Unlucky Number: The Murder of Lottery Winner Abraham Shakespeare

by Deborah Mathis, Gregory Todd Smith

Overview

The true crime story of murdered Florida lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare.

Poor man. Rich man. Dead man.

It sounded like a fairy tale: A homeless man named Abraham Shakespeare'spent his last dollars on a Florida State lottery ticket—and miraculously won $31 million.

Unprepared for his new found fortune, Abraham hired Dorice “Dee Dee” Moore to help manage his winnings and field the numerous requests for loans and assistance that he received. But somehow, Dee Dee was the only one benefiting.

When Abraham quietly disappeared from his home in Florida, friends and family grew suspicious—though he could not read or write, his only form of contact was through odd letters and texts.

But it wasn’t until investigators began to question Dee Dee about her role in Abraham’s finances that a complicated web of lies—and the desperate lengths to which one woman would go to cover it up—was exposed…

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780425274910
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/03/2015
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	4.20(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

After working as a deadline reporter for twenty-seven years (including a seven-year stint as White House Correspondent during the Clinton years), veteran journalist and author Deborah Mathis studied under a Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard, taught at Northwestern University’s prestigious Medill School of Journalism, was Communications Director at the Public Justice Foundation, wrote a weekly column for BlackAmericaWeb.com, and is the author of three books: Yet A Stranger: Why Black Americans Still Don’t Feel at Home, What God Can Do, and Sole Sisters: the Joys and Pains of Single Black Women.

Gregory Todd Smith is a native of Polk County, Florida. A self-made man, he enjoys a thriving barber practice in Lakeland, Florida.

Read an Excerpt

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

—DEBORAH MATHIS

PREFACE

In March 2014, on the brink of the annual college-basketball showdown known as March Madness, billionaire Warren Buffett teamed with Quicken Loans to concoct a get-rich-quick scheme to beat all. They would pay $1 billion to anyone, eighteen or older, who correctly predicted the winners of every game in the sixty-three-game national tournament. Even with the number of contestants limited (one per household) to fifteen million entries, the odds of winning were a mind-numbing one in nine quintillion. But that didn’t stop people from trying. (Unsurprisingly, no one won Buffett’s bracket contest. No one even came close. Most people were eliminated on day one; no one remained by the end of day two.)

Although Buffett’s March Madness bracket scheme was not a lottery per se, like a lottery, it was a game of chance and showed, once again, that the dream of striking it suddenly and gloriously rich is alive and well. Not even absurd, nearly impossible odds can quell it.

Lotteries have been a part of the United States since its very founding, when tickets to games of chance were sold to help fund the development of some colonies (such as Jamestown, Virginia), and at one point were considered not only a viable way to raise revenue for public causes, but a civically responsible one. At one time, all thirteen original colonies had a lottery to raise revenue for public services. But, in time, the lotteries became riddled with bribery, payout defaults, and other corruption. They fell into such disrepute that evangelical reformers were able to successfully press a moral argument for prohibition, and by 1895, government-run lotteries were banned nationwide.

The lottery’s official comeback took nearly three quarters of a century, beginning in New Hampshire in 1964. Today, armed with regulations and safeguards, forty-four states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, all sponsor lotteries. Only Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, and Utah abstain.

Both religious and public policy advocates routinely oppose lotteries (the former usually due to biblical strictures, and the latter typically out of concern over the government’s reliance on fantasy-fueled games of chance to fund essential services like public education), but state and multistate lotteries are wildly popular among the masses. It is estimated that about 120 million American men and women—half of all adults in the country—play state-run lotteries each year, accounting for $45 billion in receipts. Only about 1,600 of them will win a million dollars or more. The rest of us have to settle for a few bucks, if we’re at all lucky, or more likely just add the useless slips to our pile of poor choices. The summer house in the Hamptons, the ski chalet in Saint Moritz, the foundation we were going to endow, the freedom from indebtedness, and the ability to tell the boss to take this job and shove it—all will have to live a bit longer in our fantasies and most likely will live there forever. But hope springs eternal that Fortune will make a rewarding pit stop our way. Indeed, the randomness of a lucky strike is part of the lottery’s appeal. It can happen to anyone, from any walk of life, and in even the most obscure places.

In May 2013, Gloria McKenzie, an eighty-four-year-old widow originally from rural Maine, now living in Zephyrhills, Florida, was in line at a local supermarket to buy an auto-generated Powerball ticket when the kindly young woman in front of her stepped aside, allowing Mrs. McKenzie to go first. She thanked the woman for the courtesy, bought her $2 ticket and left. Chosen at random by a machine, the ticket Mrs. McKenzie walked away with that day contained the winning numbers in the multistate lottery. Her jackpot was almost $600 million—$590,500,000, the largest in the multistate game’s twenty-one-year history and the second largest in the annals of American lotteries. By sheer luck, Mrs. McKenzie had beaten odds calculated at one in 175 million.

Like most big jackpot winners, Mrs. McKenzie elected the lump-sum option for her payday, about $371,000,000 before taxes. She sank back into obscurity after collecting her winnings in Tallahassee two months after the drawing, where she emerged accompanied by her son and two lawyers, and thus adhering to the first rule suggested by experts who study those lucky few who hit it big: get a team.

Financial planner Susan Bradley told the Palm Beach Post shortly after the big drawing that she provides the super-high-dollar clients she advises with a team of neuropsychologists, estate-planning attorneys, and other professionals to help them navigate the treachero's waters of over-the-top wealth. These teams are meant to help insulate her clients from scam artists, bad investments, tricky temptations, and the deluge of hangers-on who typically prey upon the superrich. Bradley has a special set of do’s and don’ts for the suddenly and sensationally wealthy.

“One of the first things to do is stop answering the phone,” Bradley told the newspaper. “Get a cell phone with a new number and only give it to your inner circle people and keep that circle small.”

Gloria McKenzie has apparently handled her wild fortune smartly. She is said to still shop at big-box stores and frequent neighborhood eateries, though she once paid for the meals of a restaurant full of diners. Reportedly, she has built a multimillion-dollar home in Jacksonville, Florida, but has otherwise been frugal, still tooling around “in her son’s old Ford Focus,” according to one news account.

Mrs. McKenzie’s is not the only good news story about lottery winners. There are many that end happily—or happily enough. Who doesn’t rejoice at the news that a fat jackpot has been claimed by a downtrodden single mother who rides three buses to her menial job each day? Who isn’t inspired by the Missouri couple who, after netting more than $136,000,000 from Powerball, poured loads of money into improving their town, including a new fire station, ball field, sewage-treatment plant, and a scholarship fund at their high school alma mater?

There’s also the story of Sheelah Ryan, of Florida, who used her $55 million winnings in a 1988 lottery to endow a foundation that provided assistance for poor people, single mothers, children, the elderly, and homeless animals.

But, when things go wrong for lottery winners, they can go awfully wrong. News accounts, police files, and court records are full of instances where winning was far from the panacea that most people imagine when handing over a few dollars in hopes of collecting a king’s ransom.

One of the most famous instances of good luck gone bad is that of Jack Whittaker, a West Virginian who won a $315,000,000 Powerball jackpot in 2002. The next seven years were riddled with misfortune. Whittaker was robbed several times, once to the tune of $545,000; on another occasion, he was taken for $200,000. In a three-month period, both his granddaughter and her boyfriend died of drug overdoses. And Caesar’s Palace, the legendary Las Vegas casino, sued him for $1.5 million worth of bad checks he had written to cover his gambling losses. At one point, Whittaker lamented that he hadn’t destroyed his winning ticket.

And there’s William Post, of Pennsylvania, a $16 million lottery winner. His landlady conned him out of a small fortune, his brother tried to hire a hit man to kill him, and he ended up smothered in debt.

And there’s Janite Lee, who, choosing the annual payout instead of lump sum, was collecting $620,000 a year but ended up in such straits that she sold her rights to the annual payments and still went bankrupt.

Some sad endings are worse than others. Like many other winners, the man at the center of this story neglected to surround himself with wise, experienced counsel but rather relied on old friends and his own well-meaning but often misguided instincts to help him manage his multimillion-dollar winnings. It was a haphazard way to proceed and did nothing to ward off the constant appeals for money from all corners—a pestilence that turned the normally easygoing man into a miserable wreck.

When a stranger came along nearly a year after he won the lottery, not asking for money but offering help, he was eager to take it. She told him about the successful business she ran, about the money she made, and convinced him that she could assist him in getting his finances under control. Uneducated, weary, and in over his head, he accepted her offer and turned over control of his funds and outstanding accounts to her. Then he vanished.

This is the story of the peculiar, egregious connivances of a woman who might have gotten away with her crimes had she not met a man who was more cunning than she.

It is a tale of double betrayal of trust, of a man who meant well, and of a woman overcome by greed and delusion. It is the sad truth of what happened to a man who beat the long odds of winning a state lottery only to lose his most prized possession—his life.

CHAPTER ONE

What’s in a Name?

—ROMEO AND JULIET, BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

If ever there was a name built for distinction, it was Abraham Lee Shakespeare. A name that brings to mind patriarchs and liberators and literary geniuses. Yet most of forty-three-year-old Abraham Shakespeare’s life had been a patchwork of hustles, a steady stream of challenges to make it from one sunrise to the next, forever on the run from deprivation, danger, or incarceration.

Born in the small central Florida town of Sebring as the youngest of Elizabeth Walker’s four children, Abraham had come up even rougher than others in his low-income, racially estranged environment; he dropped out of school after the seventh grade and went to join his father, James, working in the citrus groves that help fuel the Florida economy and account for its standing as one of the world’s top citrus producers. It was questionable how much schooling he’d absorbed anyway, given that he could barely read and write. What education he did have had failed him, leaving him a loiterer on the outskirts of mainstream society, unskilled and unsettled. When he was thirteen, a conviction for theft got Abraham sent away to what people used to call “reform school”—a state-run juvenile detention facility—and he remained there until he was eighteen.

In the hardscrabble black neighborhoods of Lakeland, no one seemed to have any qualms about the tall, lanky man with the dreadlocked hair who pretty much kept to himself, laid low, and lived with his father. When James Shakespeare died of heart disease in 2005 at age eighty-four, Abraham moved in with his mother, Elizabeth Walker, sharing her tiny house on East Lowell Street in Lakeland’s rough-and-tumble Lakeside Addition.

Although Lakeland is a much larger city with more to do than in Sebring, where he grew up, the move did little to improve Abraham’s lot. He was still unable to find or make a place for himself in the mainstream and become productive and self-supporting. Hanging out—and hanging on—was his daily recourse, and Abraham was no stranger to small clubs and bars where people without much means or much else to do would gather to dance, drink, and laugh their troubles away.

Always fond of the ladies, he had romanced Antoinette Andrews, a woman he had known since childhood, and with her had produced a son in 1998. They named the child Moses.

By all accounts, Abraham adored his boy. Even though his relationship with Antoinette was off and on, Abraham was an attentive father. According to Antoinette, Abraham never let more than a week pass without at least a phone call to Moses, and he would usually see his son three to four times a week. Unfortunately, Abraham’s pocketbook could not match his heart. He was almost always a day late and a dollar short in what he owed Antoinette for their son’s care, and he was forever dodging child-support enforcement officials. A few times, he was even locked up for failing to make his court-ordered payments.

For the most part, Abraham owed his survival and freedom to near misses and dumb luck. By his fourth decade of life, he was still an unaccomplished and pitiable figure whose youth had been pestered by discrimination, poverty, and mischief and whose only noteworthy adult exploits were confined to several pages of police reports and prison records.

If he hadn’t scored a day-labor job washing dishes or loading trucks, Abraham could usually be found hanging around Lakeland’s Super Choice Foods, a convenience store, talking about next to nothing with similarly idle friends, all the while admiring and flirting with the women who passed through the area. Super Choice was owned by a burly fellow of Arab descent named Jimard Yuseff Zaid, whom everyone called Papi. Papi took a liking to Abraham and used him to run errands for him and his business. It was Papi’s name on the cell phone in Abraham’s pocket, and the few dollars that Abraham might have at any given moment were as likely to have come from Papi as from anyone.

Most who bothered to know him found the quiet, easygoing Abraham Shakespeare unremarkable but likable and harmless. No one really considered Abraham a menace or a threat. After all, he never hurt anyone. Some even came to consider him a friend. One of those people was local barbershop owner Gregory Todd Smith. The two first met in 1999, when Abraham strolled into Greg’s barbershop on Fifth Street one day and asked if there were any odd jobs he could do to earn a few bucks.

At first, Greg was tempted to give this unexpected visitor the boot. After all, if he had to get up every day and pull a regular nine to five, why shouldn’t this able-bodied fella? Besides, Greg thought, people like Abraham were bad for business.

But just as Greg was about to kick the man out, an old memory surfaced and short-circuited that plan. He recalled how his grandfather, long gone now, had more than once led a neighborhood wino to some spot where a chore needed doing, later coming out of his pocket with a few dollars for the transient. Granddaddy had always said a little change for some honest work would keep folks from stealing and robbing people, and Granddaddy was always right. Almost absentmindedly, Greg found himself taking Abraham around the barbershop, pointing out what needed to be cleaned, straightened, moved, or thrown out in exchange for cash on the spot.

It was the start of what would become a familiar routine. Two or three days a week, Abraham would show up and set to work at Greg’s place, then either leave with a few bills in his pocket or hang out to shoot the shit in the barbershop, which—like neighborhood barbershops everywhere—served as a sounding board and listening post for men eager to unwind and talk candidly about women, sports, politics, money, and the latest community scuttlebutt. Abraham developed easy friendships with Greg and many of his regulars, who appreciated the taciturn wanderer for his easygoing spirit, wry sense of humor, street sense, and kind heart.

Notwithstanding Abraham’s many deficiencies—no education, no home of his own, no particular talent or skills, no reliable source of income, and seemingly no plans for the future—Greg considered Abraham to be a gifted man for his temperament and good nature alone. Before long, he was calling his new friend by the nickname he had coined just for him: Shakyboy, a play on Abraham’s surname.

Several months after Shakyboy had appeared out of nowhere and become part of the landscape on Greg’s block, he disappeared. Two or three weeks went by with no sign or sighting of the man, and no one seemed to know why. Though he couldn’t help but notice Abraham’s absence, Greg did not worry, assuming that soon enough Shakyboy would show up again and resume his old routines.

Then one day, as Greg stood outside the shop to have a cigarette, he spotted Abraham in an orange uniform on the back of a City of Lakeland garbage truck as it passed down Fifth Street. A sanitation job may not be what most people aspire to, but it meant steady work and reliable paydays, and Greg felt a surge of pride when he saw his friend on that truck that day.

As was unfortunately typical, however, Abraham didn’t keep that job for long and soon was back to looking for day work. But even after he gained and lost several other jobs, Abraham kept up his habit of dropping by Greg’s barbershop, even when Greg moved his business to other locations. Abraham often had something going on, jobwise—dishwashing, hauling and loading, one- or two-day gigs on construction sites, that kind of thing. It was a hell of a way to stitch together a living, but he seemed to make it work, and as long as grit and brawn were in demand somewhere, Greg was convinced his friend Shakyboy would be all right. Besides, he had more to do than worry about some other fully grown man.

Business was booming at Greg’s new barbershop location on Highway 98 North, the most travelled stretch of roadway in Lakeland. Greg’s client base had quickly grown, and the place became a hot spot for the Madden NFL video-game tournaments he hosted, drawing both small- and big-time gamers alike to hang out all day, playing for money and running their mouths. If anything of any interest was going on around town, one of the regulars at Greg’s barbershop was bound to know about it, and make sure everyone else did, too.

On Thursday, November 16, 2006, all the shop crowd could talk about was the lucky so-and-so who had hit the $31 million Florida lottery the night before. Even though most of the customers in the shop had played the lottery that week too, no one expressed any real envy or dejection over not having won, considering the absurdly long odds of winning a jackpot big enough to forever and dramatically change their lives. No one even bothered to speculate who the winner actually was; instead, the men carried on for hours describing how they would’ve spent money like that, all of them one-upping the other with the quality or quantity of the things they would buy or do with a bank account beyond their imaginations, their fantastical talk conjuring up mansions, yachts, Ferraris, and business ventures galore.

By the next day, however, word spread that, unbelievably, the 31-million-dollar winner was someone they all knew—none other than that alien to good fortune, Abraham Shakespeare.

Greg found the claim outlandish. “Someone just trying to start some shit,” he said to the assembled crowd in his shop, raising the clippers to a client’s temple. “Shakyboy ain’t got two nickels to rub together, let alone buy a lottery ticket.” A chorus of “Amen” swelled in the shop.

But Greg was wrong about his friend. It turned out that Abraham had purchased a lottery ticket on that fateful Wednesday, November 15—not only one, but two. Abraham and Michael Ford, both then working as deliverymen for a Lakeland food-distribution company named the MBM Corporation, had set out early that day to deliver a truckload of meat to restaurants in Miami, with Ford at the wheel. As the men pulled into the Town Star convenience store in Frostproof, Ford hopped out to buy some sodas and cigarettes. “Get me two quick picks!” Abraham shouted as Ford walked toward the store. Ford returned with two tickets, each bearing a row of six computer-generated numbers, and Abraham handed Ford two of the five dollars he had to his name.

When the drawing occurred later that night, Abraham was astonished to learn that one of his two sets of numbers was the winning combination: 6, 12, 13, 34, 42, and 52. Soon after, he shared the good news with a few family members and friends, including Greg. A couple of days later, he was on TV in Tallahassee, wearing a Florida Lottery T-shirt, with his long dreadlocks tucked inside a Rastafarian bonnet and his mother and two sisters helping him hold up a sign made up to look like an oversize check that read “Abraham Lee Shakespeare. $31 Million! Lotto Jackpot.”

*   *   *

News accounts across the Sunshine State reported that the latest lucky winner had done as most big lottery winners do and had elected to take an immediate payout of a lesser lump sum rather than receive the $31 million in annual increments over twenty years. That lump sum came to just under $17 million before taxes—about $12 million after the IRS had its way—meaning the illiterate day laborer who used to sweep freshly cut hair off Greg Smith’s floors, drink a little too much hooch at times, and handle other people’s garbage was suddenly worth a mint. When a television news reporter asked Abraham what it meant to be an overnight multimillionaire, he replied, with conspicuous relief, “I don’t have to struggle no more.”

CHAPTER TWO

Abraham Shakespeare’s enormous good luck with the state lottery certainly took care of his day-to-day struggles, but he was not trouble-free. Almost immediately, he discovered that old hassles and challenges had been replaced by new and, in some ways, bigger ones.

Foolishly, or at least naively, Abraham did not gather a team of experienced professionals before his astonishing news was made public. When he appeared at the television station to accept the big check that night, he had no lawyers or financial experts standing by in the greenroom to whisk away his newfound wealth to some fiduciary fortress, and no one to shield him from the swarm of supplicants who began begging from him within hours of the word getting out.

A mere week after Abraham’s big win, the State of Florida came after him for more than $9,000 in court costs and back child support owed to Antoinette Andrews. The state not only collected the nine grand, but also saw to it that Abraham set up a million-dollar trust for his son. Despite the embarrassingly public way Abraham came to make good on his obligation to Moses, no one who knew Abraham believed he had any problem with turning the money over for his son’s care. The restitution had been thrust upon him suddenly, but Abraham didn’t seem to have a problem with it.

Before long, Abraham would have another child to care for. His former live-in girlfriend, Sentorria Butler, gave birth to a boy named Jeremiyah in November 2008. Abraham and Sentorria—whom everyone called Torrie—had broken up not long before Jeremiyah was born, and although Abraham was apparently a doting father to begin with, the two parents often butted heads over Abraham’s alleged derelictions in providing for the baby. Eventually, their relationship became contentious enough to involve the courts and a war of words.

Rumor had it that Abraham offered to buy a new house for his mother, who had worked for many years in school cafeterias, but that Elizabeth Walker turned down the offer, worried that she wouldn’t be able to afford the property taxes and insurance on a new home. Whatever amount her quaint concern may have saved her son, however, was in short order consumed by the gift and loan seekers who continued to stream past Abraham’s door with sob stories and elaborate schemes in tow.

There are legends about jackpot winners being besieged by long-lost cousins and self-declared best friends, not to mention out-and-out scam artists with “can’t-lose” propositions. Abraham must have heard them too, but his had been such a simple and obscure existence that he might not have grasped that he was now a celebrity, and he certainly didn’t know how to behave like one. Nothing in his experience would have prepared him for how aggressive people could be when a human treasure chest suddenly appears in their midst.

People descended upon Shakyboy from everywhere. And out of nowhere. Somebody had a loved one to bury but no insurance or money for a funeral; Abraham gave them the money. He did that four or five times, sometimes handing thousands of dollars over to people he’d never even met until they came pleading for help. He gave loads of money to his friends and, on at least one occasion, to the adult children of a friend because the elder man had been good to Abraham through the years. He loaned Papi $1 million. He cured people’s tax, rent, and utility-bill delinquencies. He paid off other people’s mortgages, medical bills, and car loans. The textbook and tuition bills of one or two college students were satisfied, courtesy of Abraham Shakespeare. Buddies with old debts to pay or a business idea to nourish got money from him. He gave and gave and gave. It was like Santa Claus had come to Lakeland on a spending binge.

The man who had been a loner for most of his life suddenly found himself with an entourage, with hangers-on accompanying him everywhere he went, soaking up the glory, good fortune, and celebration that enshrouded the former nobody. At bars and nightclubs, women came out of the woodwork to party with the local celeb and, in some cases, seduce him. More than once during the time that she lived with him, Torrie would learn that her boyfriend had ushered another woman home, their comings and goings captured by the security cameras positioned in and around the house. Women he didn’t know or barely knew gave him their phone numbers unbidden, and Abraham willingly accepted them. After Torrie moved out, pregnant with Jeremiyah and fed up with Abraham’s infidelities, others took their turns with the lothario.

Merely being in Abraham’s orbit had its privileges, conveying reflected glory on his posse. Some of his buddies were treated like semi-celebrities in their own rights, and they often used that positioning to woo sexual partners for themselves. They also used it to flex their fledgling power as deal makers and facilitators, like the time one of Abraham’s friends introduced Angela Moore to the man of the hour at a local bowling alley.

As their conversation moved past platitudes, Angela shared her dreams of opening a group home in the Lakeland area. She needed $20,000 to make it happen. Abraham, in a fit of grandiosity, offered her twice that amount, but they agreed on $22,200. The next day, Abraham met Angela at her bank to deposit the money.

But while he was freewheeling with loans and gifts to others, Abraham was relatively modest with self-indulgences. His most lavish gift to himself was a lovely, spacious new house in an upscale, gated community on Redhawk Bend Drive on Lakeland’s north side. He paid more than $1 million for the massive, two-story house with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a pool and spa, and a fireplace. The price also included the furnishings. One real-estate company listing describes the house further:

The huge gourmet kitchen and breakfast area with Kraftmaid Cabinets, GE Monogram stainless appliances, granite counters opens to the spacious family room featuring a granite faced masonry fireplace and custom coffered wood ceiling. French doors lead to the pool and patio area and the breezeway that connects to the guest suite/4th bedroom with full bath and kitchenette. The master suite is downstairs and also has access to the pool and patio area. The glamour master bath and customized walk in closet are huge. Upstairs is a loft area, 2 bedrooms with walk in closets and a full bath. Custom faux finishes and millwork are evident throughout the home. There are 2 double car garages and ample driveway parking. The screened pool/spa has a paver deck and waterfall feature.

Abraham also bought himself a new pickup truck and a shiny new black BMW 750i, for which he paid a reported $100,000. Considering that Abraham was not known to possess a legal driver’s license and, indeed, had gotten into trouble more than once for driving without one, rumors sprang up that Abraham had either paid someone to pretend to be him and take the state license examination or had paid off someone at the Department of Motor Vehicles to issue a license to him. Of course, it was possible that Abraham had actually studied for, taken, and passed the exam on his own, though that was considered improbable since he couldn’t read.

It was also possible that he was unconcerned about having a license and was content to drive around without one. Who could sort fact from fiction in the fog of rumor, half-truth, and exaggeration that enveloped Abraham Shakespeare after he won that money?

Barber Greg Smith rejoiced when his old friend showed him the keys to the new house on Redhawk Bend Drive in early January 2007. The two marveled over Abraham’s turn in fortune, from homeless to upscale home owner. Greg also couldn’t help but notice the big new Rolex on Shakyboy’s wrist, and he was happy to learn that his friend had not paid full retail price for the watch but rather had picked it up at a local pawn shop. Greg complimented Abraham on the bargain and wished him well on the Caribbean cruise he was about to embark on with Torrie, the mother of his son, Jeremiyah. Greg hoped the cruise would give Abraham the distance, anonymity, and privacy his friend already achingly wanted.

The relief didn’t last long. No sooner had Abraham returned to central Florida from his Caribbean getaway with Torrie than he once again became the community ATM. Fortunately, a friend helped set up some of the handouts as loans rather than as gifts, but chasing people down for their repayments left Abraham feeling worn out and demoralized. His uncle’s neighbor, Greg Massey, stepped in to help Abraham maintain his financial records and track down borrowers, often going door-to-door from one debtor to the next, though sometimes collecting more excuses and complaints than payments for his friend.

*   *   *

As if the constant appeals for cash were not enough of an aggravation for a man who was used to going practically unnoticed, Abraham’s newfound celebrity also brought more new trouble. Five months after the lottery drawing, Michael Ford, his former meat-delivery partner at MBM, filed a lawsuit claiming that he had purchased the winning lottery ticket for himself and that Abraham had stolen it from him. According to the lawsuit he filed in April 2007, Ford was a frequent visitor at the Frostproof store that sold the winning ticket and had a habit of buying two tickets, which he then stored in a compartment in the truck.

“Plaintiff did not realize the tickets were missing until Thursday, November 17, 2006 and assumed that he had lost the tickets,” read the complaint. “On November 18, 2006, the Plaintiff was informed by his supervisor that Defendant had won the Florida State Lottery that held the drawing on November 15, 2006. On the same day as being advised that the Defendant had won the lottery, Plaintiff confronted the Defendant about the missing lotto tickets from his wallet and was informed by the Defendant that he had removed the tickets from Plaintiff’s wallet, but that Plaintiff could not prove that he had done so.” The suit sought injunctive relief—to stop Abraham from spending more money—because “Defendant does not have the ability to replace the losses.”

To buttress his client’s claims, Ford’s attorney, Arnold Levine, made much of Abraham’s criminal past, particularly those incidents involving theft.

“Does a leopard change its spots?” he asked. “You have to ask yourself.” Levine argued that, without fail, Ford always bought two tickets for himself whenever he visited the store. Therefore, he said, if his client had really purchased two tickets for Abraham, he would have walked out with four tickets that fateful day instead of the two documented by store records. He also insinuated that Abraham had paid witnesses for favorable testimony, in one case, allegedly paying off a man’s $185,000 mortgage.

He and Michael Ford had not been particularly close, but Abraham was nonetheless stunned at how his old coworker had turned on him and lied about what happened. Angered by Ford’s lawsuit, Abraham hired Valenti, Campbell, Trohn, Tamayo and Aranda, a well-regarded Lakeland law firm, to represent him. But before the case went to trial, he unceremoniously ditched the firm and turned to Willie Gary, a flamboyant and accomplished lawyer from south Florida whose skill, success, and swagger have often been likened to that of the late Johnnie Cochran, of O. J. Simpson “Dream Team” fame. One of eleven children born to migrant farmers in central Georgia, Gary had parlayed his law-school education, gift for gab, doggedness, and supreme confidence into a multimillion-dollar legal empire, replete with corporate jets (including a Boeing 737 named Wings of Justice II), and for himself as founding partner, a lavish lifestyle of custom-made suits, Rolls Royces, and mansions. Known in legal circles as “the Giant Killer,” Gary had successfully taken on the Walt Disney Corporation—a demigod in Florida—and won a $240 million jury verdict against the enormous corporation for stealing his clients’ idea for a sports theme park. He later won a half-billion dollar verdict against a Canadian funeral home chain, which he settled for $175 million, and slew Anheuser-Busch, the world’s largest brewery, to the tune of $50 million in a breach-of-contract suit on behalf of the family of the late New York Yankees’ great right fielder, Roger Maris, who had gotten into the beer-distribution business.

The trial of Ford versus Shakespeare in October 2007, almost a full year after the lotto win, drew standing-room-only crowds eager to get a glimpse of the multimillionaire and to witness the punches and counterpunches they anticipated being thrown by lawyers with known penchants for theatrics and thunder. Deploying his preacheresque style and appealing to the jurors’ common sense, Abraham’s lawyer, Willie Gary, argued that Michael Ford’s story didn’t add up. Why would Abraham steal lotto tickets he had no reason to expect would be worth anything? Gary asked. Besides, Abraham had said that his former coworker had approached him a few days after the win and had asked the newly minted multimillionaire “to help him out” with a million dollars so that Ford could move to Georgia and start a business. Gary suggested that a robbed man would not ask a favor of his robber.

Despite five days of testimony, the jury took little more than a single hour to reach a verdict in Abraham’s favor, an indictment of Ford’s poor showing in court.

“I am pleased that justice prevailed and that Mr. Shakespeare was found innocent,” Abraham’s lawyer said after the verdict. “This lawsuit was about greed. The plaintiff manufactured a story and a plan to try to take advantage of my client.”

Though he had won, Abraham was mad as hell at Michael Ford’s lawyers for having “scandalized” his name by harping on his criminal record and for effectively arguing that once a crook, always a crook. Still, ever softhearted, he forgave Ford.

“I ain’t mad with him. I don’t hold it against him,” Abraham told reporters who covered the trial. “If he only waited, I could’ve given him $250,000 easy.”

Instead, Michael Ford got nothing but a big dose of national embarrassment and a bill for attorneys’ fees. He appealed the case, but the higher court ultimately dismissed the appeal. Financial records show that Abraham paid Willie Gary $800,000 for saving his fortune.

CHAPTER THREE

While he celebrated his former part-time employee and friend’s good fortune, Gregory Todd Smith was struggling with his own money problems. Specifically, the threat of losing his late mother’s house to foreclosure was beginning to bear down heavily on Greg. The little house on McDonald Street in Plant City, a small municipality about a dozen miles west of Lakeland and known as the winter strawberry capital of the world, had been the only home his mother, Helen Smith, had ever called her own. As a last gift to her and in honor of the family legacy, Greg and his siblings had vowed to hold on to the property and keep the mortgage, taxes, and insurance current. But as family member after family member suffered financial setbacks, the payments fell behind, and now the bank was threatening to take the house away. Try as they might, Helen’s children could not cobble together the tens of thousands of dollars they required to keep the house out of the auctioneer’s hands, and time was running out.

The land the house sat on was part of a verdant 700-acre swath of Polk County that had been in the family ever since Greg’s late maternal grandfather, the Reverend J. C. Gordon, bought it back in the 1920s, when not many black people in the area could produce a deed in their names. As his children became adults with families of their own, Reverend Gordon divided up the property and built homes for them. Greg’s mother was one such beneficiary.

By the time Greg was born, in 1969, the good reverend was well established as a mover and shaker in town, having acquired several plots of land in and around Plant City. In addition to his land holdings, the Reverend Gordon was also known for his carpentry skills and agricultural acumen. His fields yielded rich harvests of vegetables every year, and those crops were reaped (as they had been sown) with the help of the Gordon progeny—children and grandchildren alike—who understood early on that when it came to the old man’s crops, they would all have to pitch in. Indeed, most of them began their stints on the farmland at such tender ages that until they were older and wiser, they believed every little child in the world spent his or her days plowing and planting, plucking, and picking.

But school and fieldwork left little time for normal child’s play, and eventually, Greg grew to resent the obligation of working on his grandfather’s farm, despite the happy camaraderie of siblings and cousins and their grandfather’s insistence that the dirty, hot, back-bending labor was teaching them the value of hard work and making them stronger. At fifteen, just old enough to enter Plant City’s summer-employment program for youth, Greg did just that, uncertain what the job entailed but sure that anything was better than being an unpaid or barely paid field hand.

On his first day in the youth program, Greg hopped onto the back of a city truck, along with a troop of other adolescents and teenagers, and watched the city’s familiar terrain and landmarks shrink into the horizon as they rode for miles and miles away from Plant City, stopping at last on a long, lonely stretch of highway.

The driver, a chunky, middle-aged white man named Jim, with skin that looked like aged leather, barked the youngsters off of the truck bed and onto the steamy pavement, where each was handed a hoe and instructed to clean up the weeds and debris around the telephone poles that lined the roadway as far as the eye could see.

“And when you’re done with this one, move on to the next one,” the man said, leaning on a nearby pole and pointing to one farther up the road. “And when you’re done with that one, on to the next one and so on and so on till I pick you back up.”

“And we’re gonna get paid for doing this?” Greg asked Jim.

“Yep, that’s the job,” he answered.

Although some of the other teenagers bowed their heads fretfully or threatened to walk off the job right then and there, Greg felt relieved. This is the kind of work I’ve been doing all my life, he thought. Only now, he’d actually get paid to do it.

Sure enough, when Jim returned several hours later, Greg had covered nearly five miles of roadside work. Every telephone pole in his wake sported a fresh pedicure. Greg had even helped some of the other kids tend to their poles, as much out of a sense of competitiveness and ego as to engender a sense of teamwork and solidarity. Granddaddy, taskmaster that he was, had prepared him well. Greg turned out to be one of the best workers the program had ever seen, so much so that the city offered to keep him on part-time even after the program expired as summer came to an end. That made Greg especially proud, since it was the first time in a long time that he had an achievement worth taking home to his grandfather. Greg wanted desperately to get back into his grandfather’s good graces. Their relationship had become strained when Greg entered middle school and gained a reputation for being a troublemaker. He’d lost count of how many times he drew detention or was suspended from school, always for fighting. Although a disciplined athlete, Greg had not done much to stem his fiery, quick-trigger temper, and everyone knew it didn’t take much to rile him.