Luckily for him he picked the right taxi that day. The driver, 55-year-old Mohammed Nisar, behind the wheel.
After finally flagging down another taxi, Quinn went back to the station taxi rank to find Nisar sitting in his taxi with the bag safely on the passenger seat.
“I was very emotional,” he said.”
“I said, ‘Do you know what was in that bag? Put it this way, it is not a box of sandwiches or a newspaper. There is £10,000 (about $A20,000) in there’.”
And to thank him for his honesty Quinn gave Nisar a cash reward in an envelope marked ‘to my best friend in the world’. He even invited him and his wife to his home for a family meal.
Nisar, who has been a self-employed taxi driver for 15 years, has returned people’s belongings left in his car before and encourages other taxi drivers to do the same.
“Honesty is the best policy. There are some drivers who don’t return things, but what is the point?’ Nisar said.
“If the council had not have called me and no one had claimed it after 12 or 24 hours, I would have taken that bag straight to the police station.
“Mobile phones are the most common thing left behind, but most of them now can be traced anyway.
“My message is to encourage all my taxi driving brothers that if they find something valuable just give it back.”