The lottery was the push I needed

Richard Law, 35, of Pacific Beach won $100,000 from the California Lottery just two months after he moved to the state in 1986. Before that, Law, a British expatriate, picked cotton on an Israeli kibbutz, sold cranes for a Saudi Arabian sheik, sipped tea with a king and launched a successful moving company in Singapore. In 1986, he parlayed his lottery winnings into his own firm, a bike rental company for hotel guests. Law was interviewed by Times staff writer G. Jeanette Avent and photographed by David McNew.

I’ve always been very lucky. I’ve won just about every raffle you can think of. I won the lottery on April 16, 1986, the day after tax day.

In those days, it was a scratch-off, and if you had three numbers the same, you won. So I bought one ticket and I won $5. I went back to the shop where I bought the ticket and asked the guy for cash. He counted out four ones and then said he didn’t have $5, so I said just give me five tickets.

I left one of the tickets on the table in front of our little girl, who was 3. She had been scratching it and playing with it, and it was on the table for a half an hour before I walked past the table to find there were some zeroes on it. The numbers hadn’t been rubbed off properly so I took the ticket and finished off the rubbing and it said $100,000, $100,000, $100,000.

I spent about $300 on phone calls that night, talking to old friends in Saudi Arabia and Singapore and wherever I used to live, telling everyone. After taxes, I had a net gain of $65,000, so I decided to go self-employed from that moment on. I had already decided, but I hadn’t decided quite how. The lottery was the push I needed.

But the first thing I did was take my father and two sisters to Jerusalem. Though I’m not Jewish, I had lived on a kibbutz for a year when I was a young lad, working in the cotton fields and picking pears.

We also hired this magnificent villa in southern Spain, and I took my father, my sisters, their husbands, their children and my aunts. But that was really my only extravagance.

My relatives normally come out every year anyway to see me wherever I live, because I haven’t lived in England since 1974. When I was 19, I went over to Israel to work on a kibbutz. Then I spent about a year in England with Xerox, doing my sales training and selling word processors. But I was still very interested in the Middle East, so I decided to go work for an Arab sheik in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia.

I sold cranes for about six months, got a commission and everything was wonderful. Then, all of a sudden, the Arab owner found out that this English chap was stealing money, and he dismissed every single Englishman and American in the company. I wanted to tell the sheik it wasn’t me, so I went back and he embraced me because I had honestly made the effort to go back.

I was 22 then. While I was there, I found an advertisement in the Bahrain Times for this English company selling shelving. Bahrain is a little island country off Saudi Arabia. Because it’s a Muslim country, women cannot wear a bikini on the beach, but the king had a private beach where the expatriate wives could wear bikinis.

He gave away free Pepsi and orange juice, but no alcohol, all day long to anybody who was on the beach. The king himself would come down in a huge Rolls-Royce about 3 p.m., wearing flowing robes and a gold headdress. I used to go down to the beach to swim. What’s more bizarre than finishing work at 2 or 3 o’clock, sitting on the beach, having a free Pepsi and saying “Hi” to the king?

I left Bahrain to open the shelving business in Singapore and Hong Kong, because I couldn’t go any bigger. We had done all the supermarkets. We opened up a small office in Singapore, and we totally died. The Japanese could make my product for one-third of the cost.

I left the company and decided that I had done the Far East, and the only thing I really had left to do was America. But it’s very difficult being here legally for an Englishman. So I joined an international moving company in 1981, based in La Jolla. They asked me to take over a sales managership in Singapore, and we agreed, if I did a good job, they’d move me back to the United States.

We built the company up, and they lived up to their word and promoted me back--to Houston. I really liked Texas, but I fell out with the company in Houston, and the company has since gone bankrupt. I knew I wasn’t going to live in Houston, so in 1986 I moved to La Jolla, where I had vacationed before. Two months later I won the California Lottery.

I decided to start a bicycle rental company because I had built a service company in Singapore, and I knew I could build one up from scratch. So now we have contracts with nearly all the major hotels, and we run a bicycle delivery business with nearly 400 bikes.

I do occasionally play the lottery. For me, winning the lottery meant that a man who has always wanted to be his own boss could be his own boss.