![]() He later switched to the Michigan Lottery’s Daily 4, which can pay up to $5,000, and the Daily 3, paying up to $500. He decided this was not a good look for a man who was rubbing shoulders with local business leaders, so he quit playing. Then Tiramisu closed, and he found himself in busy restaurants screaming at bartenders to run his numbers. A $52,000 win seemed to confirm his belief.Īfter his father died, on Father’s Day in 2015, Gjonaj’s gambling escalated. He developed a smartphone app that he thought predicted winning numbers based on patterns in previous draws. Gjonaj was convinced that the draws weren’t purely random. “That’s where I fell in love with the algorithms of numbers,” he told me. The owner let him play alone at the bar after closing time. He loved to play Club Keno, a $1-minimum lottery game with live drawings every few minutes. To blow off steam, he spent Friday nights downing vodka–Red Bulls at a restaurant named Tiramisu. “He wanted to be the man.”Īt home, Gjonaj and his wife, Rose, doted on their young daughters-together they have three, and he has a fourth from a previous relationship. “He just pushed edges and boundaries that he really didn’t need to,” Randy Thomas, who employed Gjonaj in the 2000s, says. This wasn’t illegal, but it required nerves of steel. He liked to “flip paper”-he’d enter into a contract to buy a $1.2 million tract of land, then quickly find a buyer to assume the purchase for $1.4 million, pocketing the difference. In his relentless drive to make money, Gjonaj took risks and cut corners. and was known for his catchphrase: “People lie. He was also a ruthless dealmaker who began his days before 6 a.m. Gjonaj charmed clients with meals at fine restaurants and liked to recite poetry. And I was going to eventually be successful.”īy the time he was in his 30s, he had become one of the busiest commercial-real-estate brokers in Detroit, negotiating deals for a gigantic Walmart and several Taco Bells and Burger Kings. But, he added, “I knew deep down inside that I was going to figure it out. “Every day, fear played a role in it,” he later said on a community television chat show. The day after Gjonaj’s 18th birthday, he became a full-time agent. As a teenager, he haggled so aggressively for a used car that the owner promised him a job at his real-estate firm. His parents emigrated to the United States from Montenegro and spoke little English, so it was 12-year-old Viktor who handled the sale of their home in Sterling Heights, an area populated by many Yugoslavians and Albanians. S ince he was a little boy, Viktor Gjonaj had had a head for numbers. Had Gjonaj found a way to rig the machines? Or had he somehow developed a system to predict the winning combinations again and again and again? His luck appeared to defy the laws of statistics and probability, and sent the lottery commission into a spin. Over the next nine months, the 40-year-old real-estate broker would return many times, exchanging thousands of winning tickets for nearly $30 million, making him one of the biggest winners in the history of the Michigan Lottery. Then Gjonaj (his name is pronounced Joe-nye) tucked them inside the pocket of his sports jacket and roared away in his Lincoln Navigator, richer by $2.5 million. It took staff six hours to cut 500 checks for $5,000 each. Most people who present themselves at lottery claim centers are ecstatic, yet this winner waited for his prizes with the impatience of someone picking up dry cleaning. The odds of winning were just one in 416-not terribly long by lottery standards-but it was extremely unusual for someone to play the same numbers 500 times in one day. ![]() Each was genuine and contained the four winning numbers-7-8-0-0-drawn on June 18. Skeptical lottery officials ushered him into a back office and checked his tickets carefully. But Gjonaj did not have one winning ticket. Twice a day since 1981, the Michigan Lottery has drawn four numbered Ping-Pong balls from a plastic tank and paid up to $5,000 to any player with the same four digits on their pink ticket. Gjonaj, who is 6 foot 5, loomed over the front desk in his designer Italian shoes, his dark hair slicked back and glistening in the fluorescent light, and announced that he had won the Daily 4 lottery draw. ![]() He hurried past a halal-meat shop, through a waft of spices from an Indian grocery store, and into the claim office of the Michigan Lottery. O ne June morning in 2017, an Albanian American real-estate broker named Viktor Gjonaj parked outside a strip mall in Sterling Heights, a small suburb on the outskirts of Detroit. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. ![]()
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