Phone calls poured in dozens of people claimed to be the winner. But one month after the numbers were drawn, no one had presented the ticket. The next day, the Iowa Lottery announced that a QuikTrip in Des Moines had sold the winning ticket. Six days later, the winning Hot Lotto numbers were selected: 3, 12, 16, 26, 33, 11. The ticket in the video was purchased on Dec. His recent cases included securities fraud and theft by public officials. Sand, a baby-faced Iowan who turned down Harvard Law School for the University of Iowa College of Law, had a background that seemed perfect for the case: a high school job writing computer code and doing tech support, a specialty in white-collar crime. Sand watched the video again and again, trying to pick up every little detail: the S.U.V.’s make the man’s indistinct appearance: most likely in his 40s, and 100 pounds overweight, maybe more the tenor of his voice. Two years into the case, that was virtually all the investigators had. The gas-station parking lot gleamed there had been snow flurries that afternoon. Once outside, the man pulled down his hood and removed his cap, got into his S.U.V. An older man with a cane limped by the refrigerated section. At 3:24 p.m., the cashier ran the slips through the lottery terminal. The cashier took the man’s play slips, which had already been filled out with multiple sets of numbers. The stated odds of winning it were one in 10,939,383. The jackpot at the time of this video was approaching the record. The record Hot Lotto jackpot of nearly $20 million had been claimed in 2007. But a much larger prize that varied according to the number of players who bought tickets went to anyone who got all six numbers right. The prize for getting the first five numbers right was $10,000. A player - or the game’s computer - picked five numbers between 1 and 39 and then a sixth number, known as the Hot Ball, between 1 and 19. They were play slips for Hot Lotto, a Powerball-like lottery game available in 14 states and Washington, D.C. ![]() The man pulled two pieces of paper from his pocket. “Yes, sir,” the man replied quietly, his head down. The man replied in a low-pitched drawl, a voice that struck Sand as distinct: “Hell-ooooh.” The man grabbed a fountain drink and two hot dogs. Under the hoodie, he appeared to be wearing a ball cap over the hoodie, he wore a black jacket. The hood of the man’s black sweatshirt was pulled over his head, obscuring his face from two surveillance cameras overhead. ![]() It was a weekday afternoon, two days before Christmas. ![]() ![]() Sand slid the disc into his laptop and pressed play.Ī man walked into a QuikTrip convenience store just off Interstate 80 in Des Moines. The most tantalizing pieces of evidence were on a DVD: two grainy surveillance clips from a gas station. Investigators didn’t even know if a crime had been committed. This one, having to do with a suspicious lottery ticket worth $16.5 million, was full of dead ends. Now Miller was offloading cases to colleagues. He hired Sand about four years earlier and made him the youngest prosecutor in a nine-attorney team that handled challenging cases all over the state. Miller, was retiring in July 2014 after nearly three decades of prosecuting everything from murder to fraud. His boss, an Iowa deputy attorney general named Thomas H. Despite holding the contents of an investigation still open after more than two years, the file was barely half an inch thick. The file landed on Rob Sand’s desk with something less than a thud.
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