Fortune Cookie Reveals Winning Lottery Numbers

It sounds like a Twilight Zone episode or an Onion article . . . but it’s not! The “lucky numbers” inserted into fortune cookies by a Long Island City-based fortune cookie company matched six of the seven March 30 Powerball numbers, which set off alarm bells when 110 people had winning tickets:

Powerball lottery officials suspected fraud: how could 110 players in the March 30 drawing get five of the six numbers right? That made them all second-prize winners, and considering the number of tickets sold in the 29 states where the game is played, there should have been only four or five.

But from state after state they kept coming in, the one-in-three-million combination of 22, 28, 32, 33, 39.

It took some time before they had their answer: the players got their numbers inside fortune cookies, and all the cookies came from the same factory in Long Island City, Queens.

Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs Powerball, said on Monday that the panic began at 11:30 p.m. March 30 when he got a call from a worried staff member.

The second-place winners were due $100,000 to $500,000 each, depending on how much they had bet, so paying all 110 meant almost $19 million in unexpected payouts, Mr. Strutt said. (The lottery keeps a $25 million reserve for odd situations.)

Of course, it could have been worse. The 110 had picked the wrong sixth number – 40, not 42 – and would have been first-place winners if they did.

“We didn’t sleep a lot that night,” Mr. Strutt said. “Is there someone trying to cheat the system?”

He added: “We had to look at everything to do with humans: television shows, pattern plays, lottery columns.”

Earlier that month, an ABC television show, “Lost,” included a sequence of winning lottery numbers. The combination didn’t match the Powerball numbers, though hundreds of people had played it: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42. Numbers on a Powerball ticket in a recent episode of a soap opera, “The Young and the Restless,” didn’t match, either. Nor did the winning numbers form a pattern on the lottery grid, like a cross or a diagonal. Then the winners started arriving at lottery offices.

“Our first winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie,” said Rebecca Paul, chief executive of the Tennessee Lottery. “The second winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie. The third winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie.”

Investigators visited dozens of Chinese restaurants, takeouts and buffets. Then they called fortune cookie distributors and learned that many different brands of fortune cookies come from the same Long Island City factory, which is owned by Wonton Food and churns out four million a day.

“That’s ours,” said Derrick Wong, of Wonton Food, when shown a picture of a winner’s cookie slip. “That’s very nice, 110 people won the lottery from the numbers.”

The same number combinations go out in thousands of cookies a day. The workers put numbers in a bowl and pick them. “We are not going to do the bowl anymore; we are going to have a computer,” Mr. Wong said. “It’s more efficient.”

How Many Packs of Gum Does It Take . . .

How many packs of gum does it take to pay off a $350,000 mortgage? The Post investigates:

For $350,000, you can own a building with 50 square feet of usable space on a 102-square-foot commercial lot on Seventh Avenue South in the West Village.

. . .

That $350,000 will buy you 10 feet of frontage on the busy avenue, explains real-estate broker Rod Kritsberg of A&I Broadway Realty.

That’s perfect for a newsstand, cab stand, crepe window or fast-food shop, says Kritsberg, who is advertising the property on craigslist.org.

Its location — at 30 Seventh Ave. S., between Leroy and Morton streets — “is right in the heart of Greenwich Village,” he said.

“It’s a vibrant area, on a street where you get a lot of foot traffic, especially at night,” he noted. “There’s no place that sells water, cigarettes and gum for several blocks.”

Only Ivy League Or Similar Need Apply

When potential employers add “only Ivy League or similar need apply” to job postings, they’re probably not talking about smarty pants like Hakan Yalincak, who was charged in federal court for bank fraud just days before graduating from NYU’s College of Arts & Sciences:

While most graduates will walk through the arch Thursday stress-free and exuberant with success, one CAS student will be sitting behind bars in Rhode Island, contemplating a charge of multi-million dollar bank fraud.

Hakan Yalincak, a CAS senior majoring in mathematics, pleaded not guilty on Friday at the New Haven, Conn., district court to charges of conducting a $43 million bank fraud scheme by depositing fake certified checks into bank accounts in Connecticut and Switzerland. On a separate lawsuit in civil court, he is charged with conning Connecticut investors into investing $2.8 million in a non-existent hedge fund.

Things you don’t want your attorney telling the New York Times include but are not limited to “the facts will either indicate that he is culpable or is not culpable.” That’s not a great way to build confidence in your client:

“He’s an enterprising finance guy, an extraordinarily intelligent young man,” Mr. [Mickey] Sherman said. “At some point, I think the facts will either indicate that he is culpable or is not culpable.”

Bonus: Legal remedies for investors victimized by check-kiting schemes.

Gopnikian Grandeur

An Adam Gopnik-penned story about the new dinosaur exhibit at the Museum of Natural History uses the impressions of two anonymous children as the filter through which the reader experiences it. Or is it actually a thinly veiled story about his two children, set against the backdrop of a new dinosaur exhibit? Or is it really just an excuse to show how his ten-year-old son is so smartly (and improbably!) clued into the cult of Steve Martin. I vote number three:

Mark Norell is the all-knowing curator of the extremely cool, truly awesome, and very soon to open “Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries” show at the American Museum of Natural History. “He looks just like Steve Martin,” a ten-year-old whispered politely to a companion one afternoon last week, after taking in Norell’s expressive eyebrows and oversized jaw and handsome, slightly supercilious smile.

A Classy Restaurant in a Retro Location

A 25-year-old “real estate investor” (we know what that’s shorthand for) has purchased an old diner on the west side of Manhattan and has shipped it piece by piece to an upstate location in order to reopen it as a Florent-style hip restaurant.

I love dreaming, too!

Alas, it’s serious, and the Times reports the move took place last night:

It was possible to take the money used to buy the defunct Munson Diner, for nearly six decades a neon-lit source of heartburn and nostalgia in Hell’s Kitchen, and get, say, a bare-bones BMW convertible.

Of course, opting for a $30,000 sports car would not get the buyer the eight-door refrigerators (two), refrigerated display cases (two), soup table, deep fryer, Silver King coffee urn and enough seats (7 booths, 15 stools) for four football teams. Or, for that matter, the memories of the “Seinfeld” and “Law & Order” television episodes in which the diner made an appearance.

But restaurant accouterments and television history are not why Jeremy Gorelick, 25, and a group of upstate investors bought the Munson Diner this year. They bought it, Mr. Gorelick said yesterday, for reincarnation in a Catskills town as a “destination location” resembling the hip Restaurant Florent in the meatpacking district in Manhattan, but with a stream of high rollers from, fingers crossed, a nearby casino, or, failing that, a summer music festival like Tanglewood.

And so, to that end, the diner was lifted onto a flatbed truck last night to be inched from 11th Avenue and 49th Street over the George Washington Bridge, with a final destination 90 miles northwest of New York: a hill overlooking Liberty, a tiny village in Sullivan County.

“It’ll be a classy restaurant in a retro location,” Mr. Gorelick said.

Not to nitpick, but isn’t it a retro restaurant in a . . . I don’t know that I’ve ever heard upstate New York called “retro.” I don’t know that folks up there consider their ‘hood “retro”! I hope the folks in Liberty love Boudin Noir and Duck Mousse Pate! (I mean, I sure do, but I’m not retro like all them all are!)