Lottery Winner's Lucky Day Turns into One Heck of a Mess
Posted: 7/18/2007 11:33:05 AM
The lure of quick cash from someone else's winning lottery ticket now has three women facing some serious charges, after their alleged plan proved to be very unlucky.
Imagine you just found out you won $25,000 in the lottery. You get a receipt — but in your haste, you actually leave the ticket at the store. And when you got back, it is gone. Well, that is just what happened to a 24-year-old Tina-Marie Ware from Rensselaer. She kept looking and looking — and finally, needed the State Police to help unravel the mystery.
It began with a woman buying a series of New York State Lottery tickets, for the "Raffles to Riches" numbers game. Each cost $20. When she came to the Mobil "On the Run" in East Greenbush to see if she won, the clerk, Kirstin Von Borstel confirmed she had — $25,000. The winner left with a receipt, but not the winning ticket.
A short time later, she came back, talked again to the 20-year-old clerk, and then another clerk, 21-year-old Kelly Clifford.
"She was real adamant that 'we gotta' find that ticket, we gotta find that ticket, it's in the trash'," says Tom Beauter, who was in the store at the time. "I mean, would you go dumpster diving? For $25,000, I might...well yea, exactly."
Ware was adamant, so both she and Clifford actually jumped in to the dumpster, and pulled out bags, looking for the ticket. They did it not once, but twice.
"We had two clerks that worked in cahoots with each other that evening, and gave us some misinformation on where the ticket may have ended up," says Tom Constantine, with Red-Kap Sales, Inc.
Constantine is the regional manager and a former police officer. What he did not know at the time was that Clifford found the ticket. State Police say Clifford convinced Von Borstel to get her roommate, 30-year-old Tracy McCarty, to cash the ticket the next day and split the money — $18,000 after taxes. And when the real winner went to lottery headquarters, the plan was all but over.
"New York State Lottery and the GTECH, their parent security firm — it's impenetrable, there's no way that anyone's going to get away with cashing a lottery ticket of that sum and get away with it," Constantine says.
"All three of them spent the money very quickly, or put it in a bank account very quickly," says State Police Trooper Maureen Tuffey.
But police have only found less than $500.
"Very little bit right now has been recovered, though we do anticipate recovering just about all of it," Trooper Tuffey says.
Both clerks have been fired. State Police say they each got $7,500, and the roommate got $3,000 for her troubles. Clifford also faces drug charges. She was found with 54 hydrocodone pills and no prescription.
All three are due back in court next week.
Source: News 10
