Unlucky Number: The Murder of Lottery Winner Abraham Shakespeare - Couverture souple

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

—DEBORAH MATHIS

PREFACE

In March 2014, on the brink of the annual college-basketball showdown known as March Madness, billionaire Warren Buffett teamed with Quicken Loans to concoct a get-rich-quick scheme to beat all. They would pay $1 billion to anyone, eighteen or older, who correctly predicted the winners of every game in the sixty-three-game national tournament. Even with the number of contestants limited (one per household) to fifteen million entries, the odds of winning were a mind-numbing one in nine quintillion. But that didn’t stop people from trying. (Unsurprisingly, no one won Buffett’s bracket contest. No one even came close. Most people were eliminated on day one; no one remained by the end of day two.)

Although Buffett’s March Madness bracket scheme was not a lottery per se, like a lottery, it was a game of chance and showed, once again, that the dream of striking it suddenly and gloriously rich is alive and well. Not even absurd, nearly impossible odds can quell it.

Lotteries have been a part of the United States since its very founding, when tickets to games of chance were sold to help fund the development of some colonies (such as Jamestown, Virginia), and at one point were considered not only a viable way to raise revenue for public causes, but a civically responsible one. At one time, all thirteen original colonies had a lottery to raise revenue for public services. But, in time, the lotteries became riddled with bribery, payout defaults, and other corruption. They fell into such disrepute that evangelical reformers were able to successfully press a moral argument for prohibition, and by 1895, government-run lotteries were banned nationwide.

The lottery’s official comeback took nearly three quarters of a century, beginning in New Hampshire in 1964. Today, armed with regulations and safeguards, forty-four states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, all sponsor lotteries. Only Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, and Utah abstain.

Both religious and public policy advocates routinely oppose lotteries (the former usually due to biblical strictures, and the latter typically out of concern over the government’s reliance on fantasy-fueled games of chance to fund essential services like public education), but state and multistate lotteries are wildly popular among the masses. It is estimated that about 120 million American men and women—half of all adults in the country—play state-run lotteries each year, accounting for $45 billion in receipts. Only about 1,600 of them will win a million dollars or more. The rest of us have to settle for a few bucks, if we’re at all lucky, or more likely just add the useless slips to our pile of poor choices. The summer house in the Hamptons, the ski chalet in Saint Moritz, the foundation we were going to endow, the freedom from indebtedness, and the ability to tell the boss to take this job and shove it—all will have to live a bit longer in our fantasies and most likely will live there forever. But hope springs eternal that Fortune will make a rewarding pit stop our way. Indeed, the randomness of a lucky strike is part of the lottery’s appeal. It can happen to anyone, from any walk of life, and in even the most obscure places.

In May 2013, Gloria McKenzie, an eighty-four-year-old widow originally from rural Maine, now living in Zephyrhills, Florida, was in line at a local supermarket to buy an auto-generated Powerball ticket when the kindly young woman in front of her stepped aside, allowing Mrs. McKenzie to go first. She thanked the woman for the courtesy, bought her $2 ticket and left. Chosen at random by a machine, the ticket Mrs. McKenzie walked away with that day contained the winning numbers in the multistate lottery. Her jackpot was almost $600 million—$590,500,000, the largest in the multistate game’s twenty-one-year history and the second largest in the annals of American lotteries. By sheer luck, Mrs. McKenzie had beaten odds calculated at one in 175 million.

Like most big jackpot winners, Mrs. McKenzie elected the lump-sum option for her payday, about $371,000,000 before taxes. She sank back into obscurity after collecting her winnings in Tallahassee two months after the drawing, where she emerged accompanied by her son and two lawyers, and thus adhering to the first rule suggested by experts who study those lucky few who hit it big: get a team.

Financial planner Susan Bradley told the Palm Beach Post shortly after the big drawing that she provides the super-high-dollar clients she advises with a team of neuropsychologists, estate-planning attorneys, and other professionals to help them navigate the treacherous waters of over-the-top wealth. These teams are meant to help insulate her clients from scam artists, bad investments, tricky temptations, and the deluge of hangers-on who typically prey upon the superrich. Bradley has a special set of do’s and don’ts for the suddenly and sensationally wealthy.

“One of the first things to do is stop answering the phone,” Bradley told the newspaper. “Get a cell phone with a new number and only give it to your inner circle people and keep that circle small.”

Gloria McKenzie has apparently handled her wild fortune smartly. She is said to still shop at big-box stores and frequent neighborhood eateries, though she once paid for the meals of a restaurant full of diners. Reportedly, she has built a multimillion-dollar home in Jacksonville, Florida, but has otherwise been frugal, still tooling around “in her son’s old Ford Focus,” according to one news account.

Mrs. McKenzie’s is not the only good news story about lottery winners. There are many that end happily—or happily enough. Who doesn’t rejoice at the news that a fat jackpot has been claimed by a downtrodden single mother who rides three buses to her menial job each day? Who isn’t inspired by the Missouri couple who, after netting more than $136,000,000 from Powerball, poured loads of money into improving their town, including a new fire station, ball field, sewage-treatment plant, and a scholarship fund at their high school alma mater?

There’s also the story of Sheelah Ryan, of Florida, who used her $55 million winnings in a 1988 lottery to endow a foundation that provided assistance for poor people, single mothers, children, the elderly, and homeless animals.

But, when things go wrong for lottery winners, they can go awfully wrong. News accounts, police files, and court records are full of instances where winning was far from the panacea that most people imagine when handing over a few dollars in hopes of collecting a king’s ransom.

One of the most famous instances of good luck gone bad is that of Jack Whittaker, a West Virginian who won a $315,000,000 Powerball jackpot in 2002. The next seven years were riddled with misfortune. Whittaker was robbed several times, once to the tune of $545,000; on another occasion, he was taken for $200,000. In a three-month period, both his granddaughter and her boyfriend died of drug overdoses. And Caesar’s Palace, the legendary Las Vegas casino, sued him for $1.5 million worth of bad checks he had written to cover his gambling losses. At one point, Whittaker lamented that he hadn’t destroyed his winning ticket.

And there’s William Post, of Pennsylvania, a $16 million lottery winner. His landlady conned him out of a small fortune, his brother tried to hire a hit man to kill him, and he ended up smothered in debt.

And there’s Janite Lee, who, choosing the annual payout instead of lump sum, was collecting $620,000 a year but ended up in such straits that she sold her rights to the annual payments and still went bankrupt.

Some sad endings are worse than others. Like many other winners, the man at the center of this story neglected to surround himself with wise, experienced counsel but rather relied on old friends and his own well-meaning but often misguided instincts to help him manage his multimillion-dollar winnings. It was a haphazard way to proceed and did nothing to ward off the constant appeals for money from all corners—a pestilence that turned the normally easygoing man into a miserable wreck.

When a stranger came along nearly a year after he won the lottery, not asking for money but offering help, he was eager to take it. She told him about the successful business she ran, about the money she made, and convinced him that she could assist him in getting his finances under control. Uneducated, weary, and in over his head, he accepted her offer and turned over control of his funds and outstanding accounts to her. Then he vanished.

This is the story of the peculiar, egregious connivances of a woman who might have gotten away with her crimes had she not met a man who was more cunning than she.

It is a tale of double betrayal of trust, of a man who meant well, and of a woman overcome by greed and delusion. It is the sad truth of what happened to a man who beat the long odds of winning a state lottery only to lose his most prized possession—his life.

CHAPTER ONE

What’s in a Name?

—ROMEO AND JULIET, BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

If ever there was a name built for distinction, it was Abraham Lee Shakespeare. A name that brings to mind patriarchs and liberators and literary geniuses. Yet most of forty-three-year-old Abraham Shakespeare’s life had been a patchwork of hustles, a steady stream of challenges to make it from one sunrise to the next, forever on the run from deprivation, danger, or incarceration.

Born in the small central Florida town of Sebring as the youngest of Elizabeth Walker’s four children, Abraham had come up even rougher than others in his low-income, racially estranged environment; he dropped out of school after the seventh grade and went to join his father, James, working in the citrus groves that help fuel the Florida economy and account for its standing as one of the world’s top citrus producers. It was questionable how much schooling he’d absorbed anyway, given that he could barely read and write. What education he did have had failed him, leaving him a loiterer on the outskirts of mainstream society, unskilled and unsettled. When he was thirteen, a conviction for theft got Abraham sent away to what people used to call “reform school”—a state-run juvenile detention facility—and he remained there until he was eighteen.

In the hardscrabble black neighborhoods of Lakeland, no one seemed to have any qualms about the tall, lanky man with the dreadlocked hair who pretty much kept to himself, laid low, and lived with his father. When James Shakespeare died of heart disease in 2005 at age eighty-four, Abraham moved in with his mother, Elizabeth Walker, sharing her tiny house on East Lowell Street in Lakeland’s rough-and-tumble Lakeside Addition.

Although Lakeland is a much larger city with more to do than in Sebring, where he grew up, the move did little to improve Abraham’s lot. He was still unable to find or make a place for himself in the mainstream and become productive and self-supporting. Hanging out—and hanging on—was his daily recourse, and Abraham was no stranger to small clubs and bars where people without much means or much else to do would gather to dance, drink, and laugh their troubles away.

Always fond of the ladies, he had romanced Antoinette Andrews, a woman he had known since childhood, and with her had produced a son in 1998. They named the child Moses.

By all accounts, Abraham adored his boy. Even though his relationship with Antoinette was off and on, Abraham was an attentive father. According to Antoinette, Abraham never let more than a week pass without at least a phone call to Moses, and he would usually see his son three to four times a week. Unfortunately, Abraham’s pocketbook could not match his heart. He was almost always a day late and a dollar short in what he owed Antoinette for their son’s care, and he was forever dodging child-support enforcement officials. A few times, he was even locked up for failing to make his court-ordered payments.

For the most part, Abraham owed his survival and freedom to near misses and dumb luck. By his fourth decade of life, he was still an unaccomplished and pitiable figure whose youth had been pestered by discrimination, poverty, and mischief and whose only noteworthy adult exploits were confined to several pages of police reports and prison records.

If he hadn’t scored a day-labor job washing dishes or loading trucks, Abraham could usually be found hanging around Lakeland’s Super Choice Foods, a convenience store, talking about next to nothing with similarly idle friends, all the while admiring and flirting with the women who passed through the area. Super Choice was owned by a burly fellow of Arab descent named Jimard Yuseff Zaid, whom everyone called Papi. Papi took a liking to Abraham and used him to run errands for him and his business. It was Papi’s name on the cell phone in Abraham’s pocket, and the few dollars that Abraham might have at any given moment were as likely to have come from Papi as from anyone.

Most who bothered to know him found the quiet, easygoing Abraham Shakespeare unremarkable but likable and harmless. No one really considered Abraham a menace or a threat. After all, he never hurt anyone. Some even came to consider him a friend. One of those people was local barbershop owner Gregory Todd Smith. The two first met in 1999, when Abraham strolled into Greg’s barbershop on Fifth Street one day and asked if there were any odd jobs he could do to earn a few bucks.

At first, Greg was tempted to give this unexpected visitor the boot. After all, if he had to get up every day and pull a regular nine to five, why shouldn’t this able-bodied fella? Besides, Greg thought, people like Abraham were bad for business.

But just as Greg was about to kick the man out, an old memory surfaced and short-circuited that plan. He recalled how his grandfather, long gone now, had more than once led a neighborhood wino to some spot where a chore needed doing, later coming out of his pocket with a few dollars for the transient. Granddaddy had always said a little change for some honest work would keep folks from stealing and robbing people, and Granddaddy was always right. Almost absentmindedly, Greg found himself taking Abraham around the barbershop, pointing out what needed to be cleaned, straightened, moved, or thrown out in exchange for cash on the spot.

It was the start of what would become a familiar routine. Two or three days a week, Abraham would show up and set to work at Greg’s place, then either leave with a few bills in his pocket or hang out to shoot the shit in the barbershop, which—like neighborhood barbershops everywhere—served as a sounding board and listening post for men eager to unwind and talk candidly about women, sports, politics, money, and the latest community scuttlebutt. Abraham developed easy friendships with Greg and many of his regulars, who appreciated the taciturn wanderer for his easygoing spirit, wry sense of humor, street sense, and kind heart.

Notwithstanding Abraham’s many deficiencies—no education, no home of his own, no particular talent or skills, no reliable source of income, and seemingly no plans f...