DCist contributor James Calder bought himself a ticket this week—before the jackpot went up by $100 million.
Though we read earlier that a Maryland resident who purchased one of three winning tickets in last week’s frenzied Mega Millions drawing was trying to remain anonymous, turns out it’s tough to stay undercover when you’ve won a share of a $656 million jackpot. And even more so when accused of pulling a fast one on your coworkers.
But that’s what’s going on with Mirlande Wilson and her fellow employees of a Baltimore area McDonald’s restaurant, The New York Post reports. Wilson, 37, went in on a group ticket with her colleagues, but now says the winning ticket was purchased separately, and is therefore all hers.
“I was in the group, but this was separate. The winning ticket was a separate ticket,” Wilson, a mother of seven children, told the Post yesterday.
But the other McDonald’s employees the Post spoke with aren’t buying Wilson’s story. In fact, they’re pretty cheesed over it:
“She can’ t do this to us!” said Suleiman Osman Husein, a shift manager and one of 15 members in the pool. “We each paid $5. She took everybody’s money!”
A man identifying himself as the boyfriend of a McDonald’s manager named Layla, who was part of the pool, said Wilson bought tickets for the group at the 7-Eleven in Milford Mill, where the winning ticket was sold.
In splitting the jackpot with other winners in Illinois and Kansas, Wilson is due either a $105 million lump-sum payment (after taxes), or annual payments of $5.59 million for the next 26 years. But her alleged swindling of a group ticket hews closely to the story of Americo Lopes, another Mega Millions winner who tried to claim a 2009 jackpot for himself after purchasing the winning ticket with a group of his colleagues. A judge in New Jersey last month ordered Lopes to share the $38.5 million prize.
The owner of the McDonald’s where Wilson works gave her money to buy more numbers for the group, the Post reported, but instead of returning the additional ticket to the office, she took it home and kept it for herself. But the owner, reached by the Post, didn’t want to talk about it: “It’s all bullshit, if you ask me. It’s speculation,” Birul Desai said.
