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Unlucky Number: The Murder of Lottery Winner Abraham Shakespeare
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About Unlucky Number: The Murder Of Lottery Winner
Product Description The true crime story of murdered Florida lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare. Poor man. Rich man. Dead man. It sounded like a fairy tale: A homeless man named Abraham Shakespeare spent his last dollars on a Florida State lottery ticket—and miraculously won $31 million. Unprepared for his new found fortune, Abraham hired Dorice “Dee Dee” Moore to help manage his winnings and field the numerous requests for loans and assistance that he received. But somehow, Dee Dee was the only one benefiting. When Abraham quietly disappeared from his home in Florida, friends and family grew suspicious—though he could not read or write, his only form of contact was through odd letters and texts. But it wasn’t until investigators began to question Dee Dee about her role in Abraham’s finances that a complicated web of lies—and the desperate lengths to which one woman would go to cover it up—was exposed… About the Author After working as a deadline reporter for twenty-seven years (including a seven-year stint as White House Correspondent during the Clinton years), veteran journalist and author Deborah Mathis studied under a Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard, taught at Northwestern University’s prestigious Medill School of Journalism, was Communications Director at the Public Justice Foundation, wrote a weekly column for BlackAmericaWeb.com, and is the author of three books: Yet A Stranger: Why Black Americans Still Don’t Feel at Home, What God Can Do, and Sole Sisters: the Joys and Pains of Single Black Women. Gregory Todd Smith is a native of Polk County, Florida. A self-made man, he enjoys a thriving barber practice in Lakeland, Florida. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS —DEBORAH MATHIS PREFACE In March 2014, on the brink of the annual college-basketball showdown known as March Madness, billionaire Warren Buffett teamed with Quicken Loans to concoct a get-rich-quick scheme to beat all. They would pay $1 billion to anyone, eighteen or older, who correctly predicted the winners of every game in the sixty-three-game national tournament. Even with the number of contestants limited (one per household) to fifteen million entries, the odds of winning were a mind-numbing one in nine quintillion. But that didn’t stop people from trying. (Unsurprisingly, no one won Buffett’s bracket contest. No one even came close. Most people were eliminated on day one; no one remained by the end of day two.) Although Buffett’s March Madness bracket scheme was not a lottery per se, like a lottery, it was a game of chance and showed, once again, that the dream of striking it suddenly and gloriously rich is alive and well. Not even absurd, nearly impossible odds can quell it. Lotteries have been a part of the United States since its very founding, when tickets to games of chance were sold to help fund the development of some colonies (such as Jamestown, Virginia), and at one point were considered not only a viable way to raise revenue for public causes, but a civically responsible one. At one time, all thirteen original colonies had a lottery to raise revenue for public services. But, in time, the lotteries became riddled with bribery, payout defaults, and other corruption. They fell into such disrepute that evangelical reformers were able to successfully press a moral argument for prohibition, and by 1895, government-run lotteries were banned nationwide. The lottery’s official comeback took nearly three quarters of a century, beginning in New Hampshire in 1964. Today, armed with regulations and safeguards, forty-four states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, all sponsor lotteries. Only Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, and Utah abstain. Both religious and public policy advocates routinely oppose lotteries (the former usually due to biblical strictures, and the latter typically out of concern over the government’s reliance on fantasy-fueled g
