If she shows up at Lockwood & Mead's World Headquarters, I'm quitting

Fearless fudrucker practices his defensive skills - i'm still nervous

My partner and acting CT Lottery president Francis X. Fudrucker isn't being paid for his service while he temporarily fills in for his now-fired, incompetent predecessor Anne Noble (hell of a negotiating job there, Frankie), but in view of this story from Pennsylvania, I think he should start getting hazard pay; and if he doesn't want it, those of us who may soon be cowering behind our desks will take it.

A Pennsylvania lottery player who kept buying losing scratch-off tickets called her string of losses a conspiracy and threatened to kill employees at state lottery headquarters, authorities said.

Towanda A. Shields is wanted on 53 charges, including harassment, stalking and terroristic threats, for phone calls and voice-mail messages that police said started as a “nuisance” last year and escalated into a “relentless” stream of hostile, sexually explicit and threatening statements to Pennsylvania Lottery officials in Lower Swatara Township.

Police there issued a warrant for her arrest Tuesday and are working with authorities in Philadelphia, where Shields lives, to bring her into custody.

“You can’t look at it and say, ‘This is just somebody venting,’ ” Lower Swatara Township Police Detective Robert Appleby told The Washington Post. “To go as long and hard as she did, you start to wonder if she was going to go any further.”

Appleby said Shields seemed to believe that the lottery was conspiring against her — playing her numbers in other states where she didn’t play. He said she insisted that state lottery officials owed her money for the games she had lost because of that.

“Most people know when they play the lottery, they’re not going to win,” Appleby said. [What? What? - you promised me, Frankie!] “She seemed like she had a sense of entitlement — that she was supposed to win the lottery.”

Police said in a statement that from April through December, Shields “repeatedly made death threats and harassed employees” at lottery headquarters.

The 47-year-old allegedly called employees from “burner” phones and told them she had searched their names online and discovered where they lived. She also said she had hired “her boys” to kill them, police said.