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The Scheme That Broke the Texas Lottery

When a “purchasing group” won a ninety-five-million-dollar jackpot, the victory caused a scandal in a state where opposition to legal gambling remains widespread.

Some of her earliest memories involve accompanying her grandmother to a bingo hall in Wichita Falls; at one point, she told me, she considered Las Vegas her “home away from home.” She became interested in small-scale publishing, and went on to run a real-estate magazine called Unexaggerated Homes of Dallas, in which, she said, “builders could not use adjectives—what you see is what you get.” Shortly after Texas launched its lottery, in 1992, Nettles began producing the Lotto Report, a print newsletter that she likened to the racing forms sold at racetracks. Its aesthetic could be summed up as “crank-adjacent”: there is an overwhelming amount of erratically capitalized and bolded text, punctuated with exclamations like “Unreal!” and “Unbelievable!” and “If you have high blood pressure, don’t read any further!” In 2014, Nettles told the TexasTribune that she was spending fourteen to sixteen hours a day keeping tabs on the lottery. I recently met Nettles at a Starbucks in Waco, the midway point between our homes, where she ordered her vanilla latte without a lid so that there was room for extra whipped cream on top.

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