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connection, petitioner stated that he was not sure whether he had
enough money to purchase the Corvette (despite having already
made a deposit on the car) until he went back home and counted
out the necessary amount of cash.
Petitioner testified that he threw out the canister sometime
after 1990 when the money was all gone. He claimed that he had
kept the money in the canister from the day he got it, except for
a small amount of cash which he had placed in his sock drawer in
early 1989.
Petitioner claimed that he rarely spent money out of the
canister prior to 1989. Once, he said, while in high school, he
used some of the money to rent a car. In college, he purportedly
bought a videocassette recorder with some of the cash.
Occasionally, if he got behind in bills, he used a little bit of
the money to "keep up". Petitioner kept no record of such
expenditures, however.
We think that respondent has proven by a preponderance of
the evidence that petitioner's testimony is implausible, self-
serving, and contrived. We believe it unlikely that petitioner
could keep a large sum of money in his bedroom closet for
approximately 7 years without either his brothers' or parents'
discovering it. Nor do we think that petitioner would keep such
a large amount of money in a college dormitory or in his bedroom
in the houses he shared. Such behavior is at odds, among other
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