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My no-cost Lotto windfalls were all thanks to my sharp eye. I've always made it a point to pick up any lottery tickets (without heel marks) that I spot on the sidewalks of Manhattan. You'd be amazed by how many "live" tickets I've found through the years-they number in the dozens. Sadly, most of the "live" tickets I've found have been as good as dead-losers. Once I found a batch of ten tickets, neatly tacked together with a paper clip. Not a winner in the lot! Through the years, seven of the winning tickets I've found have been the instant kind, the scratch-offs. The games were so complicated and instructions so unclear that the buyers had discarded the winning tickets, not realizing they had won.

I found my big winner, the $1300 ticket, on Fifth Avenue in front of the New York Public Library. It was Sunday and my wife was displaying her artwork near the corner of 40th Street. Needing a pick-me-up, she asked me to please go get her a Coke from the hot dog vendor on 42nd Street. Halfway down the block I spied a lone Lotto ticket and picked it up. It was for Lotto Forty, a game that has since been discontinued in New York, and it was to be run the next day. The next morning, sitting in the back of a bus, I suddenly remembered that I had that Lotto Forty ticket in my pocket. I opened my copy of the Daily News.
Incredulously, I looked at the numbers and I looked at the ticket. Whoever had bought it had correctly picked five out of six of the winning numbers! The purchaser had only missed the sixth–the jackpot number–by one digit (the sixth number picked was 23, it should have been 24).

The next day I went to the lottery headquarters in the World Trade Center and picked up a check from them for $1 300. While I was there, a most happy feller with a smile from ear to ear bounced in with a winning ticket worth $5000 from New York's daily numbers game. His smile disappeared when they ran his name through the computer and found that he was a tax delinquent to the tune of $3600, which they promptly deducted from his winnings. Having witnessed this, I was able to alert one of the warehouse packers who had hit for a nice few thousand. He prudently sent his cousin to collect the winnings.

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One store owner in New Castle, Delaware, chose to close rather than deal with the endless line that stretched out the door of his little shop. He had to call the police to handle the mob of customers who were furious at having to leave empty-handed after waiting four hours to put down their bets.

When the drawing finally took place on Wednesday, May 20, 1998, there was just one 195 million dollar winner, a ticket sold at the Lakeside Country Store in Walworth County, Wisconsin. Interestingly, the previous Powerball record jackpot was $111.2 million, it was also sold in Wisconsin.

The ballyhooed $195-million jackpot figure is a deception. The $195 million is paid out to the tune of about $8 million a year for twenty-five years. The slick operators deposit just enough money in a bank to throw off $8 million yearly in interest. At the end of twenty-five years they withdraw the whole amount, so the $ 195-million jackpot didn't cost them a penny!
If the winner opts for a cash payment—which the winner did— the loudly touted $195 million suddenly shrinks to $104 million. After taxes, the winner netted $68 million. Not an inconsequential sum, to be sure, but a long distance from the heralded $195 million.
As for the tens of thousands from New York and New Jersey who stampeded into Connecticut and waited on long lines for hours on end, eager to pump their many millions of dollars into the Powerball machines, all they got for their money was the shaft.
Will this discourage them? Not likely.

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