Successfully embezzle $2.3 million dollars from your employers over a period of 3-1/2 years. (Which isn't all that smart to begin with).
Then blow all that money buying lottery tickets.
Annie Donnelly, 38, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to stealing the money over 3 1/2 years from her employer, Great South Bay Surgical Associates, where she was a bookkeeper.
She was spending about $6,000 on lottery tickets a day, a spokeswoman for the Suffolk County District Attorney's office said. It was not clear how much, if any, she won.
"I don't think I'll ever see anyone spend that much money again," said a shop assistant named Shawn, who works at the MK Cards Gifts and Cellphones store in Ronkonkoma, New York, where Donnelly bought her tickets. Contacted by telephone, he declined to give his last name.
Donnelly, who lives in Farmingville, New York, a New York City suburb on Long Island, faces at least four years in prison and could serve as many as 12 years after pleading guilty to grand larceny, the district attorney's spokeswoman said.
Sheer genius.
Incidentally, one laughable line in the story: "The New York Lottery gives about 56 percent of its revenues in prizes, and a third of its revenues, or $2.2 billion in fiscal 2005 to 2006, to education in the state." That particular completely fictional statement is how they put over the lottery when they started it in New York. In reality all the money goes to the state's general fund, not to education. It's been a sore point in New York for decades.
