In the spring of 2023, a London banker and gambler reached out to a few contacts with an unusual request. He wanted to know if his connections could help him take down the Texas Lottery.
His global team came up with a scheme: They set up shop in several locations in Texas, including a former dentist office. And over three days, associates and some of their children manned dozens of machines that worked around the clock, spitting out 100 or more tickets every second.
It all paid off: They won a $57 million jackpot. All of this was made possible because the state of Texas allowed online lottery ticket vendors to print tickets for their customers.
Once made public, the plan sparked outrage and multiple investigations. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called the crew’s win the “biggest theft from the people of Texas in the state’s history.”
The Wall Street Journal put together an account of what happened based on interviews with those directly involved and others. Journal reporter Joe Wallace said there are two key players involved.
“One is the Australian high rolling gambler named Zeljko Ranogajec, otherwise known as the Joker for his ability to pull off this kind of stunt in far-flung casinos and at racetracks around the world,” Wallace said. “He, from what we understand, bankrolled the operation, but the guy on the ground actually pulling it off and who may have spotted the opportunity to begin with, he’s another Australian called Bernard Marantelli.
“Both men work closely together. They form part of a wider group of gamblers who go around the world, pulling off just this kind of stunt.”
Wallace said the two men came up with a plan that worked extremely well in Texas.
“What they figured out was that the jackpot, which had been growing for months, had reached such a high level that they were almost guaranteed to win big time if they bought almost every ticket,” he said. “I say almost guaranteed because the big risk for them was that someone else would also buy the winning combination.
“That’s the nightmare situation for this kind of pro gambling team, because then you split the pot. And you either don’t make very much money or you lose money. No one else had picked the winning combination, and so they won.”
» MORE: Investigations, resignations, new legislation: What’s going on with Lotto Texas?
The gambling group targeted Texas in part because not very many lottery tickets were selling weekly, Wallace said.
“That was important information to them because it showed that there weren’t very many competitors,” he said. “They didn’t print every single possible combination, which is interesting in its own right.
“One of the things I was most interested to learn is that if you’re a pro gambler, you don’t want to print some combinations, for example, 123456, because those are picked by a lot of people playing the lottery. And again, you do not want to split the winnings, so you do not go for low numbers or numbers which could be a birthday or something like that.”
Some state lawmakers have blamed the Texas Lottery Commission for what happened.
“Ryan Mindell, who is the current director of the Lottery Commission – he wasn’t the director at the time – he told a Senate hearing in Texas earlier this year that a junior employee signed off on a request made by one or more of the people involved in the operation to disperse very rapidly dozens of the terminals needed to print the tickets in the run-up to the drawing in April of 2023,” Wallace said. “That clearly was a very important part of the operation. In order to print so many tickets, the team needed to get hold of as many of these terminals as they possibly could.”
» GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE: Sign up for Texas Standard’s weekly newsletters
The commission itself is investigating why that request was approved, and there is also an investigation underway by the Texas Rangers.
“Interestingly, late last year when the jackpot was again rising and some of these professional gambling groups were again circling on the hunt trying to figure out if they could pull off this kind of operation again, the commission got wind of this, and this time it took a different approach,” Wallace said. “It very rapidly issued a software update which would make it more difficult to pull off this kind of heist again.”
The men behind the scheme haven’t spoken publicly about it, Wallace said.
“The winnings were claimed through a Delaware limited partnership, and the winners exercised their right under Texas law to remain anonymous,” he said. “Their involvement has become known in large part due to some very good reporting in the Houston Chronicle.
“All we had in our story was a comment from a representative of this limited partnership, a lawyer based in New Jersey who had actually sent in the winning ticket to the commission claiming the prize. He said that all applicable laws and rules had been followed at the time and [the group] would continue to do so.”
