One June morning in 2017, an Albanian American real-estate broker named Viktor Gjonaj parked outside a strip mall in Sterling Heights, a small suburb on the outskirts of Detroit. He hurried past a halal-meat shop, through a waft of spices from an Indian grocery store, and into the claim office of the Michigan Lottery. Gjonaj, who is 6 foot 5, loomed over the front desk in his designer Italian shoes, his dark hair slicked back and glistening in the fluorescent light, and announced that he had won the Daily 4 lottery draw. Twice a day since 1981, the Michigan Lottery has drawn four numbered Ping-Pong balls from a plastic tank and paid up to $5,000 to any player with the same four digits on their pink ticket. But Gjonaj did not have one winning ticket. He had 500.
Skeptical lottery officials ushered him into a back office and checked his tickets carefully. Each was genuine and contained the four winning numbers—7-8-0-0—drawn on June 18. The odds of winning were just one in 416—not terribly long by lottery standards—but it was extremely unusual for someone to play the same numbers 500 times in one day. There were other red flags. Most people who present themselves at lottery claim centers are ecstatic, yet this winner waited for his prizes with the impatience of someone picking up dry cleaning. It took staff six hours to cut 500 checks for $5,000 each. Then Gjonaj (his name is pronounced Joe-nye) tucked them inside the pocket of his sports jacket and roared away in his Lincoln Navigator, richer by $2.5 million.
Over the next nine months, the 40-year-old real-estate broker would return many times, exchanging thousands of winning tickets for nearly $30 million, making him one of the biggest winners in the history of the Michigan Lottery. His luck appeared to defy the laws of statistics and probability, and sent the lottery commission into a spin. Had Gjonaj found a way to rig the machines? Or had he somehow developed a system to predict the winning combinations again and again and again?
Since he was a little boy, Viktor Gjonaj had had a head for numbers. His parents emigrated to the United States from Montenegro and spoke little English, so it was 12-year-old Viktor who handled the sale of their home in Sterling Heights, an area populated by many Yugoslavians and Albanians. As a teenager, he haggled so aggressively for a used car that the owner promised him a job at his real-estate firm. The day after Gjonaj’s 18th birthday, he became a full-time agent. “Every day, fear played a role in it,” he later said on a community television chat show. But, he added, “I knew deep down inside that I was going to figure it out. And I was going to eventually be successful.”
By the time he was in his 30s, he had become one of the busiest commercial-real-estate brokers in Detroit, negotiating deals for a gigantic Walmart and several Taco Bells and Burger Kings. Gjonaj charmed clients with meals at fine restaurants and liked to recite poetry. He was also a ruthless dealmaker who began his days before 6 a.m. and was known for his catchphrase: “People lie. Numbers don’t.”
In his relentless drive to make money, Gjonaj took risks and cut corners. He liked to “flip paper”—he’d enter into a contract to buy a $1.2 million tract of land, then quickly find a buyer to assume the purchase for $1.4 million, pocketing the difference. This wasn’t illegal, but it required nerves of steel. “He just pushed edges and boundaries that he really didn’t need to,” Randy Thomas, who employed Gjonaj in the 2000s, says. “He wanted to be the man.”
At home, Gjonaj and his wife, Rose, doted on their young daughters—together they have three, and he has a fourth from a previous relationship. To blow off steam, he spent Friday nights downing vodka–Red Bulls at a restaurant named Tiramisu. He loved to play Club Keno, a $1-minimum lottery game with live drawings every few minutes. The owner let him play alone at the bar after closing time. “That’s where I fell in love with the algorithms of numbers,” he told me. Gjonaj was convinced that the draws weren’t purely random. He developed a smartphone app that he thought predicted winning numbers based on patterns in previous draws. A $52,000 win seemed to confirm his belief.
After his father died, on Father’s Day in 2015, Gjonaj’s gambling escalated. Then Tiramisu closed, and he found himself in busy restaurants screaming at bartenders to run his numbers. He decided this was not a good look for a man who was rubbing shoulders with local business leaders, so he quit playing. He later switched to the Michigan Lottery’s Daily 4, which can pay up to $5,000, and the Daily 3, paying up to $500. A Daily 4 ticket costs $1—or up to $24 for a “wheel” play, which turns any combination of the chosen four numbers into a winner (1-2-3-4, 4-3-2-1, 2-4-1-3, etc.). This improved his odds from one in 10,000 to one in 416 for a 24-way bet.
Gjonaj said he discovered “strange phenomena” in the results posted on the Michigan Lottery website. “When a certain number came out, my number would be shortly thereafter,” he said. He built charts and spreadsheets that he believed gave him an early-warning system for winning numbers. He gambled lightly on 4-7-4-2, parlaying any winnings onto 0-0-7-8, a number that his charts said often followed. Then came the shapes. Gjonaj connected the dates of lucky draws, scrawling an X on his calendar that he believed predicted when the number was due again.
Gjonaj had won only a few hundred thousand dollars, he estimates, until June 2017, when he noticed that the number 7-8-0-0 tended to appear at least once or twice a year. Believing that the number 7-8-0-0 was due, he started to buy 300 to 1,000 $12 tickets every day. His numbers didn’t come up on June 15, June 16, or June 17. But on June 18, he hit the big time, collecting his $2.5 million from the claim center.
Gjonaj bought his lottery tickets from Picolo’s Liquor & Deli, a type of alcohol and tobacco shop known in Michigan as a “party store.” The store’s owners, like all Michigan Lottery retailers, received a 6 percent cut of ticket sales and a 2 percent commission on prize money. According to an investigation by Crain’s Detroit Business, Gjonaj’s activity helped boost Daily 4 ticket sales at Picolo’s from $51,745 in 2015 to $1.3 million in 2016. By 2017, the lottery terminals at Picolo’s were running day and night, printing more than 3.92 million tickets a year, at the rate of one ticket every eight seconds.
When his spreadsheets told him that numbers 2-7-0-6 were due in November 2017, Gjonaj instructed Picolo’s to print 800 “wheeled” tickets at $24 each, spending a total of $19,200. That night the store called him to say he’d won $4 million. But Gjonaj didn’t celebrate. “Nobody in my family knew what I was doing,” he said. “You shake it off and get back to work.”
The problem was that the patterns existed entirely in Gjonaj’s head. For all his huge wins, he was also losing massive amounts of money, sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into his theory that certain numbers repeated themselves. Mathematically speaking, that theory is bunk, Mark Glickman, a senior lecturer on statistics at Harvard University, says. “Drawings from day to day are what statisticians would describe as being ‘independent.’” The Michigan Lottery, after all, pulls numbers from a bunch of bouncing Ping-Pong balls, not electronic software that could, in theory, be governed by algorithms.
Gjonaj quickly became addicted to the high of huge wins. Whenever he seemed to be on the brink of losing everything, he’d hit a jackpot. When he was up, he was on top of the world. When he was in the hole, he was only one big win away from glory. He told himself that his losses wouldn’t matter if he made one big score. He just needed a way to keep buying as many tickets as possible.
In October 2017, Gjonaj set up a real-estate company—the Imperium Group, named after a word for “absolute power.” He decorated his office walls with photographs of Steve Jobs, Stephen Hawking, Mark Cuban, and Dr. Dre. He hired independent contractors to help market the business, including the son of the owner of Picolo’s. But while they were working, Gjonaj shut his office door and focused on playing the lottery.
His gambling was by now becoming a lot of work for one person. So he decided he needed a partner.
In December, Gjonaj attended a funeral for the mother of an old friend, Gregory Vitto. This was a tough time for Vitto, who had lost his job as a construction foreman and was struggling to pay his daughter’s college tuition. Vitto is 10 years older than Gjonaj and had known him since the 1990s, when Gjonaj loaned him a car for six months. Their friendship had faded over the years, but Vitto thought of Gjonaj as someone who was always there in his hour of need, paying him to do odd jobs, and giving him $500 in cash on his 50th birthday. “He was like a little brother to me … he was always a giving person,” Vitto told me.
Vitto, who is tall and fair and looks nothing like his Italian American parents, learned in sixth grade that he had been adopted. Later, he tried to find his biological parents, but all the documents were sealed, and anyway, after his wife left him, he was too busy raising two girls, never missing a basketball game or graduation. At times Vitto had to scrape by on government assistance. “He’s a great fighter. I mean, he went through a very difficult, traumatic situation,” Gjonaj said. “That was one of the reasons why I brought him onto the company.” In January 2018, Gjonaj surprised Vitto with an offer to join him at the Imperium Group. “He showed me the beautiful office where I’d be sitting right next to him,” Vitto recalled.
Vitto signed up for a real-estate license, despite having no experience. He and Gjonaj both took Adderall for ADHD and seemed to…
