$136-M jackpot from plumber’s forgotten ticket

NEW YORK—Fortunately for Anthony Perosi, his truck broke down.

That was a few weeks ago, on Staten Island, where he works as a plumber.

Truck repairs cost money, and Perosi’s thoughts turned to something he had stashed away behind a pipe in his basement.

It was a $2 Powerball ticket he had bought at 7-

Eleven on Page Avenue six weeks before—five random numbers he had been playing twice a week for years, besides the Powerball number.

Flashback: A few days after the Powerball drawing on March 14, Perosi, 56, was eating lunch at a restaurant, where someone told him that 7Eleven on Page Avenue had sold a Powerball winner.

“I say, ‘I’ve played at Page Avenue 7Eleven,’” Perosi recalled on Thursday.

Behind the bar, his friend Sandy turned around. “She was like, ‘Forget about it.’” She heard a schoolteacher had won. She told Perosi, “You didn’t win nothing.”

“So I didn’t check my tickets,” he said.

And that was that. Perosi put the ticket in a pouch that he keeps tucked between a light-switch conduit and the concrete wall of his unfinished basement in his home on the North Shore of Staten Island.

Once in a while he took the tickets to get scanned to see if he had won a few dollars.

Then, when his truck broke down on April 27, Perosi thought back to the 7-Eleven on Page Avenue. He checked the ticket online. “I tried to breathe in and nothing would go in,” he said. “I thought I was having a heart attack and my heart stopped. So I grabbed the ticket, figuring they would find it in my hand.” Then he exhaled. He was still alive. He circled the dining room several times, muttering to himself, his little dogs following. Perosi had won $136 million. He is splitting it 70-30 with his son, Anthony III.

After taxes, the elder Perosi takes home $38,612,055. His son, a salesman for a food company, gets a respectable $16,548,023.

It is not the biggest lottery jackpot ever, but it is the biggest ever won on Staten Island, and the secondbiggest Powerball prize awarded in New York State, lottery officials said.

Perosi told reporters at lottery headquarters in the financial district on Thursday that his plans for his winnings were modest. He will continue to work—but less than before.

He will try to see more of the great state of New York.

“You know, Buffalo, the woods,” he said. And his truck will get some company. “I’ll probably buy another vehicle,” Perosi said.