WHAT ARE THE ODDS!
Second $1M jackpot for lottery guy
A Long Island hardhat just beat 2-billion-to-1 odds to score his second million-dollar cratch-off lottery prize in four years.
“I scratched the ticket at home, looked at my fiancée and said, ‘I won!’ She said, ‘ No way!’ and we started jumping around the house excited, crashing around the living room,’’ Bruce Magistro said.
He was still on the job Tuesday, helping to build a house in Southampton.
The widowed father of three said his first million-dollar win, on a $5 Extreme Cash card in 2012, was bittersweet, as he lost his wife, Yvonne, to cancer, shortly after the windfall.
“That was a tough time in my life. The money, it let me stay home with [her],” the Lindenhurst construction foreman told The Post on Tuesday.
Magistro, 48, said that the face of the New York Lottery, who presented him with his oversized check at the time, actually predicted he’d be back.
“The craziest part is that Yolanda Vega told me I was going to win again. We were standing there the last time. She was holding the big check, and she leaned in to me and said, ‘You’re going to win again, I can feel it!’ ’’ Magistro said.
She was right. He scored another $1 million payday with a $2 Win for Life scratch-off March 15.
Vega may may have been swayed by the sheer volume of tickets Magistro regularly buys.
The West Babylon gas-station owner who sold him his second winner said Magistro was a longtime customer who bought as much as $200 in tickets a day.
“He usually buys the $10 and $20 scratch-off tickets,’’ said Mike’s Super Citgo boss Mike Abizeid. “Since I opened the store 11 years ago, he [has] spent $150 to $200 every day on scratch-offs.”
“This one came at the perfect time,” Magistro said. “Construction has been rough the last couple of years.’’
Magistro — who used a lucky dime to scratch the ticket — will be handed his check at the gas station, again by Vega, on Wednesday — which is two years to the day that his wife died.
“I think there is some kind of di-divine intervention here,’’ he said.
Magistro has been receiving $33,090 after taxes annually from his last win and will continue to do so until 2031.
But “you can’t retire on that,’’ he said, adding he’ll use someme of the new dough to wed fiancée Deborah Ward.
State Gaming Commission rep Lee Park said the odds of winning the Win for Lifeife grand prize — or $1,000 a week for life — are 1 in 7,745,600. The odds of Magis-istro winning Extreme Cash were 1 in 2,520,000.
Philip Protter, a professor of statistics at Columbia University, said the odds of Magistro winning the twoo games were approximately 1 in 2 billion.