Jackpot Win Is Couple’s Salvation

The Thomases weren’t looking for a miracle, just a break.

Unemployed and more than $20,000 in debt from his failed contracting business, Dean Thomas knew he had to start life over again. He sold his truck and left his Granada Hills house in October for a construction job in Las Vegas.

His wife, Linda, a bookkeeper, joined him in Nevada three months later, after selling the house at a loss when foreclosure loomed.

The Thomases are no longer worried about the bill collector, not since Linda hit a $1.8-million jackpot--the largest recorded quarter slot-machine payoff--in a Las Vegas casino.

“We had lost everything,” Linda Thomas said. “Now, it’s all been given back to us.”

Linda said she had played $3 bingo once a week in the casinos since she arrived in the city in January. When she and her husband went to the Aladdin Hotel and Casino last Friday, she decided to play a few coins in the slot machines while waiting for the next bingo game to start.

She lost $2 on nickel machines before she switched to quarter slots, she said. “Then I decided to get $10 in quarter rolls, and I thought I was really splurging.”

The 35-year-old former Encino bookkeeper sat in front of a line of Quartermania slots, machines hooked up to a statewide system of more than 1,100 other machines with a progressively growing jackpot, and pumped in a few quarters.

“I was wondering if anybody ever wins this, and then the four symbols came up in a row,” she said. “Lights started blinking and an alarm went off, but I was just wondering why no quarters were coming out.”

A floor manager walked over, put his arm around her and told her she had won $1,881,545.50.

“My hands got all tingly, and I was hyperventilating,” she said.

When Dean Thomas heard the news, he said, he rushed over to the slot machines and saw his wife surrounded by casino guards and curious gamblers. Linda began tossing quarters to people around her, and the couple was later pampered with a limousine ride and dinner.

The pair have been besieged with attention since the win, said Dean Thomas, 39.

“We’re not used to this. . . . We live a quiet kind of life,” he said. “I’m used to living from paycheck to paycheck.”

The casino will pay the couple in installments over the next 20 years, and Dean Thomas said the winnings will be more than enough to make a new start. He will continue working in construction, he said.

Linda Thomas said they will pay off their debts in the San Fernando Valley, but they plan to buy a house in Las Vegas and do not want to return to Los Angeles.

“I don’t know where we’re going from here, but we’re not going back to California,” she said. “We weren’t very lucky there.”