Michael 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 dealer
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.
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 those up, reselling them as they got more valuable. Then he saw Storage Wars.”
Michael says that .he often discovers tragic stories behind the abandoned lockers he find. One locker he bought had belonged to a New York socialite, and was stacked high with designer dresses and accessories, along with empty vodka bottles and divorce papers.
“I’m always trying to figure out the lives behind the units,” Michael said. “If you lose a locker, usually you’re not financially stable, and your life isn’t in a great place. Sometimes it can be a sad story.”
The story of Andrew Crispo, the owner behind Michael’s biggest score to date, is particularly tragic.
Once a noted art dealer and gallery owner, Crispo was implicated in the so-called Death Mask murder in 1985 and, while he was not convicted of that crime he was later jailed for tax evasion and for threatening to kidnap a lawyer’s four-year-old child.
Crispo died penniless, in a Brooklyn nursing facility in 2024 – which led to Michael being able to snap up the contents of his storage locker for next to nothing: “He had a horrible ending,” Michael said. “I’m not sure what the lesson is.
“His life seems like a lesson in how not to live your life.”
