Susan Nussbaum called 1-800-GOT-JUNK — and now, she says, she’s 1-800-GOT-PROBLEMS.
Nussbaum had used the junk-removal service once before. So she called again when she had some pieces of furniture to discard before a move between Upper West Side apartments. She had three unwanted items — a bed, a bookshelf and a large wall unit with cabinets.
Hauling away those furnishings cost her $412 — and a whole lot more.
The wall unit housed a safe filled with precious jewelry — around $100,000 worth, and with great sentimental value, according to a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit filed earlier this month against 1-800-GOT-JUNK, accusing company employees of stealing the safe.
Nussbaum emptied the wall unit except for the safe, which was “too heavy” for her, according to her lawsuit. She planned to ask the movers for help, but “in the chaos of moving,” she neglected to do so.
She then went to a Mattress Firm store at the other end of the block to check out a new bed, Nussbaum told The Post, but returned home immediately after realizing her mistake.
“I can’t run fast but the truck had already left and I called the moment I walked in,” she said.
“I was frantic,” she recalled. “I said: They just left, please look in the truck right now, please have them come back immediately. My friend took over the phone call because I couldn’t speak. They said they saw nothing in there. They are lying.”
Nussbaum said she also offered a reward for the return of the safe.
“The customer service team was incapable of discerning the severity of the situation and failed to acknowledge the conflicting statements between [Nussbaum] and their employees,” according to paperwork filed by Nussbaum’s lawyer, Scott Wolinetz. The safe was misappropriated “through fraudulent and deceptive means … Plaintiff seeks the immediate return of the value of the stolen safe.”
Surveillance footage of the sidewalk outside the building shows the wall unit on its side, with its cabinets falling open, revealing the safe. One of two movers then closes the cabinets and they wheel the item away on a dolly.
“They definitely saw the safe but did not say: Did you mean to leave it?” Nussbaum said. “That night, I even went to the junkyard in The Bronx with my son,” but to no avail.
She suspects the jewelry was stolen and pawned. Since the incident, which happened in October 2023, she has been scouring eBay to see if any of the allegedly purloined pieces appear there, but hasn’t found anything.
Nussbaum, 70, worked as a special-education teacher and a social worker. Her husband, a doctor, died almost nine years ago. Since she was widowed, she has moved among Manhattan rentals several times.
The missing items included her first birthday candle, labeled in her mother’s handwriting, and her son’s baby spoon. There were several rings from her grandmothers, Nanny Frieda and Nanny Florie.
Also gone is her wedding band from her late husband and a charm bracelet her mother gave her when she was a teenager. “I will never see it of course, but if I got it back I would wear that every single day of my life,” Nussbaum said.
The jewelry was not insured. The safe also housed important documents, including passports and birth certificates.
“I should have taken out the stuff in the safe and put it in a bag, or called my super for help,” she said. “I should have gone through the safe again like I do in a hotel room. When you leave a hotel room, you go through the drawers.”
1-800-GOT-JUNK outlets are franchises.
“Our hearts go out to Susan,” wrote Evan Cohen, the area director, in an email to The Post. “We took pictures of the unit both before and after the service was performed to validate our pricing and the space the items would take up in the truck.”
He failed to provide the pictures at The Post’s request, but did send paperwork saying, “I hereby agree the work has been satisfactorily completed and understand that I no longer own the items that have been removed,” which was signed by Nussbaum.
“Susan directed the team to remove and dispose of the entire cabinet, which the team did,” Cohen wrote. “Immediately after we performed the service, the cabinet was dropped off at a third party local disposal/recycling facility … Susan called our office some time after the service had been completed, and was very upset. She said that a safe was in the cabinet wall unit and she had forgotten about it. She explained that she had not told the team about the item, and had instructed them to simply dispose of the entire wall unit … unfortunately, by the time she notified us, the truck team members had already followed her instructions, and were dumping the wall unit at the local disposal facility … The truck team members reported not seeing or handling a safe in the wall unit.”
An internal inquiry determined that “the truck team members and manager had followed our standard service process, and had disposed of the wall unit as requested by Susan, the client,” Cohen wrote. “The team members categorically denied taking any safe.”
Information from a private investigator hired by Nussbaum showed her first frantic call to 1-800-GOT-JUNK was made at 4:26 in the afternoon — an hour and a half from the truck’s departure time — and lasted eight minutes. The truck was still at The Bronx junkyard, A.J. Recycling, according to a receipt stamped 4:35.
The 1-800-GOT-JUNK manager in The Bronx “insisted that … his drivers … are trustworthy” and “also indicated that it is not uncommon to have contents inside cabinets that people are throwing away,” the investigator’s report reads. “He insisted that the contents of the truck were already dumped and that there was nothing more he could do. . . . [He] did indicate during our conversation that the drivers stopped for lunch. We are unable to determine where and when that stop was made as GOT-JUNK refuses to provide any additional information.”
Nussbaum had planned to bequeath the jewelry to her daughter and son, both of whom are in their 20s.
“I think about this every single day of my life and it haunts me,” she said.
