Winners Say High Life Has Its Lows : Lottery Can Make Dreams Come True and Nightmares Come Knocking

For most of us, it happens only in dreams. But there are those whose dreams come true.

It was Thanksgiving Day, 1988, when Zafer Altintas, then a pizza shop worker and airport shuttle driver for an Irvine hotel, hit the lottery for nearly $15 million. Recently, when ticking off the homes he has since purchased, he nearly forgot to mention the two vacation cottages near the Marmara Sea in Turkey.

“Before, I would never have thought about stopping at Cartier,” Altintas said of one of his many trips to the Paris jeweler. “Now, it’s so easy. I go in to buy a $15,000 watch like you would go in to McDonald’s to buy a Big Mac.”

Then there is Tom Tehee.

Winner of a record $45.3 million, Tehee’s rags-to-riches story now includes bodyguards for his family, concealed weapon permits, armed limousine drivers for in-town trips and telephone death threats.

“People came out of the woodwork,” Tehee said, describing the never-ending stream of visits, calls and letters--most from brazen strangers--all wanting a piece of his fortune. “I didn’t start taking the death threats seriously until (the callers) started naming the types of vehicles I drive, my boat and my helicopter. That tends to shake you up a little bit.”

Since 1986, simple luck has made millionaires of 729 Californians--58 from Orange County--in state lottery games. Two more will be officially welcomed to the club Monday when lottery officials identify winners from Northridge and Bell who will split a $46.5-million jackpot.

For most, new-found wealth has bought them unbelievable financial freedom, capable of supporting occasional hedonistic indulgences of fast cars and world travel. But there are times too, as Tehee can attest, when being rich isn’t at all what Robin Leach advertises.

In more than a dozen interviews with past winners, most report they were caught unprepared for the flood of requests and demands that followed public announcements of their good fortune. The very day a 57-year-old Vacaville man claimed his first check on a $25.7-million winning ticket, he got a call “from some town in South Carolina” that wanted him to install a school heating system.

“After the thrill of buying the car or the house, I think a lot of people never really feel comfortable,” said Florida attorney Stuart Young, who has counseled lottery winners in his home state. “They got rich quick and feel like they did nothing to earn it. Some of them are totally uncomfortable in a rich man’s world.”

Still, there is a bottom line. No matter how difficult their new life experiences have become, none ever talked of giving the money back.

Shortly after winning the state’s richest lottery prize, Tom Tehee and his family learned how ugly wealth could be.

He and his wife, Kathy, and their young son were enjoying a crisp day at Santa’s Village in the San Bernardino Mountains when from across the park a voice called out, identifying Tom as “the guy who won the lottery.”

Tehee said the unknown man must have recognized him from a televised announcement of his winnings. Within minutes, Tehee said, a crowd of 30 to 40 guests started moving toward the small family, some offering sarcastic commentary on their new riches while others called out requests for cash and loans of all kinds.

“As they got closer, I remember saying that we’ve got to get the hell out of here,” he said. “So, we put our son in the car and left. It was scary.”

Since he plunked down $5 for lottery tickets nearly two years ago, life has never been quite the same for the man who once dispatched security patrols in Los Angeles County housing projects.

The money, about $1.5 million per year for the next 20 years after taxes, has brought him cars, a 24-foot speedboat and a three-passenger helicopter, all benefits that he would never give back. But it has also brought its share of misery from an overwhelming number of panhandlers who have caused Tehee to take protective precautions worthy of national political figures and Hollywood big shots.

“We didn’t expect it,” Tehee said of the attention that has followed.

Concern for his family’s security came almost immediately after winning when he arrived home to pick up mail and found a van parked in front of the house.

Tehee said a man approached and identified himself as a retired firefighter. The man told Tehee that he needed $450,000 to pay off tax debts that had been accumulating for nearly a decade.

Then, the man added a bold postscript to his request. It is a statement Tehee has learned to hate since that lucky December day in 1990. “He said, ‘You have it (money). You can afford it.’

“I backed out the driveway fast and left,” Tehee said. “He has bothered me three or four more times since then.”

Encounters like the one with the retired firefighter and telephone calls from people who have threatened to “explode” his boat and cars, now have Tehee and his wife packing firearms. On trips out of town, they sometimes travel with bodyguards. On shorter local outings, they often prefer the “fun” of a limousine and the safety afforded by an armed driver who doubles as a bodyguard.

To ward off intrusions through the mail, the family has set up a private post office box. And they still don’t feel comfortable disclosing their new hometown.

“We have a 3-year-old son, and he is my biggest concern,” Tehee said. “Fortunately now, I’m not as recognizable.”

Only recently has Tehee tried to break the habit of constantly packing a weapon or traveling without bodyguards.

“I still want to be a normal person. That’s hard to do. I’m just trying to be the same person I’ve always been. Of course I’m going to change materially. But I’m trying not to change in my mind.”

The way Gloria Stuntebeck figures it, by winning $4.7 million in the lottery four years ago she has probably lost about one-third of her friends.

“A lot of people really resent it,” the 58-year-old Chula Vista woman said. “They figure I shouldn’t get mad if the water bill goes up. Somebody stopped me in the grocery store and asked me what I was doing there. So I said, ‘Hey, I have to eat, too, you know.’ ”

In some situations, Stuntebeck says she doesn’t even bother to tell friends about the occasions when she and her husband leave on their many spontaneous trips. She doesn’t mention the trips because she doesn’t want to hear the jealous “mumbling” that she knows will follow.

With particular disdain, Stuntebeck describes one encounter with a “former friend” who wheeled a brand new car into the Stuntebeck family driveway. “It was some kind of big, hot, sporty car,” she recalled.

The friend was “on the verge of bankruptcy” before buying the car but bought it anyway and had arrived to ask Stuntebeck if she would help pay for it.

“I said ‘No.’ I wasn’t about to finance her stupidity,” she said. “I don’t have a 20-room mansion or pink Cadillac. I have never lived that way in my life.”

The former apartment manager, whose winnings have helped her and her husband buy a second home in Las Vegas and sent them on a African safari, said her “fair-weather” friends are sporting an “attitude” when it comes to discussing her new wealth.

“They look at me from a different angle,” she said, “like, ‘Why you instead of me?’ ”

From her vacation rental in Idaho, Christene Lentz rises most days about 10 a.m., sometimes noon, and gets ready to watch her soaps. Occasionally, her morning routine will include a shopping trip, but she can’t bear to miss “General Hospital.”

“I don’t do much,” the Capistrano Beach woman said. “I like to read; I learned how to play golf; and I just caught my first fish. I don’t know, I just go along with the flow.”

Such is life for a $19.5-million lottery winner.

She is a 24-year-old woman with a stockbroker and a payroll that includes friend Samantha who doubles as a personal assistant.

“She (Samantha) keeps track of all the bills,” Lentz said. “She talks to people who call (and ask for things). She’s a lot more forceful than I am. She takes care of all the stuff I don’t want to deal with.”

Lentz was a student at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo and working as a receptionist in her mother’s business when good fortune struck. She recalls the day of her victory as the moment she “automatically became an adult.”

Soon after her victory, she married the man she had known since high school. The evening she bought the ticket, the two had talked of marriage should a payoff follow.

But the same lottery luck did not bless the short-lived union.

Looking back, Lentz said she and her husband, while now still friends, were too young to embark on a lifelong commitment. She also admits that the wealth played a part in the breakup.

“Part of the reason is that he didn’t work,” Lentz said. “I think he felt guilty about the money. I think all men want to take care of a woman.”

These days, Lentz said she gets enjoyment out of a collection of dolls that numbers about 1,500, a 43-foot yacht docked in Dana Point and frequent trips to Las Vegas where “I love to gamble.

“I usually give myself about $500 to spend (in Las Vegas), and I come back with enough to pay for my trip.”

For the next 16 years, Zafer Altintas can count on getting an annual check for $740,000. Like all lottery winners, the young man’s $14.8-million jackpot is delivered in yearly portions spread over 20 years.

Yet, Altintas wonders about the day when the checks stop coming.

“It all stops when I’m 43, and I’m worried about that,” the Irvine man said. “You get used to this kind of life very easily.”

In the four years since he struck it rich, Altintas said he has bought homes and cars for his family in Turkey and in the United States, and has traveled the world (“Rome is my favorite. I’ve been there eight times.”) but admits that he has sunk very little of it in investments for the future.

The gregarious Altintas said he has “some money in oil” but a recent venture in the local retail business did not go so well. The shop, which featured Turkish crafts of pottery, glassware and jewelry, opened at the Tustin Marketplace in August, 1991, and closed seven months later.

“We had some beautiful stuff, but I guess they didn’t like it,” he said.

“I’m not stressed out about that, but I want to make sure when I get married and have children that they don’t have to work at a gas station or pizza store.”

In the meantime, Altintas said he has enjoyed the pleasures his winnings have brought him. He moved his mother from Turkey to California and bought her a house in Irvine. A brother is driving a gift BMW. And Zafer is cruising the streets in a Mercedes, a long way from his past low-wage jobs at the hotel, pizza shop and service station.

“I’m not spoiled,” he said. “I know that some people look at me with dollar signs in their eyes.”

But there is one thing money has not been able to buy him: a meeting with actress Kim Basinger.

“I would really like to meet her.”

The telephone calls started coming, hundreds of them, almost immediately after his $30-million piece of luck was announced to the world by the California Lottery.

Some of the callers to Dennis Sanfilippo’s home in the tiny Northern California town of Murphys included movie producers--some known but most unknown--looking for financing on future films. They came from churches and from those who brought news of how he could get in on the ground floor of the “perfect vegematic.”

So numerous were the calls that Sanfilippo had to add more phone lines for his entertainment production company, a business he started before winning.

“I try to look at everything, but it was getting kind of frustrating,” the friendly 40-year-old said. “There is always somebody who wants something.”

But Sanfilippo, whose annual lottery payoffs come to about $1.5 million before taxes, said he wanted to do something and his attention was turned to the homeless.

Last weekend in Santa Clara County, Sanfilippo had scheduled what he hopes will be a series of benefit concerts for the homeless.

“It’s a real serious problem,” he said. “They are out there. You may not want to think about it, but they are out there.”

The head of Mother Lode Productions Inc. said he had secured a string of rock ‘n’ roll and blues bands to provide entertainment at last weekend’s event which he hopes to duplicate some day in San Francisco.

Other than the phone calls and concert preparations, he said life hasn’t changed much since winning in March. He bought Cadillacs for his mom and aunt; a four-wheel-drive vehicle for his girlfriend; new bicycles for their two sons; and a Mercedes for himself.

“I really haven’t gone on a spending spree,” he said. “I still put my pants on the same way. The only thing that’s changed is that I now write checks with more zeroes.”

Meet “Mr. Lucky.”

No one in the six-year history of the California lottery has more right to the moniker than Riverside’s Pasquel (Benny) Benenati, lottery officials say.

While many have won more money, none have won more often than the 61-year-old head of an aerial surveying company who has picked winners in a record six gaming categories for windfalls totaling about $5.5 million.

“It’s mind-boggling when you figure what sort of odds we’re talking about,” Benenati said in a recent interview and after closing a deal on a vacation house in Mammoth. “What I’ve done is rather unique.”

What may be more unique, however, is how Benenati has chosen to celebrate his good fortune.

In March, 1989, when Benenati won his largest prize, $5.2 million, he closed down his business, gathered his entire family, his employees and their families--59 people in all--and booked them passage on a four-day Mexican cruise.

Leaving out of Long Beach, the party made stops at Santa Catalina Island and in San Diego on the way to Mexico.

“They thoroughly enjoyed it,” Benenati said. “I feel like you just can’t do enough for your family and employees. The feeling you get in return from doing something like that is great.”

The feeling was so great, in fact, that when Benenati struck again for $150,000 last June, the family and business associates went cruising again. Everybody liked the first vacation so much, they decided to take the same Mexican cruise, with 55 people joining “Benny’s” party last year.

The site of the Mammoth vacation house, he said, was chosen partly because some of his employees enjoy fishing and for the creek that runs through his newly acquired, two-acre property.

The balance of the winnings will be used as a “big insurance policy” for his family which includes two young boys and a wife, 19 years his junior.

“I’ll leave with a smile on my face,” Benenati said.

O.C.’s Top Lotto Winners

10 biggest jackpots in Orange County since October, 1986:

Name City Amount Carlos Olvera Westminster $25,140,000 Ronald Smith Westminster $20,660,000 Rita Ussery Tustin $19,620,000 Christene Lentz Capistrano Beach $19,580,000 Joan Young Laguna Niguel $17,140,000 Ricardo Velazquez Mission Viejo $16,400,000 Zafer Altintas Laguna Hills $14,800,000 Thin Nguyen Pham Garden Grove $14,500,000 Josef Strauss Anaheim Hills $11,880,000 Amador Granados Anaheim $11,220,000

Source: California Lottery