Some families in Italy say that if you win the lottery, you can’t tell anyone. However, a family from Bitonto, a town in southern Italy, had no other choice. When the father realized he had thrown away the winning ticket stub, they had to break this unspoken rule to recover their one million euros, which was floating in the trash.
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The odyssey of this family, who confirmed the events to EL PAÍS but asked to remain anonymous, began on Sunday, August 2, when the father bought a ticket for the Million Day draw of the National Lottery. This daily draw allows you to win a million by matching a combination of five numbers. He chose, as he usually did, a date linked to the memory of a loved one. After inserting the stub into the machine where prizes are checked, the man read the message “not payable” and threw the ticket into the administration’s trash bin. He understood “not payable” to mean it was worthless. In reality, it meant the ticket was a winner but could not be cashed at the point of sale because the amount was too large. According to the Italian lottery regulations, if you win more than 10,500 euros, you must go to a bank or directly to the national lottery offices.
When he returned home, his family let him know they had won the lottery because they frequently played the same combination, an important date for them. But the happiness didn’t last a minute: they didn’t have the necessary stub to claim the prize. That’s when Roberto Toscano, the director of the public company responsible for garbage collection in the town, came into the picture. The family contacted him that same Sunday at noon. “My first reaction was disbelief because it didn’t seem possible. On one hand, it’s hard to believe someone plays the lottery, doesn’t realize they have a prize, and throws away the stub. On the other, it’s also hard to imagine that a ticket like that could be found afterward,” Toscano confesses in a phone conversation with EL PAÍS. Still, he didn’t get discouraged: “When they told us it was such a large sum and I sensed the desperation of those people, I thought it was worth trying.”
By reconstructing the entire waste collection chain — which includes the operator who empties the container, the transfer of bags to a smaller vehicle, and later their transfer to a compactor truck — they realized there was a chance the ticket was still there. There was also another stroke of luck: it was Sunday. The compactors don’t go to the landfill until Monday, so the final load of waste was still at the municipal facilities. When they found the right truck, 24 hours had already passed since they started the search.
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Before continuing with the task, the family had to sign a legal document committing to pay all expenses, as it was a special operation carried out with additional resources worthy of a police movie. The truck was put under armed guard. “It had potentially become a kind of armored van,” Toscano explains. Then they moved it to an authorized plant, where a group of ten workers began the search. Equipped with white coveralls without pockets to avoid any suspicion and under the supervision of a camera recording the process, they rummaged through six tons of garbage until they found a bag full of discarded lottery tickets.
Many were damaged, but they kept checking them one by one until, almost miraculously, the number they were looking for appeared. But it wasn’t the winning ticket, but one bought a few days earlier by the same family. A few minutes later, the final stroke of luck arrived. “It was a really beautiful and emotional celebration, as if the workers themselves had won the prize,” recalls Toscano, who was present at all stages of the search and handed the ticket over to the family’s legal representative. “When I spoke to them again on the phone, they were in tears again, but from emotion.”
Asked about the feeling of holding a paper worth one million euros, he admits it gave him a great vertigo. “The story has something miraculous. If I hadn’t lived it firsthand, I wouldn’t believe it,” he insists. Upon leaving the facilities, he invited his workers to have a coffee at the nearest gas station. They bought a scratch card to see if they still had the lucky streak. They won 50 euros, which they shared among all. A trivial amount compared to what they had helped recover. After taxes, the family will have 920,000 euros left, from which another 10,000 must be deducted to pay for the ticket search expenses. Money, the sources consulted assure, well invested.