Lottery Winner Picked by a Jury : Courts: Liquor store owner is given the $12.3-million prize after a bitter, 15-month legal battle with a clerk who claimed the ticket was his.

Disputed ownership of a winning $12.3-million Super Lotto ticket was finally resolved Tuesday by a civil court jury, 15 months after the owner of a local liquor store and one of his clerks--who were once described as “closer than brothers”--each claimed it.

The jury concluded that the ticket belonged to store owner Soo Jang Chae, even though the ticket ended up in the hands of one of his clerks, Dong Pil Kim, the morning after the Jan. 29, 1994, drawing.

“I think I will go on a vacation,” said a grinning Chae. “But I want to lead as ordinary a life as possible.”

California State Lottery officials have held on to the winnings--which will amount to about $425,000 a year, after taxes, over 20 years--pending the court resolution. Their own security officials were unable to resolve the feud.

The winning ticket was tucked inside the cash register at Chae’s Airport Liquor Store when the lotto numbers were drawn, and that was one of the factors that caused the jury to award Chae the winnings, jury foreman Jeff Myers said.

The jury deliberations also focused on which man was more likely to have chosen the winning combination based on each man’s established playing habits, jurors said.

The jury deliberations lasted only about an hour, despite a weeklong trial that saw convoluted and conflicting testimony, even by the same witnesses.

Chae said he put his lottery tickets in his cash register before going out to a movie the evening of the drawing. He said he was told the next morning by his store clerks that since he had no winning tickets, they threw them away.

Later that day, Chae said, Kim announced that he--Kim--had won the lottery but was willing to split it 50-50 with him, in gratitude for his boss’s generosity in employing him at the store when he was a newcomer to the United States.

In the trial, it was Kim’s testimony that his boss agreed, before the drawing, to keep the tickets in the cash register overnight.

Jurors said they discounted Kim’s contention because he had no established habit of allowing his boss to keep his Lotto tickets on his behalf.

During the trial, Kim said that when Chae realized his clerk had won, the owner demanded all but $1 million of the prize in exchange for not alerting immigration authorities and subjecting Kim to deportation.

Chae said he offered his clerk $1 million in an effort to resolve the dispute amicably before he decided to take Kim to court.

The brouhaha won attention in Southern California’s Korean community, which had followed the matter closely in Korean-language newspapers.

Chae, 45, said he believed he was made to look bad in some of the Korean press accounts, and now feels vindicated by the unanimous verdict. “Many Korean people had suspicious eyes on me. They said I was greedy,” he said. “I’m not greedy.” And he said he would probably not play the lottery much more “because I do not need that much money.”

The jury heard testimony from an expert in statistics and probability who said there seemed to be no particular numerical pattern to how the numbers were selected. That expert’s findings bolstered Chae’s position because the numbers showed close relationship to Chae’s and his wife’s birth dates.

Additionally, one of the other seven Super Lotto tickets Chae undisputedly purchased that day included four of the same six winning numbers.

Kim, however, said he enlisted Chae’s help in selecting two of the numbers, and said they frequently shared number selections.

According to testimony, the clerk told no one for hours that he had just won millions. That behavior belied the ecstasy he should have felt and betrayed how he was plotting to carry out the theft of the winning ticket, Chae’s attorney, Browne Green, argued.

In contrast, Chae spent the next morning fishing through a trash bin looking for his missing ticket to financial nirvana, even as Kim stood by watching--with the winning ticket in his pocket, the jury was told.

Green argued that Kim’s offer to share the winnings with his boss was born of guilt because Kim had Chae’s winning ticket to begin with.

Complicating the bitter feud was the role of another liquor store employee, Kihyun Park, who said he initially conspired with his fellow clerk to steal the winning Lotto ticket from their boss, but admitted the plot to his boss and testified in court that the ticket indeed was Chae’s.