Here’s one for the books: professional gambler Bernard Marantelli recently traveled from the UK to Stamford, Connecticut hoping to bag a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot—and willing to spend big to do it.
According to the Hartford Courant, Marantelli scooped up hundreds of thousands of Quick Pick Lotto tickets in hopes of winning $25.8 million. Lottery officials monitored the transactions, and in an October 28 email, Mark Walerysiak, Connecticut Lottery Corp. (CLC) security director, alerted Peter Hsieh, of the state Department of Consumer Protection (DCP).
“Good afternoon, Pete. Just letting you know that we have been monitoring the sales of an individual who is spending an enormous amount of money on the lotto game,” he wrote. “He is currently staying in the Stamford area and has already spent about $200,000…. I spoke to Marantelli last week on the phone. He is the current CEO of Colossus Bets in the UK, a sports betting agency, and he is also a professional gambler/mathematician. He told me that he is planning on winning the lotto jackpot.”
Marantelli and several associates bought scores of Lotto tickets, standing in line for hours on end at several small outlets in Stamford. Apparently, however, the herculean effort fell short: on November 1, a single winning ticket was purchased in Danbury.
Players have a one in 7,059,052 chance to win the jackpot, so Marantelli’s daring gambit may have been nothing but an expensive lesson, though odds are good he at least made back some of his investment in smaller wins, from $2 to $2,000 or more.
Marantelli originally approached the CLC asking to buy tickets in huge batches.
“He initially asked if CLC would be able to set up additional terminals at lottery headquarters to accommodate him,” Walerysiak wrote in the October 28 email to Hsieh, “but I told him that we could not because we need to treat him just like any other customer He was told that he could use any of our 2,900 retailers to buy his tickets.”
Atlantic Market owner Sanjay Patel said Marantelli and his helpers came to the store daily, carrying cloth bags filled with cash, as much as $20,000 at a time.
In other Connecticut Lottery news, the whistleblower case of former lottery security director Alfred W. DuPuis is ongoing. DuPuis retired in 2018 after a million-dollar mistake made by his subordinates in the 2018 New Year’s Super Draw. DuPuis contends that the charge of “gross neglect” lodged against him in the matter was retaliation for his role as a whistleblower about lottery improprieties about five years ago. Matthew Stone, the lottery’s general counsel, has said “there has been zero retaliation” by anyone at the lottery against DuPuis. Nothing came of the FBI’s criminal investigation five years ago, the Courant reported.
