the $203,000 fell to the street. There wasn’t another soul around. He picked up the clear plastic bag and, to be safe, poked through trash canisters for a dark garbage bag to conceal the loot.

“I won’t deny I needed the money, that I thought about [keeping] it,” Franco said.

But if he did take the money, would anyone back home really believe he had found it? Maybe Franco would become the subject of another kind of corrido, a narco-corrido, the kind that extols the deeds of drug dealers.

He told his five roommates at their South-Central apartment that if he saw anything on the news about the money, he would return it. But that was just an excuse. He knew it would be on the news.

The next morning Franco called the police, who asked questions over and over. Could they tell the media? No way, he said, fearing that publicity would lead the Immigration and Naturalization Service to his door. They agreed to meet him near the baseball field at nearby Gilbert Lindsey 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 reluctantly relented. As Mazursky tells it--in a scene that “made the movie for me”--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. But he was irritated--”I made a fool of myself”--when he agreed to wash dishes in the background as a Spanish-language TV reporter pronounced that Franco would “continue to be a poor dishwasher.”

When the news reached Tepeapulco, his hometown of 45,000 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. “He seemed a little gordito,” she added, referring to the weight he had put on in the two years since she had seen him. “I thought it was a miracle from God--that God illuminated the path for him. We’re very proud of our son. Honesty is something we inculcated in him.”

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

His father, Liberio Sergio Franco, 49, said friends as well as strangers had told him that 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.” A close friend in Los Angeles also lobbed zingers, giving Franco a nickname he still hears: Nino rico. Rich boy.

“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.”

Raul Anorve, director of the Los Angeles-based Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California, said many day laborers and immigrants had seen Franco’s good fortune as a blessing from God, “like the money came from heaven.”

“Some said he deserved to flee with the money,” Anorve said. “Poor immigrants do so much of the dirty work and never get the recognition. ‘Something like this comes along, and at least one of us gets lucky, and he ought to have kept it.’”

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

“They said I lacked malice that night,” he said. Then, thinking better, he said the word isn’t malice; it’s more a mix between that word and cunning, perhaps ambition.

And to suggest that Franco lacks ambition is to miss the dream that drove him to the United States in the first place.

When he was about 8, he began to notice how hard and long his mother worked cleaning houses, often the houses of the town’s wealthier residents.

“He would tell me, ‘Mama, sit down a little,’” she said. “He would say, ‘When I’m big, I’m going to make you a really big house--so you could have your own house to preoccupy yourself with and you won’t have to go to work.’”

She had worked since she was a girl, and in farming towns like Tepeapulco, she said, there aren’t many opportunities for what might be called prestige jobs. So people take pride in doing what needs to get done. “You go forward,” she said, “on the basis of working.”

She and her husband couldn’t afford to put Franco through high school, let alone a university. After working as a carpenter, his father’s profession, and in the garment industry, Franco sold wares at a small store.

Two years ago, he came to California to raise money for his mother’s house. “She worked too much and she had worked enough already for us,” he said.

The man who would be heralded for his honesty saw no contradiction in crossing the border illegally. Conditions back home had given him little choice, he said.

“The factories are finished,” Franco said of the empresas that once provided jobs in Tepeapulco.

And it seemed so easy to make money in the United States, an impression created by the young men, or chavos, who returned from up north. “The chavos who came from here to the town carried a lot of cash. It’s the thing that pushes you to think you can make money over here,” Franco said.

But the illusion of easy money quickly broke down. Franco worked hard--10 hours a day, six days a week--at a Chinese restaurant for about $1,300 a month. He sent $600, maybe $800, a month back home. He helped pay for the funeral of a cousin who was killed in a car wreck near the agricultural fields of Modesto.

On his one day off, he might eat at a mariscos, a seafood restaurant, or join friends at los bailes--dances. But just as often, he stayed home.

When Mazursky and Freeman, assisted by an interpreter, took him to the Pantry restaurant a few months ago, he looked straight ahead, as if embarrassed by the busy scene around him.

“There was a lot of good-looking chicks walking in and out, but Ascension doesn’t look much to the right or to the left. He just looks at the food,” said Mazursky, who pronounced him “a nice kid.”

Franco wants to build that house, and says that clowning around and cotorreando--flirting--with girls, would delay that goal. The worst thing, he long thought, would be to get in trouble, to draw the attention of the authorities. It’s a fear natural to the undocumented. He’d never even gotten a traffic ticket, and that was a small point of pride.

Mazursky and Freeman had entered his life in October, though they had to wait to meet him. He was too busy working, raising money for his mother’s house. At first, Franco wasn’t sure his life was movie material, especially when Mazursky and Freeman said a movie might have a love interest. Franco, who often jokes about the sorry state of his social life, said: “Well, introduce me to that woman, because in real life, I know no such person.”

The mixing of fact and fiction doesn’t concern him, Franco said. He just thinks a movie, which is still not a done deal, would just release more gossip.

“They’re just going to talk even more,” he said. “Well, what are you going to do?”

Franco never did get a job offer. “With difficulty I found this job,” Franco said of why he hasn’t found something better paying than dishwashing. “I’m the kind of person, I won’t even think of moving out of a job unless I definitely have something else lined up.”

Although Franco trusted the police not to turn him in to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, he feared the publicity might lead to his arrest. The coverage also unnerved his boss, who remains anxious about the publicity.

INS officials have said they have bigger problems to worry about than a single undocumented immigrant who did a good deed. A rumor spread in Tepeapulco that Franco was even given citizenship--his papeles, papers--for his act.

“Here’s your ‘papers,’” said Franco, flicking his fingers in an irreverent signal that he had gotten no such thing.

But the armored car company did give him a reward--$25,000. After taxes and paying $700 to a check-cashing place--another downside to being undocumented--he netted $17,000.

He gave some of the money--a couple hundred dollars here, a thousand there--to a few people who had helped him when he first came to the United States.

Most of it he sent to Tepeapulco, where his parents raised the shell of the house he had promised them as a boy.

Franco still needs about $10,000 for windows, electricity and other finishing touches. 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.”