THERE WERE some dark twists in the plot line, inevitable, perhaps, when friends fight over $38.5 million in lottery winnings. The friends, construction workers from New Jersey, said they had pooled their money for lottery tickets for years. Five of them relied on a member of their little group, Americo Lopes, to buy the tickets.
In November 2009, he collected their money and bought a Mega Millions ticket that won, a fact he told no one except lottery officials. He cashed in the ticket as if it were his alone. The lottery deducted taxes and sent Lopes a cheque for $17,433,966. He quit his job, saying he needed foot surgery. “We believed him,” said one of the others, José Sousa – until several months later, when Lopes told another man in the group that he had won the lottery a week after he had stopped working. As word of his luck spread, yet another man checked a website, found Lopes’s name and discovered when he had hit it big.
On Wednesday, a jury in Union County, New Jersey, ordered Lopes to share the winnings with the five former co-workers. Lopes was not happy; the Star-Ledger of Newark quoted him as saying, in Portuguese, “They robbed me.”
The case was based largely on circumstantial and, at times, emotional evidence. If this trial suggested some similarity to It Could Happen to You, a film loosely based on a real-life lottery winner’s generous tip to a waitress, the proceedings proved otherwise: there was testimony of greed, lies and betrayed friendship.
“We trusted him,” Sousa (46) said on Wednesday. “He cheated us.” Of the jury’s decision, he said: “We proved that we’re not lying. This is the most important thing.”
Lopes’s lawyer, Michael D Mezzacca, said during the trial that the lack of written records cast doubt on the co-workers’ allegations. He said because the group did not document who had bought what, no one could say with certainty who had paid for the winning ticket.
Lopes (52) maintained he had bought the winning ticket on his own, separate from any tickets he got for the group. His wife, Margarida, testified that he finally called one of the men in the group in March 2010 and let the word out about winning. She said the man, Daniel Esteves, had cried on hearing the news. Another worker, Candido Silva snr (61) cried on the witness stand. His son, Candido Silva jnr (36), who is also part of the group, said the case had been stressful, but the verdict was what he and the others had expected.
“If you have a clear conscience, you have nothing to worry about,” Silva jnr said.
The five men said they had known Lopes for years and considered themselves close friends of his. Silva snr said that in 2008 he helped fix up a house Lopes had bought. He said they worked on the driveway together. And the sidewalk. And the basement. Silva snr said, as he did in court, that he had looked on Lopes as a son.
Sousa said they were all so close that Lopes attended his daughter’s christening five years ago. He was upset Lopes had testified in court that the six had not been friends. The money was frozen after the men filed suit in 2010. For now, the men said, they were not planning any major lifestyle changes. They would take two weeks off for vacation, but would probably return to the highway construction crew that had once included Lopes. – (New York Times)