“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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