Lots of luck: Lottery winners collect big bucks

New York Lottery (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Electrician says he could hardly believe his good fortune

BY RICH SCHAPIRO / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, April 26, 2012, 1:38 PM

A Long Island electrician was sporting a thousand-watt smile Thursday after winning $1 million in the New York lottery.

And a Yemini immigrant planned to share some of his new $5 million fortune with his home town.

"I still have smile-itis," joked the electrician, Ralph Russo, a 46-year-old married father from Roslyn.

Russo bought his winning “Black Pearls” scratch-off ticket April 2 at a gas station mini-mart in Roslyn Heights.

At first, he couldn’t believe his eyes.

“I handed the ticket to the gas station attendant and asked him: ‘What does this mean?’” Russo recalled.

“He looked at it and he looked back at me and he said, ‘You just won a million dollars.’ I was like, what?”

Again the attendant told Russo he was a millionaire, and again Russo didn’t believe it.

“He came up to me and started shaking me. He was like, ‘Russo, you won a million dollars,’” said the self-employed electrician.

“We were jumping up and down in the parking lot for a while.”

Russo, who is planning to create a college fund for his kids and go to Aruba for vacation, will receive a net check totaling $33,090 a year through 2031.

The recent crop of lottery winners also included a Brooklyn deliveryman who is now $5 million richer.

“I say, ‘Thanks, God,” said Hezam Al-Nagar, a Yemeni immigrant living in East New York. “Now I can help anybody I want. Anybody needs help from my village (in Yemen), I can help them.”

The winners were introduced at a news conference in Manhattan.

With Charles Beacham and Marty Twelves

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/lots-luck-lottery-winners-collect-big-bucks-article-1.1067984?localLinksEnabled=false