Winner’s Dreams Led Him to U.S.

Last month, when Jose Caballero had planned to go home to Mexico to visit his family, he couldn’t afford the trip.

Now, when he can afford it--when the California Lottery’s $2-million winner can afford almost anything--he is indeed going home to Mexico, perhaps for good.

The 24-year-old Mexican native’s $2-million lottery win this week fulfilled part of a childhood fantasy--standing before the grinding cameras in fabled Hollywood. But his audience included immigration officials, who arrested the San Jose man as an illegal alien early Wednesday morning after a night of celebration and of worry.

On Thursday, in the parking lot of the Mexican Consulate here, Caballero again faced the cameras.

‘I Want to Go Home’

“I want to go home to be with my family,” he told reporters in Spanish, as several Mexican citizens who had business at the consulate cheered him. He said he will voluntarily leave the United States rather than use immigration appeals to fight to stay in this country.

He has yet to spend any of his winnings. His $5,000 bond Wednesday was posted by relatives; he had been driven to the consulate for his meeting Thursday in his sister-in-law’s Buick; the black double-breasted suit he wore was an old one, and he later jokingly showed a reporter the $1 bills in his wallet.

Soon, he said, he would like to get a tourist visa to come back here at least to visit friends and family. But that will have to wait until he has returned to his family, until he has rested, until he goes through the paper work.

“We are abiding by the law,” said consular official Rene Mejia, who said Caballero had arrived at his office that morning “in a good mood,” with his mind already made up to go.

“He is a regular case. The only difference is obviously he’s some kind of celebrity,” Mejia said.

Later, in an interview at the office of his lawyer, William W. Stahl, Caballero slumped, exhausted, in a soft chair and smoked a cigarette. The half-hundred hours since he became a millionaire had been less a whirlwind of pleasure than a destructive tornado.

He spent Wednesday night after his arrest with friends, away from his small white house in East San Jose and the reporters and neighbors who kept coming by with questions and congratulations and jovial hints about loans. “I just hid out,” he said, “not to avoid friends, but to avoid headaches.”

He had often played the national lottery in Mexico, buying his tickets from a little place near the bank where he once worked, moving up from clerk to head of the credit department. He never won then, and the $100 win that put him in the running for California’s $2 million seemed like an impressive windfall.

The man who spoke of his fortune, good and bad, was far different from the image that the words undocumented alien often bring to the minds of most Californians.

A Mexican Horatio Alger Story

College-educated, the eldest son of eight children, with a father who had years ago come to the United States to work and “never wanted to come back,” Caballero was something of a Mexican Horatio Alger story long before he set foot in California in early 1984.

“I think I have a little luck with everything,” he said, from a part-time job at a snack-food plant during high school to the supervisory position in the bank after he left college, where he had studied accounting and dreamed of his own business.

Still, “I don’t think money is your life. I’ve always wanted to live free from that kind of pressure.”

As a child, “I’d heard people talk about how the United States was, and I imagined it from what I saw on TV and read about. And I wanted to come up here to work, to make money and help my family, to repay my father for all he did for me.” He smiled at the import of what he was about to say: “I came to find my fortune.”

What he found was a job in a furniture factory, making deliveries during the week, selling the furniture at flea markets on the weekends, a trusted enough employee to be given a key to the factory. The hours were long and the work was hard, but “I always said I’d come here to work.”

He was out delivering furniture, in fact, when the word came that he had been chosen for the big lottery spin. His immigration status did not spring immediately to mind. Since he came here in January, 1984, he lived “from one minute to the next” with the possibility of being caught, but he did not dwell on it.

And now that it has happened, Caballero has been matter-of-fact about it.

‘Thought It Through’

Stahl reviewed the options and left the choice to Caballero, who “thought it through all day and night.”

Stahl said plans are being made for Caballero to return to Mexico shortly, probably as a “voluntary return.” Of course, some of the sting of leaving the United States--where his visit to Universal Studios 11 months ago gave him the “illusion” of being a star and his $2-million lottery ticket made it a reality--is assuaged by the $70,000 he will collect each year for 20 years, no matter what country he lives in.

Once he has rested back home and thought this through, he said he may start again on plans for his own factory--and perhaps one day open a branch in California.

Until then, there will be at least one inexorable reminder, a little souvenir of his Mexican citizenship and his California windfall: two countries’ income taxes.