Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 20, 1992 TAG: 9202200345
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM SHEAN AND TONY GERMANOTTA
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
DID SATURDAY'S LOTTO WINNER HEDGE ALL THE BETS?
Virginia's largest Lotto jackpot remained mired in mystery Wednesday.The winner had yet to surface.
Authorities were still baffled by the millions of dollars in bulk purchases apparently financed by Australian funds.
Secret Service agents were being sent from Richmond to dig deeper into the legality of the block buys.
And lottery officials had yet to determine where those players got the truckload of play slips they needed.
By Wednesday there seemed to be every reason to believe that one group had attempted to cover all of the 7.1 million possible lottery combinations.
An Australian group told one Hampton Roads bank that it wanted to use a $7.2 million international money wire transfer to buy a guaranteed win. That bank refused the business, but it didn't stop the plan.
Bulk purchasers at Farm Fresh, Miller Mart stores and Open House Diners all used cashier's checks drawn from Crestar Bank.
Uni-Mart convenience stores, part of a Pennsylvania-based chain, also sold $1.5 million in tickets to one buyer, but it was unclear Wednesday whether that money came through Crestar.
Ninety-six percent of the Lotto's possible combinations were played Saturday, far more than the previous high of 72 percent, said Lottery Director Kenneth Thorson.
Sheer logistics kept the percentage from being even higher.
Farm Fresh Chairman Michael E. Julian said his stores were unable to process all of the $2 million in Lotto tickets one customer bought through that outlet.
A single lottery machine can print out 45,000 tickets a day, officials said. That means it takes more than 22 machines running full-tilt on nothing else to print out 1 million tickets a day. And there are only three days between the Wednesday and Saturday drawings.
Twice before, the daunting physical process involved in buying more than 7 million tickets had scared off those looking for a guaranteed lottery winner.
When the lottery jackpots approached $20 million in July 1990, and again last August, the Virginia Lottery Department received calls from prospective buyers asking if they could eliminate the middle man and blanket the drawing.
"They said, if I give you a check for $7 million, would you give me a certificate for covering all combinations?" Thorson recalled.
No one at the agency took the calls seriously, believing they were little more than daydreams.
"We do not accept a check and then write you a special ticket for all combinations of numbers," said Paula Otto, a lottery spokeswoman.
The callers were told they would have to get in line with all the other players and buy their tickets at the regular retail outlets. There is no evidence of an attempt to cover all combinations in either of those drawings.
Last week, when outlets asked about the propriety of selling tickets in bulk buys, the department told them it was legal so long as it didn't inconvenience regular players.
The agency also did not provide bulk rolls of play slips to anyone. A ticket purchaser uses the slips to select the desired numbers; the slips are then fed into the lottery computers, which print out the official tickets.
Although printing your own play slips is legal, it would be difficult, Thorson said.
The winning ticket came from a Western Branch Farm Fresh store involved in the bulk buys. But lottery officials said they have no way of knowing whether the lucky ticket was part of that package.
The winner has 180 days from the drawing to surface and pick up the first of 20 annual checks for $1,026,000.
Thorson speculated that a lottery club may be behind the block purchases.
"If one of these clubs found 70,000 people to put up $100 each, then they'd have $7 million for tickets," he said.
Landmark News Service reporters Steve Suo, Thomas Huang, Marc Tibbs, Bonnie\ V. Winston and Thomas Boyer contributed to this report.