The accusations that have brought the lottery seller from A Coruña to trial, who allegedly hid a Primitiva prize of 4.7 million euros from a customer to keep the money, began to take shape in 2018. It was at that time that the police started the investigation. Six years had already passed since Manuel Reija, responsible for the lottery administration in the San Agustín square, had gone to the State Society of Lotteries and Betting (Selae) claiming that he had found the ticket on his counter and did not know whose it was. The first thing the agents who took on the case did was analyze the movements recorded in Reija’s establishment machine before and after verifying that the ticket made its owner a multimillionaire. And the surprise came thanks to numerology.
According to what the investigators said this Wednesday on the second day of the trial, they discovered that on that July 2, 2012, shortly before 11:30 a.m., not only had the 4.7 million ticket been checked for a prize, as the lottery seller had stated. Reija also ran more combinations through the machine, and some of those bets, specifically the manual ones, had been revalidated seconds later with the same numbers. They were unique numerical sequences and everything had happened in a very short time interval: in less than two minutes, 21 movements had been recorded, between prize checks and new validations. “We came to the conclusion that there was a person in front of the person who runs the administration,” said José Manuel López, one of the police officers who led the investigation, before the court.
That deduction clashed head-on with the lottery seller’s version. Reija repeated that he had found the ticket on the counter when he was alone, not in the presence of the customer. “We thought there was a criminal offense and the next question was: who is the victim,” López explains. In 2019, the lottery seller was formally charged, as was his brother Miguel Reija, then delegate of Lotteries in A Coruña and now on trial for allegedly covering for Manuel in his plan to keep the prize.
When the agents dismantled the lottery seller’s version, five years had passed and the owner of the ticket had not been found among the more than 300 people who claimed it. Since there had been no complaint indicating a possible theft, the police had not intervened beyond facilitating an unsuccessful comparison of the 11 fingerprints on the ticket. It was considered a loss and, according to various witnesses during the trial, neither Selae nor the police themselves had the authority to search for the millionaire. “I think more could have been done” in 2012, lamented one of the police officers, convinced that if, for example, the street cameras of the establishment where the winning bet was made had been checked, the lucky winner would have been found “unequivocally.”
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To locate him once and for all, what the agents did was focus on several of the bets that were checked and validated in those two minutes along with the winning ticket. They were manual and repeated combinations. They requested information from Selae to see in which lottery offices they had been stamped since 2011, and in the 800 bets they sent, they detected a pattern of behavior. Most weeks, they were validated in offices in A Coruña and occasionally cashed in other parts of Spain such as Fuerteventura, Torremolinos, or Huelva. And that is how they located a retiree from the Monte Alto neighborhood in A Coruña, a regular player of these draws, who had been in those locations on private and Imserso trips.
When they found out his identity, the police discovered that he had died in 2014. He passed away without even imagining that he had won such a prize. His widow and daughter, appearing as private prosecutors, explained this Wednesday in court that the man was fond of numerology and usually repeated bets every week that played with his birth date and that of his family members. One of the combinations that was checked along with the winning ticket on the day Manuel Reija allegedly hid the prize was 03-06-10-19-45. It matches his birth (June 3, 1945), his family pointed out in court. The 10 comes from adding all the digits of that date and then adding the digits of the resulting number together, a common operation among those who believe in this discipline.
