There’s a big lottery mess in New Jersey.
There’s this multistate lottery called The Big Game that operates in eight states. On April 16, there was a drawing for a jackpot of $331 million. As happens, even at odds of 71 million to one against, there were three winners of $59 million each, in Georgia, Illinois and New Jersey.
The winner has come forward in Georgia. The Illinois winner hasn’t manifested himself. But in New Jersey, it’s a little more complicated.
It appears that the winning ticket is held by Angelito Marquez, a 28-year-old nurse’s aide from Newark. The trouble is, he’d been deputized to buy tickets for a pool of 19 co-workers. Just who did what to whom is a little murky because Marquez’s story — well, it wiggles a little in the telling. Nothing especially wrong with that: interviews to newspapers are not conducted under oath.
Props, though, to the Star-Ledger reporters, who got an interview with Marquez by staking out the nursing home where he works before his shift started Friday night. The best the Times could do was three words through a car window on Sunday.
