News and opinion writer
People have a lot of strategies for winning the lottery. They play lucky numbers, always buy certain games, or only buy tickets from particular stores or on specific days. But there's one unusual strategy that's had a big payoff for some winners: bad behavior.
Several lottery winners have gained their good fortune through other people's misdeeds. Whether it's karma or just good luck, these players became millionaires because other people didn't know how to be polite.
These are the true stories of lottery players who won big because of someone else's bad behavior.
Sneaky Snickers
Mike Barth and his co-workers all worked for the state government of New York. They had formed a lottery ticket-buying group, and each week, everyone threw in two dollars to purchase a batch of lottery tickets.
In March 2011, it was Barth's turn to buy the tickets, so he headed to Colsoun's, a newsstand on Broadway, to pick out some numbers for the Mega Millions drawing. Barth had skipped lunch and was feeling hungry, so just as it was his turn in line, he turned to pick up a Snickers candy bar. At that moment, someone else reached over his shoulder and bought their own Mega Millions tickets.
Barth was irked but decided it wasn't worth making a fuss about. “I thought about saying something but decided just to let it slide,” he said about the Quick Pick ticket sold right before the one he purchased.
He bought the next ticket, and as it turns out, instead of being mad at the cutter, he should have hugged him because Quick Pick gave him the numbers 22, 24, 31, 52, 54, and Mega Ball 4, which turned out to be a jackpot winner worth $319 million.
However, after finding out he had won, Barth immediately realized that he had another problem. He had left the ticket unsecured on his office desk, and he couldn't go back to get it because he was out of town touring colleges with his son.
He called his co-worker and fellow winner, John Hilton, to go into the office and secure the ticket. Hinton found the ticket and decided he couldn't take any chances with something so valuable. He took it home, shoved it into two plastic zip-lock bags, and hid the bag inside a five-pound bucket of bird feed, which he then hid in his basement.
Barth laughed when he told reporters, "He was like Gollum in 'The Lord of the Rings,' protecting the ticket like it was his 'precious.'”
It was a long weekend, but the entire group took the ticket to the state lottery offices as soon as they opened Monday morning. At the press conference, fellow winner John Kutey said that after finding out his group had won, his hands shook so badly he couldn't even dial the phone.
Group member Gabrielle Mahar said the first thing she wanted to purchase with her money was a dishwasher because she was tired of doing her dishes by hand in her rented bungalow.
Barth and six of his co-workers chose the immediate cash payout, each collecting $19 million after taxes. Their shares could have been smaller, but some of the group's regular members opted out of purchasing tickets that week.
Million dollar bump
It was the end of a long week, and Southern California resident LaQuedra Edwards just wanted to buy a few lottery tickets. She placed $40 into a Lottery vending machine at her local grocery store and was about to make her selection when a rude stranger ran into her.
"He just bumped into me, didn't say a thing, and just walked out the door," Edwards said of the "rude person" at the grocery store.
Edwards usually bought several cheaper tickets, but the unexpected shove caused her to accidentally spend $30 on a 200X scratcher ticket, which was a game she had never intended to buy.
But her attitude toward the crude stranger did a 180 when she took her game back to her car, uncovered it and saw that her accidental ticket was a jackpot winner worth $10 million.
Edwards told reporters:
I didn't really believe it at first, but I got on the 405 freeway and kept looking down at (the ticket), and I almost crashed my car. I pulled over, looked at it again and again, scanned it with my [California Lottery mobile] app, and I just kept thinking, this can't be right.
Her odds of winning were one in three million, but they would have been zero without that unkind shove.
The cutter
Stephen Munoz Espinoza of Delray Beach, Florida, just wanted to buy a lottery ticket from his local Publix when a stranger's bad behavior led to a massive fortune. Munoz Espinoza tried to use the store's lottery ticket machine, but as he approached it, a stranger cut in front of him and bought his own tickets.
“It was the end of a long day, and I was tired. I stopped at Publix and was about to buy a ticket at the machine when a man cut right in front of me,” Espinoza told lottery officials.
Rather than start a fight, he decided to let it go. "Instead of saying something, I decided I'd just buy a ticket at the counter instead.”
It was a good thing he did because once at the counter, he decided to buy a 500X THE CASH for $50. He uncovered the numbers and was excited to see that he had won $2,000. But he still had more numbers, so he kept scratching and revealed a 500X multiplier symbol. Suddenly, his prize jumped from $2K to $1,000,000.
“I can't believe I won a million dollars!” he exclaimed. Munoz Espinoza collected his prize at the Tallahassee Florida Lottery headquarters with his wife. He elected to take the lump sum payout, which came to $820,000 before paying taxes.
Munoz Espinoza says that he plans to buy a new home for his family with the winnings.
Permanent vacation
Rebecca Gonzales was looking forward to taking a well-deserved day off from her job at a Los Angeles Walmart when she got the phone call that every employee dreads: her manager told her that the store was short-staffed on a holiday weekend. She needed to come in to help fill the gap.
She had planned to spend the day with her family, but her manager insisted they needed the extra help.
“It was Labor Day, and they only needed me for three hours,” Gonzalez said. “I wanted to obviously be home with my family because we planned to barbecue,” she told reporters.
She decided to go in, and after completing her partial shift, she bought herself a Single, Double, and Triple instant-win game.
“I'd planned on buying one on my break, but it was so busy I totally forgot. I didn't remember I was going to buy a Scratcher until I left for the night and passed by the machines,” Gonzalez said.
She went back to her car, uncovered the ticket, and saw that it was a winner worth $10 million. “I couldn't believe it!” she said.
Gonzales said that she plans to use her new wealth to pay down her debt and purchase a new home for her family. And despite taking home an eight-figure lottery prize, she says she's still putting in hours at her Walmart job.
“I've only told one person at work, and it was the manager who wanted me to stay late on a Holiday,” Gonzalez said. “He couldn't believe it."
Spousal support jackpot
Thomas Rossi was shocked when Denise Rossi, his wife of twenty-five years, announced that she was filing to divorce him and told him that he had to move out of their house immediately. He thought they were happy together and didn't understand why she suddenly no longer wanted to be married to him.
Thomas couldn't persuade her to change her mind, so they divorced in 1996. He restarted his life as a single man and thought that was the end of his relationship with Denise when something strange happened.
Years after the divorce, he was sorting through his mail when he found a letter addressed to Denise from a company that specialized in paying lump sum payouts to lottery winners in exchange for their annuity payments.
The letter specifically stated that the company:
...helped hundreds of lottery winners like you around the country receive a lump-sum payment for the present value of their future annual lottery payments.
The letter was baffling because, as far as Thomas knew, his ex-wife had never won the lottery. He decided to investigate further and soon discovered that just eleven days before she filed for divorce, Denise had won and collected a lottery prize worth $1.6 million and never told him about it.
California is a community property state, which means that all money and assets acquired during a marriage are owned equally by both partners, including lottery winnings.
Denise won the money but intentionally hid it from her husband. She had the prize check mailed to her mother's home and then opened a new bank account that Thomas didn't know about, in which to deposit it.
Thomas took her back to court and argued that he was entitled to a portion of her lottery prize. Denise was unrepentant, claiming that she was miserable in her marriage and shouldn't have had to share the money.
The judge ruled for Thomas. He said that if Denise had been honest, she could have kept half the prize; however, because she had lied to her husband and the court, he awarded the entire jackpot to her ex-husband.
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