DEENA WINTER / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Saturday, February 25, 2006 6:00 pm
Jim Hoppe didn’t get much done last week other than take phone call after phone call from television producers and reporters trying to get interviews with his now-famous clients, eight Powerball jackpot winners. Related: Financial planners: Winning the lottery isn't always a dream
At 5:30 Friday afternoon, he was still tied up on the phone as another phone rang in the background.
“I’ve talked to more producers from more TV shows than I could shake a stick at.”
The Lincoln lawyer normally handles criminal cases and domestic disputes, not Bill O’Reilly and Greta Van Susteren and Barbara Walters — and Paula Zahn and Geraldo Rivera and Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Kimmel and Jay Leno — and the producers of every morning news show, plus Dateline NBC.
And all of their “people” who called Hoppe were turned down. “Good Morning America” did manage to snag footage of lottery winner Eric Zornes shopping for a new vehicle, but that wasn’t an arranged interview, Hoppe said.
“They’re pretty humble folks who don’t wanna draw a whole lot of attention to themselves,” he said of his new media-shy Powerball-winning clients Quang Dao, David Gehle, Alain Maboussou, Chasity Rutjens, Robert Stewart, Michael Terpstra, Dung Tran and Zornes.
The eight meat processing plant workers may not have known exactly what they were in for when they realized they had a piece of paper worth $365 million, but they knew enough to disappear for awhile. Most of them booked rooms at the Embassy Suites, Hoppe said. He wasn’t sure how long their cover would last when he showed up to find their hotel room door open for cleaning staff.
Just one day after he was hired to represent the winners — they picked his name out of a phone book — Hoppe heard people at his racquetball club talking about eight plant workers being the winners.
They had planned to try to sneak one of the winners into the State Office Building to verify the winning ticket, but it was surrounded by TV satellites and crawling with reporters. Hoppe felt some sympathy for reporters standing out in the cold, but decided to ask lottery officials to come to them.
That done, some of the winners were “pretty reluctant” to hold a news conference, he said.
“In the end everyone understood it’s a good human interest story.”
On Wednesday morning, the lucky eight were sequestered inside the 11th and M streets offices of Intralot, which supplies the Nebraska Lottery. They were impressed by the stacks of lotto machines and a spare ball tumbler.
Before the news conference began, Hoppe tried to reassure his clients, but even he was a little weak-kneed at facing hundreds of reporters and guests in the The Cornhusker Marriott ballroom.
“Walking into that room (was an) awesome experience. It gave me confidence that I could walk into lots of other rooms,” he said.
After Hoppe gave an impromptu introduction, the winners stepped up to take questions from a media pack fit for a president, then disappeared.
“Some people kind of left town, some people went back to work, some people went back home and closed the door,” he said.
As for their new attorney, he’s handled a couple dozen interview requests, about 50 calls from financial advisers, letters from “poor, broken-down widows” asking for $100,000 to pay off their homes and a letter asking if the winners would be interested in buying a gun factory.
And the phone continued to ring.
Reach Deena Winter at 473-2642 or dwinter@journalstar.com.