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ESSAY
Jeffrey Epstein’s Ranch Won $85 Million in the Oklahoma Lottery Two Days After He Went to Prison. The Company That Printed the Ticket Belonged to His Palm Beach Neighbor.
The Store That Sold It Belonged to The Neighbor’s Former Colleague. And The Ranch, Which Was Never Searched, Now Belongs to a Trump Insider’s Family. Follow the Money, Part Two.
🎩 By Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
Yesterday, I published the first installment of a four-part series I’ve written in which I follow the money related to Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, from its purchase from the King family in 1993 to its new owners, Don and Mary Catherine Huffines. What follows here is part two. By following the money, a terrifying picture begins to emerge, an existential threat to the national security of the United States of America.
In yesterday’s part one of this series, I shared a bit about the financial relationships between dead child rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and former New Mexico Governor Bruce King and his son, former New Mexico Attorney General Gary King. To briefly summarize, Epstein’s Zorro Trust purchased nearly 7,500 acres outside Stanley, New Mexico, from the King family for $12.3 million in 1993, after the King family sold it off to help pay $21 million in debts on their various businesses. I recounted the evidence of child sex rape and trafficking that took place at Zorro Ranch for decades, and ended the piece with the vastly under-reported fact that Zorro Trust won the Oklahoma Powerball lottery in 2008, two days after Epstein began serving his first — and far too lenient — jail term, in the amount of $85 million.
Today we pick up there. With that lottery win. While I’ve seen a few stories online about it, no serious news outlet has covered it. I suspect this is because plausible deniability is built into the way Oklahoma law allows trusts to win the lottery while legally protecting the identity of the trust’s owners. This law exists in theory to protect large jackpot winners from being hounded or robbed. But it also creates fertile ground for fraud. Not even a freedom of information act records request from a reporter can unseal those records. The only way we could ever find out for certain, from lottery officials, that the Zorro Trust that won on July 2, 2008, was the same Zorro Trust that bought the ranch in Stanley, New Mexico — a six-hour drive from the convenience store where the ticket was purchased — would be if the courts demanded the record unsealed. So far, that hasn’t happened.
There are, however, other ways to put together a strong circumstantial case.
One way is to go to Stanley and other points in this state and ask around. Which I did. I live here. We’re a big state with a small population. Everyone knows everyone, and my family has been here for 13 generations. Lots of regular people worked on that ranch — as staff, as contractors. And while it’s clear in the Epstein files that Epstein and his wealthy associates didn’t think much of the working poor who cleaned their toilets and took out their trash, such disregard by the rich for those they exploit tends not to breed loyalty in the end, because the working poor are human. That said, people are still reluctant to give their names publicly, because many were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, and others witnessed abuses so horrific they’re pretty sure that even with Epstein dead, there are still people who want this all to go away.
I want to pause here to say this: Former employees of Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch who signed non-disclosure agreements may have more legal freedom to speak than they realize. The Speak Out Act, signed into federal law in 2022, significantly curtailed the enforceability of NDAs involving sexual assault and sexual harassment, gutting one of the primary legal mechanisms used to silence witnesses to abuse. Beyond that, courts have long held that no contract can compel someone to conceal criminal conduct — an NDA that functions as a cover-up is, by definition, unenforceable as against public policy. Whistleblower protections further shield anyone who comes forward to law enforcement or journalists investigating matters of legitimate public concern. And there is a practical reality worth noting: Epstein is dead, his ranch has changed hands, and any attempt by his estate to sue a former employee for speaking truthfully about crimes would open that estate to the very discovery process it would most want to avoid. The NDA, in other words, may have always been more threat than law.
Which is all to say: people here in New Mexico know that it was Epstein’s Zorro Trust that won the Oklahoma lottery two days after he began to serve his first prison sentence. They also know who bought the ticket. Brice Gordon, a former New Zealand soldier who managed the estate with his wife Karen, also a former New Zealand soldier. I’d ask them about it directly, but they seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth after inheriting $2 million when Epstein died.
Now that we have all that out of the way, let’s look at the people and entities involved behind the scenes in making that win possible — a win with 146 million to one odds for regular people, and likely far greater odds for a convicted pedophile in prison. It’s in those details that the picture begins to come into focus.
Fact No. 1: The Man at the Top
James Scroggins materialized in the world of American state lotteries the way certain figures do in industries built on government contracts and quiet relationships — fully formed and without much of a paper trail explaining how he got there. He ran the Pennsylvania lottery, then the Missouri lottery for thirteen years, then arrived in Oklahoma in 2005 to launch its lottery from scratch. He was the executive director of the Oklahoma Lottery Commission on July 2, 2008, when the Zorro Trust walked in and claimed $85 million — which the trust opted to take as a $29.3 million lump sum. He was the man legally required to receive the trust’s membership disclosure — the document naming the actual human beings behind that claim. He is one of a very small number of people alive who knows what that document said.
Scroggins is not a man the public knows much about. Search his name and you find almost nothing — no consulting website, no professional biography, no industry award profiles, no conference keynotes, no press releases announcing his next chapter after he left public service. His LinkedIn profile exists, but is set to private, a curious posture for a man who spent two decades as a government official administering a public trust. What we know about him comes almost entirely from contemporaneous news coverage of the lotteries he ran. And what that coverage reveals, once you read across all four states and all four decades, is a consistent pattern: wherever James Scroggins went, the rules bent.
It started in Pennsylvania.
In the late 1980s, while Scroggins was serving as Pennsylvania’s lottery director, a man named Nick Herbst walked into lottery offices to claim a nine-month-old $15.2 million Super 7 jackpot. The ticket was reviewed at the lottery offices and approved for payment by Scroggins personally — over the written objections of at least one lottery staff member who had flagged a serious problem with the ticket’s validity. The problem was this: while the lottery’s computer showed the ticket had been sold at the Neshaminy Mall in Bensalem, Bucks County, the paper the ticket was printed on carried a serial number assigned to a lot of paper sent to a Scranton lottery agent — a completely different location. The two records did not match. Scroggins ordered the claim honored anyway. Herbst was ushered to a press conference, given a check for the first installment, posed for photographers, and answered reporters’ questions. He claimed he had forgotten about the ticket and had been using it as a bookmark.
The ticket was a fraud. It had been fabricated by an employee of the company that provided computer systems to the lottery — a scheme that required inside access to the technical infrastructure of the game itself. Two men, Herbst and a computer repairman alleged to have masterminded the scheme, were arrested and charged with forgery, theft, conspiracy, tampering with public information, and unlawful use of a computer. When the arrests were made, Scroggins stood before reporters and said: “This situation proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the system works. Yes, there was a payment made to someone who in fact was not a winner, but those persons were apprehended.” That claim was disputed by at least one official privy to the details of the investigation.
It was not the last time Scroggins would find himself defending a suspicious claim he had personally approved.
He moved on to Missouri, where he ran the lottery for thirteen years without surfacing in major public scandals — though it bears noting that Missouri was a Scientific Games contract state throughout his tenure, cementing a long working relationship between Scroggins and the executives of the company that would later hold Oklahoma’s lottery contract.
Then came Oklahoma, where the pattern sharpened considerably.
Two years before the Zorro Trust claimed its $85 million, a different anonymous trust claimed a $101.8 million Powerball jackpot in Oklahoma. Scroggins told a reporter at the time that the commission did not even know who the winners were — that their identities were not stated in the trust agreement. Under the Oklahoma Lottery Act, the commission was required to withhold delinquent child support payments from lottery winnings. But Scroggins, backed by the state Attorney General’s office, declared that requirement inapplicable in this case. The winners’ identities were protected. No background search was conducted. No child support check was run. The precedent had been set: anonymous trust claims in Oklahoma were beyond scrutiny, with the executive director’s blessing and the state’s legal imprimatur.
That was 2006. In 2008, the Zorro Trust walked through the door Scroggins had built.
Scroggins himself, in a 2009 interview, drew attention to something remarkable about Oklahoma’s jackpot win rate. He noted that the state’s frequency of jackpot winners was, in his own word, “astounding” for a lottery only four years old. “Many participating states have played Powerball for 10 to 15 years and only had one winner,” he said. Oklahoma, between 2006 and 2008, had produced four unique jackpot winners — two of them on the same day. Scroggins flagged the anomaly. He did not investigate it.
There is something else worth noting about that July 2, 2008 drawing specifically. According to multiple accounts, a computer malfunction disrupted what was ordinarily a live, televised broadcast of the Powerball draw. The drawing went forward without the usual public broadcast, monitored instead by an auditing firm. Why was the night Oklahoma’s largest-ever jackpot was decided also the night the live television feed went dark? That question has never been publicly answered.
After Oklahoma, Scroggins moved to Illinois in 2012, to serve as Chief Financial Officer for the state’s lottery — arriving, characteristically, at a moment of institutional chaos. Illinois had just become the first state in the nation to privatize its lottery operations, hiring a company called Northstar Lottery Group to run its games. Northstar later came under withering scrutiny after a Chicago Tribune investigation found that the lottery had failed to award more than forty percent of the instant game grand prizes it had advertised between 2011 and 2015, with Northstar dramatically increasing the number of printed tickets while dangling ever-larger prizes in front of buyers. Scroggins walked into the middle of that scandal.
And then he vanished from public record entirely.
What we are left with, across Pennsylvania, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Illinois, is a man who repeatedly found himself at the exact intersection of questionable claims, convenient procedural interpretations, and lucrative vendor relationships — and who, when his public career ended, chose silence over the kind of professional visibility that is standard in his industry. We know almost nothing about who he is. That, too, is a kind of answer.
Fact No. 2: The Store
The winning ticket was purchased at a Stripes convenience store in Altus, Oklahoma — a town of 18,000 near an Air Force base, and a six-hour drive from the Zorro Ranch outside Stanley, New Mexico — by Brice Gordon.
Stripes was a chain of convenience stores and gas stations operating primarily in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, owned in 2008 by Susser Holdings Corporation, a family-run company headquartered in Corpus Christi, Texas. The Altus location had only recently come under Susser Holdings’ control — the company had completed its acquisition of the Town & Country Food Stores chain in early 2008, absorbing the western Oklahoma locations into its corporate portfolio just months before the July 2 jackpot.
Unlike a franchise operation, where an independent owner might notice and report anomalies, Susser Holdings owned and operated its stores directly. The terminal, the staff, and the ticket inventory at the Altus location all fell under a single corporate chain of command. And at the top of that chain was the company’s Chairman, CEO, and President: Sam L. Susser.
Susser had come to the convenience store business by way of Wall Street. He worked at Salomon Brothers Inc. in the Corporate Finance and Mergers and Acquisitions division from 1985 to 1987. He was on the floor of that institution during the precise months when a man named Ronald Perelman — funded by junk bond king Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham Lambert — made a hostile move to acquire a controlling stake in Salomon Brothers worth $800 million. It was widely described as a junk bond raid. Warren Buffett intervened as a white knight, investing $700 million in convertible preferred stock, which allowed Salomon to buy back the targeted shares. With that, Perelman was dispatched. Susser left Salomon the same year and returned to Texas to build his family’s business.
Fact No. 3: The Lottery Contract
The company that held the Oklahoma lottery contract in 2008 — printing the state’s Powerball tickets and operating the central gaming system that determined the winners — was Scientific Games Corporation. Its largest shareholder, holding nearly forty percent of its stock, was Ronald Perelman.
Let that land for a moment. The man who had tried to seize the firm where the future owner of the winning ticket’s store once worked — Perelman — controlled the company that printed the tickets and ran the system.
Fact No. 4: The Network
Ronald Perelman was not a peripheral figure in Jeffrey Epstein’s world. He appears in Epstein’s personal black book. He hosted the 1995 Palm Beach dinner at which Epstein and President Bill Clinton were first documented in the same room together. And in 2004, Perelman sold his Palm Beach estate, Casa Apava, for $70 million — then a record for Palm Beach real estate — on the same small island where, that same year, Epstein and Donald Trump famously went head to head at a bankruptcy auction for a 62,000 square foot oceanfront mansion called Maison de l’Amitié, the House of Friendship. Trump outbid Epstein, paying $41.35 million. The trustee overseeing the auction described it at the time as “two very large Palm Beach egos going at it.” It was the beginning of the end of their friendship. Within weeks of losing that auction, Epstein found himself under investigation by Palm Beach police.
These three men — Epstein, Trump, and Perelman — did not merely know each other. They occupied the same tightly drawn circle on one of the wealthiest strips of land in America. And Ronald Perelman, alone among them, had the industrial infrastructure to print lottery tickets and run the systems that determined who won.
And it just so happens that his associate, Jeffrey Epstein, was the winner.
Fact No. 5: The New Owners
Eleven years passed between the lottery win and Epstein’s death in a Manhattan federal detention facility on August 10, 2019 — years during which Zorro Ranch was never searched, even as federal investigators examined his other properties. Two days before he died, Epstein changed his will, leaving $100 million and all of his properties to a woman often identified as his last girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak, whom I wrote about in detail a couple of weeks ago. Zorro Ranch was among those properties. Shortly after Epstein’s death, federal investigators instructed then-New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas to pull the plug on any efforts to investigate or search the ranch.
On August 16, 2023, a company called San Rafael Ranch LLC purchased Zorro Ranch from Epstein’s estate for an undisclosed price — the asking price had been reduced from $27.5 million to $18 million before the sale closed. San Rafael Ranch LLC was formed just 19 days before the purchase closed, with a Santa Fe real estate attorney, Charles V. Henry IV, listed as its registered agent. There was no public disclosure of beneficial ownership, until last month, when Clara Bates, a reporter with the Santa Fe New Mexican, was able to find mention of the LLC’s owners in court documents pertaining to the owners’ attempts to force the state of New Mexico to place the value of the ranch at just $9 million for tax purposes — the same tactic Trump has used throughout his career to avoid paying real estate taxes.
The new owners are Don and Mary Catherine Huffines. Court documents list Mary Catherine as trustee and their son Colin as manager of a related entity, San Rafael One LLC.
Don Huffines is a Dallas real estate developer and hard-right Republican politician who, along with his identical twin brother Phillip, co-founded Huffines Communities in 1985, now one of the largest residential real estate development firms in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. A fifth-generation Texan whose family has operated car dealerships in the Dallas metroplex since 1924, Huffines served one term in the Texas State Senate representing North Dallas from 2015 to 2019, ran unsuccessfully against Governor Greg Abbott from the right in 2022, and on March 3, 2026 — three days before this article was published — won the Republican primary for Texas Comptroller, the state’s chief financial officer. A self-described MAGA Republican, he has endorsements from Ted Cruz, the late Charlie Kirk, and just last week, Donald J. Trump. Don and Mary Catherine spent Valentine’s Day in 2025 at Mar-a-Lago.
Another son, Russell Huffines, serves as Associate Director of Agency Outreach in the White House Office of Cabinet Affairs under President Donald J. Trump, and co-runs HEST Investments — a Dallas-based venture capital family office — alongside his father.
And here’s where the dot-connecting comes full circle. Remember Sam L. Susser? Yeah. Hold on to your hats, friends. It’s about to get bumpy.
In 2014, Sam L. Susser sold Susser Holdings Corporation — the parent company of the Stripes convenience store chain — to Energy Transfer Partners for approximately $1.8 billion. He then relocated to Dallas, where he founded Susser Bank, a private financial institution, taking on the role of Chairman. To help govern it, he assembled a board that included James R. Huffines — Don Huffines’ older brother.
James Huffines is a veteran Texas banker who had served as President and Chief Operating Officer of PlainsCapital Corporation before becoming COO of Hilltop Holdings, the financial empire built by Dallas billionaire Gerald J. Ford.
Ford, it happens, had built a significant portion of that empire in partnership with Ronald Perelman — the same Ronald Perelman whose company printed Oklahoma’s Powerball tickets in 2008, and whose name appears in Jeffrey Epstein’s personal black book.
In March 2026, the newly-created Epstein Survivor’s Truth Commission ordered Don and Mary Catherine Huffines to immediately halt all construction at the now-renamed San Rafael Ranch, finding the new front gate was being built without proper permitting. Aerial shots taken by the New York Times showed that the Huffines had also excavated a large portion of the ranch’s helipad and labyrinth gardens, leaving a deep, massive hole in a property where witnesses said two “foreign girls” had been buried on orders from Epstein and Maxwell after being murdered during “rough fetish sex.”
In tomorrow’s Part 3 of this series, I will take a closer look at the businesses Don and Russell Huffines run together through HEST Investments, and how at least one of their portfolio companies — which works with neonatal cardiac tissue harvested within 30 days of live birth — occupies a field of science that was of well-documented special interest to Jeffrey Epstein.
Image: The Stripes convenience store in Altus, Oklahoma, that sold the winning Powerball ticket to Zorro Trust in 2008.
🎩 Author Alisa Valdes (Rodriguez)
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THE DEMOCRATS DO NOT HAVE A BRAND
CASAR: For the $1 billion we’re being asked to spend on Trump’s ballroom, we could fund 217 million free school lunches and 15,000 more teachers. As secretary of education, which do you think helps our nation more? McMAHON: I think those are incredibly weird comparisons