Three Toronto bakery employees will have plenty more dough to play with after winning a massive $50-million Lotto Max jackpot.
The men have been working at a west-end bakery since moving to Canada from Poland 20 years ago. They claimed the massive prize at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming prize centre in Toronto shortly before noon on Wednesday.
Presuming the trio splits the jackpot evenly, Zdzislaw Modlinski, Eugeniusz Borek and Wlodzimierz Konieczny will each receive $16.6 million.
The group won the prize in the March 11 draw, but it took days before they came forward to collect.
Borek said he was working all day Saturday and was too tired on Sunday to think about the draw. Finally on Monday he got around to pulling out the stack of tickets he and his two friends had bought. The winning ticket was the first one he checked.
"I was screaming, jumping, crying. I don't know; I was very, very, happy," he told reporters on Wednesday.
But Borek shouldn't have been too surprised to see the winning numbers. A few days before the big draw, Borek had a dream that he was pushing a big wheelbarrow full of cash.
"The next day, I had a dream that I was opening up a car wash and a gas station and a couple of other small businesses," he told reporters. "When I woke up, I thought, 'The money is coming, I am sure.'"
The three men are all of Polish descent, immigrating to Canada more than 20 years ago.
Borek said he was ready to retire immediately. Modlinski and Konieczny will follow suit, as soon as replacements are hired.
"I think after working for 20 years in the bakery, especially my father who worked on nightshifts, I think they really deserve this," said Modlinski's daughter Ewa. "Just being an immigrant and not speaking the language causes a lot of barriers, so I think that this will definitely open up a lot of doors for them to have a better standard of living."
Konieczny's daughter, Monica Howe, said there was going to be a champagne party in the group's future. The men said it was too early to say how they would spend the money.
Since Sept. 2009, there have been eight jackpot winners in Ontario.
It is the third $50 million jackpot won by groups in the Toronto area in recent months.
A group of 19 Bell Canada workers won the jackpot in January before nine other stepped forward to claim partial ownership. OLG paid the original group $31.7 million, while ownership of the rest of the prize remains embroiled in a court dispute.
Another $50 million prize remains unpaid as a group of Toronto-area factory workers face a similar dispute with an additional claimant.
On Monday, Toronto's Christos Rados won a $7 million Lotto 6-49 prize after playing the same numbers for nearly 20 years.
