Players eye biggest lotto pot in years
$449M drawing tonight
Al Reilly ducked out of the scorching afternoon sun and into 777 Convenience Store in Charlestown yesterday to buy a Lottery ticket and a dream.
Reilly has played Mega Millions every day for the past 30 years, and with today’s drawing’s estimated $449 million jackpot — which carries a cash option of about $313.3 million — he wasn’t going to miss out.
“If I win after all these years, I might just break even,” the 76-year-old townie said with a chuckle. “It’s a dream. Everybody’s gotta dream, right?”
Last paying out on March 8, the jackpot has been growing for 33 consecutive drawings without a top prize winner until it hit $449 million, the game’s highest jackpot since the $636 million won on Dec. 17, 2013.
And although both of those fell short of the highest-ever Mega Millions jackpot — $656 million, hit on March 30, 2012 — Mary, a 777 Convenience Store customer who declined to give her last name, decided that this was going to be the time she was going to win big.
“It’s a chance,” she said. “If you don’t play, you can’t win.”
So Mary bought a single ticket with the same numbers she has played for more than 20 years: all birthdays — hers and her parents’ — and disappeared back out into the sweltering heat.
Next came David Lynch, a 74-year-old local tax attorney with a plan.
If he won, he said, he’d take a lump-sum payment.
“That’s for sure, regardless of your age,” said Lynch, who already bought a ticket the day before but picked up another when he stopped by for a bag of potato chips yesterday. “You can’t spread it out over 20 years because if you die before then, all the rest goes to your estate and gets taxed.”
And what would he do with that much money?
“Set up a charitable foundation,” he said strategically, “and save a tremendous amount of money. And I’d help out my family and friends, of course.”
“But really, when you get into the hundreds of millions, people can’t comprehend it, it’s so much. If someone wins that thing,” he said, shaking his head, “it’s through the roof.”
And if you’re going to play the Lottery, Vu Vo, the store’s owner, says, his is the place to do it.
In January, the store sold a Powerball ticket to a local man, who won $1 million.