Teen buys abandoned storage unit for £330 and ends up making £37k when he sees inside

Teen buys abandoned storage unit for £330 and ends up making £37k when he sees insideMichael Haskell, 17, says his family started taking his storage locker hobby seriously after he discovered a unit previously owned by a disgraced New York art dealerCommentsNewsMichael Moran and Maria Ortega Foreign Content Specialist09:44, 14 Apr 2026View 3 ImagesOne of Michael's biggest finds was a 'lost' Man Ray painting(Image: Facebook)A 17-year-old who was inspired by a Storage Hunters type TV show to start buying up the contents of abandoned storage lockers says his family only started taking his hobby seriously when he bought a unit for just over £300 and found a huge stash of valuable artworks inside.‌Michael Haskell, from New Jersey in the US, uses a computer program he developed using ChatGPT to identify forgotten storage units that might once have been owned by noteworthy individuals.‌The unit that made his family start taking him seriously was the discovery of a storage unit that had been owned by disgraced New York art dealer Andrew Crispo.‌He bought the contents of the Brooklyn unit for $450 (about £330) and sold the artworks he found inside – including a painting by surrealist pioneer Man Ray and some drawings by Ray’s lesser-known contemporary Walt Kuhn – for an incredible $50,000 (nearly £37,000).“My family took my hobby seriously after that,” Michael told the New York Times. Michael has an eBay store, Mike’s Unique Treasures, where he sells most of what he discovers. He says he earns around $7,000 (just over £5,000) a month from his hobby.View 3 ImagesThe prices of some single items on Michael's eBay store cover the cost of several abandoned storage units(Image: eBay)‌Michael’s mother, Anna, says he has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. “Michael would go to book fairs, where he discovered he could buy books by the bag and resell them,” she recalled.“Then he started researching LEGOs that were going out of production, and he started buying th...