By the spring of 2020, the lottery lawyer wasn’t sure the walls were necessarily closing in. The FBI had started interviewing his insta-millionaire clients, though, and things didn’t look good. The jackpots several winners had entrusted him to invest seemed to be dwindling, and Jay Kurland wasn’t sure how much they blamed him, Bloomberg News reported. Shortly before 9 a.m. on June 19, he hopped on the phone with his neighbor and business partner Francis Smookler, a tanned, easy-living ex-stockbroker. “My Staten Island clients are very concerned,” Kurland said, singling out one couple. “You know, the visits, combined with the lack of payments.” “Do you think that that’s going to explode into some big thing?” Smookler asked. “No,” Kurland replied. “At the end of the day, we made, we’ve got bad business moves, but it was nothing criminal.” There were others in this ultra-specialized field, such as Kurt Panouses of Indialantic, Fla., the so-called Powerball Lawyer. But Kurland was America’s foremost lotto-winner whisperer. Morning shows would book him for soft-focus segments; thelotterylawyer.com and @lotterylawyer were his. In 2018 he started representing the biggest solo lottery winner of all time, a woman who’d bought a $1.5 billion ticket at a convenience store in South Carolina. As Kurland racked up more and richer clients, he started looking for more innovative ways to multiply their money. Side hustles emerged, and the cast of characters he worked with began to look less vanilla: In addition to his neighbor and business partner Francis Smookler and Frangesco Russo, there was Christopher Chierchio, who ran a Staten Island plumbing business and has been identified in the New York tabloids as a Genovese crime-family soldier; Greg Altieri, a wholesale jeweler turned Ponzi schemer; and Kurland’s own brother-in-law, Scott Blyer, aka DrBFixin, a cosmetic surgeon specializing in Brazilian butt lifts. It all came to a head when, on the morning of Aug. 18, 2020, Kurland, Smookler, Russo, and Chierchio were booked on multiple counts of wire fraud and money laundering, accused of bilking three marquee lottery winners out of more than $100 million. Smookler and Russo were also accused of extortion. Federal prosecutors in New York laid out a scheme predicated on the trust Kurland had built with clients who were wildly unprepared for the opportunities and pitfalls of sudden wealth. Following Kurland’s investment advice, lottery winners plowed cash into high-interest lending businesses run by his associates, for which he allegedly received secret kickbacks.
