makes around $35,000 a
year doing with that much
cash? Bargas thought.
Suspicious, he called the
police, who called the FBI.
Soon, agents listened in as
Bargas met with the jus-
tice of the peace, Tommy
Tipton. Tommy pulled
out a briefcase filled with
$450,000 in cash, still in
Federal Reserve wrappers,
and swapped $100,000
of it for Bargas’s worn, circulated
bills. The FBI then went to work in-
vestigating the serial numbers on the
new bills.
A few months later, Rennison went
to see Tommy. He said that he had hit
the lottery but was on the outs with
his wife and trying to keep the win-
nings from her. A friend had claimed
the $568,990 prize in exchange for
10 percent of the money. At the time, it
all seemed to add up, and the Tommy
Tipton case was closed.
Now Sand suspected that there
were even more illicitly claimed tick-
ets out there. He knew from experi-
ence that white-collar criminals aren’t
usually caught on their first attempt.
In fact, a $783,257.72 jackpot from
a Wisconsin Lottery drawing on De-
cember 29, 2007, had been claimed by
a Texas man named Robert Rhodes—
Eddie Tipton’s best friend. On Novem-
ber 23, 2011, Kyle Conn from Hemphill,
Texas, won $644,478 in the Oklahoma
Lottery. Sand saw that Tommy Tiptonhad three Facebook friends named
Conn. He got a list of possible phone
numbers and cross-referenced them
with Tommy’s cell phone records. An-
other hit.
Two winning Kansas Lottery tickets
with $15,402 payouts were purchased
on December 23, 2010—the day Ed-
die bought the Iowa ticket. Cell phone
records indicated he was driving
through Kansas on the way to Texas
for the holidays. One of the winning
tickets was claimed by a Texan named
Christopher McCoulskey; the other,
by an Iowan named Amy Warrick.
Each was a friend of Eddie’s.
One morning, Sand and an investi-
gator knocked on Warrick’s door. She
told them Eddie had said he wasn’t
able to claim a winning lottery ticket
because of his job. If she could claim
it, he’d said, she could keep a portion
as a gift for her recent engagement.
“You have these honest dupes,”
Sand says. “All these people are being
offered thousands of dollars for doing114 dec 2018 )jan 2019
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