Michael Haskell, a 17-year-old high school senior from New Jersey, paid $450 for an abandoned Brooklyn storage unit that turned out to have belonged to Andrew Crispo, an art dealer prominent in the 1980s. Inside were works by Man Ray and Walt Kuhn. Haskell sold them at Bonhams auction house for nearly $50,000.
That's the high-water mark in a business he's been running for a while now. Haskell buys abandoned storage units at public lien auctions — when renters stop paying, facilities are legally allowed to auction off the contents — then catalogs what's inside and sells it on eBay. He earns more than $7,000 a month and invests the profits in S&P 500 index funds. He stores the cataloged goods in his mother's garage.
Before bidding, Haskell photographs items with Google Lens to estimate resale value. He also built a custom ChatGPT program that cross-references former unit owners' names against news archives, flagging lockers that may have belonged to musicians, athletes, or other people whose castoffs would fetch a premium.
Not everything becomes inventory. Haskell found a Purple Heart medal in one unit and has declined to sell it, spending time instead trying to trace it back to the original owner's family. Along the way, he's turned up what the New York Times describes as traces of whole lives — a declining socialite's belongings, a pioneering Black mayor's family history, and a soul musician who never quite made it.
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