A primitive without an owner, a traveling retiree and police expertise: the plot of a 4.7 million prize

Every police officer knows that immediacy is key to resolving a case, but the agents of the Northern District Judicial Brigade, in A Coruña, received the case more than six years late. In June 2012, an unknown person stamped a primitiva ticket in a lottery administration and, four days later, that combination was awarded 4.7 million euros. The ticket ended up in the hands of Manuel Reija, the owner of the establishment, known as the San Agustín lottery. According to him, the bet had been found on the counter and with the help of his brother, a delegate of the State Lottery and State Betting Society (SELAE) in A Coruña, he did what he could to collect the prize.

In 2018, José María Vidal, a young man from A Coruña, denounced Reija for having stolen his bet and the move ended up becoming a police case. The police investigation ended up showing that the complainant was not the legitimate winner and that the true author of the combination awarded with the prize was a man who died in January 2014, whose family has requested anonymity. The Prosecutor’s Office is now demanding a six-year prison sentence from the lottery for alleged fraud and another six years from his brother for money laundering.

The accusation assumes that Reija deceived the winner when he went to check with his administration if any of his bets had been awarded. “For one of the tickets, the lottery paid him a smaller prize, one euro and a bit,” says José Manuel López, the chief inspector who led the investigation. Reija tried to collect almost five million euros with the help of his brother Miguel, but Lotteries were suspicious and kept the ticket to find the rightful owner of it. Later, he required the A Coruña City Council to open a process (file of finding a lost object) in order to locate its owner. 317 people claimed it from different parts of Spain. Each and every one of the claims were rejected, but the only account that came close to the facts was that of Vidal, who went through criminal proceedings.

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The duty judge, who was investigating the complaint, ordered the police to investigate the lottery for alleged fraud, but the police investigators went further. They set out to identify the lucky one. The first thing they did was ask the State Lotteries for the movements registered at the San Agustín terminal that July morning when the lottery went to check the prizes. The results contradicted Reija’s version. “What confirms to us that the lottery was not telling the truth is that there are a series of manual bets that are checked and that immediately after the same combinations are verified, the same manual bets, the same numbers,” explains José Manuel López. That is to say, that the lottery, according to the police version, entered the lucky ticket two more times in the terminal in a single morning.

The lottery seller came to request payment of the prize up to six times (the last in February 2019), the same times that Lotteries denied the requests. Meanwhile, the agents continued pulling the thread. The police deduced that the legitimate winner was a regular player because, beyond the millionaire combination, which was made automatically, he used to play the same combinations that he almost always registered in the same neighborhood of A Coruña. And a clue caught the attention of the agents: there were periods without bets. “We discovered that in those periods that we were missing, the tickets appear in Fuerteventura, Torremolinos, Palma de Mallorca and Caldas de Rey (Pontevedra),” the researchers explain. “We came to the conclusion that he was a person who had a lot of time and who also went to places where it was hot at Christmas and Easter. So we thought that he could be a person with time and older, a retired person, ”says Chief Inspector José Manuel López. The trail led them to Imserso.

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The track paid off. There was a woman from A Coruña who stayed with her husband in hotels in those coastal places where, in addition, there were lottery administrations that registered the same combinations. The next step was to call the woman to testify. She “she She came with her daughter. They had some idea, but they did not know what awaited them. They were told that it was a matter of a scam, of their trips, but the ticket was not mentioned to them. When you ask them if they made bets and tickets, where they traveled and such, well I suppose that some light would come on. And they already tell us that her husband (the one who placed the bets) had died in January 2014 ″, says the chief inspector. The two officers were awarded Police Merit Medals for the investigation.

The police were closing the circle on the owner of the ticket and justice did the same on the lottery and his brother. The judge who investigated Vidal’s complaint called them both to testify, in November 2019, for an alleged crime of misappropriation. As soon as the interrogation began, the lottery made a rectification. “What I found is a group of tickets among which was the winner.” When asked by the judge about those tickets, he replied: “They could go to the trash can calmly, but it was not the case, I simply took the block of tickets and began to pass them and in one of the transactions I got the famous ticket,” he explained. .

The Prosecutor’s Office has endorsed the account of the agents and is now demanding a six-year prison sentence from the lottery for alleged fraud. “There are a number of things that I will address when there is a trial, if there is a trial. I have my evidence, which is also perfectly substantiated, that things have not been done correctly”, explained the lottery owner Manuel Reija in an interview prior to the indictment of the Prosecutor’s Office. His brother Miguel de él will face the charge of alleged perpetrator of a crime of money laundering, with a sentence of six years in prison, and another of concealment. SELAE keeps him in the position of delegate of Lotteries of A Coruña. The prosecution claims that the heirs of the winner, the widow and daughter, receive the award.

Vidal’s complaint was the trigger to clarify a case that had been entrenched for years and that no one was addressing, although the ticket was never his. The young man passed away a few months after filing the complaint. “My son said, ‘dad, I don’t care about money, what I want is for him not to charge it’ and he got it. We are satisfied, ”says his father.

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