$35-Million Lottery Hoax Fools Media

The joyous cosmetologist hung crepe paper from the walls, served champagne to newly found friends and tossed dollar bills from a window of the Manhattan hotel suite she and her boyfriend rented to celebrate “winning” New York state’s $35-million lottery jackpot.

Her “prize”: $1,666,666 a year before taxes--the largest individual payout in the lottery’s history.

Local television stations in New York City showed her and a photocopy of the winning ticket while the New York Post proclaimed in a front-page headline: “$35M And She’s Single.”

She was also a hoax, leaving editors red-faced and her mentor, a veteran practical joker, chortling.

Alan Abel, a hoaxer whose previous pranks included a fictitious school for panhandlers, a campaign to put pants on animals (his slogan: “A nude horse is a rude horse”) and his own obituary in the New York Times, confessed Monday he was behind the scheme.

Abel said he planned the stunt to protest what he charged were the lottery’s astronomically long odds of winning.

“The lottery is a joke, basically because you don’t have a chance to win,” he said. “The poor suckers out there are taking their baby and bread money to buy those tickets.”

But lottery officials said a genuine winner actually existed, making the payout to a single person the richest in New York’s history. The state’s largest lottery jackpot was $45 million in December, 1988, but the money was divided among a dozen winners.

“We weren’t fooled. The media was,” a lottery spokesman said Monday.

After the drawing Saturday night, lottery officials disclosed the winning ticket was purchased somewhere in Westchester County, north of New York City. After hearing that, Abel hired an actress and rented the suite in the Omni Park Central Hotel in mid-Manhattan.

The actress held a party and invitations were faxed to the media. When reporters arrived, they met a woman who identified herself as Charlene Taylor, 30, of Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. She said she was a cosmetologist and claimed she dreamed that Malcolm Forbes and Donald Trump “were flying around me on a magic carpet and they gave me the numbers.”

“Crazy as it sounds, it’s true,” she insisted.

Staff members at the hotel were convinced. She autographed $10 bills for the hotel’s employees. With a half-filled glass of champagne in one hand, she held up a photocopy of what she said was the winning ticket for photographers. Actually, the ticket was a composite of the winning sequence of numbers, clipped individually from other tickets.

The New York Post bit hardest. Other papers were more restrained, saying a woman claiming to be the winner was celebrating. The New York Daily News didn’t bite at all.

“It’s a hoax,” the Daily News proclaimed on its front page, showing the woman with her ticket.

That paper’s reporter knew a prank when she saw one. And she saw Abel in the hotel room. How did she know? She had once taken his adult-education course in practical joking.