The $590.5 Million Quick Pick
Gloria MacKenzie, an 84-year-old retiree from Zephyrhills, Florida, won $590.5 million in the May 18, 2013 Powerball — the largest sole-ticket jackpot in U.S. history at the time. She bought the winning Quick Pick at a local Publix after another shopper let her go ahead in line. She took a lump sum of about $370.9 million before taxes.
For weeks in the spring of 2013, the town of Zephyrhills, Florida, waited to learn who held the winning ticket. The town, home to about 13,300 people some 30 miles northeast of Tampa, was known for its bottled spring water. Then, on June 5, 2013, the Florida Lottery answered the question: the winner was Gloria C. MacKenzie, an 84-year-old retiree originally from Maine and a mother of four, who lived in a modest tin-roof house in Zephyrhills. She held the only winning ticket in the May 18 Powerball drawing, a $590.5 million jackpot that was the second-largest lottery prize in American history at the time, behind only a $656 million Mega Millions prize split among three winners in March 2012. Because MacKenzie's ticket stood alone, hers was the largest jackpot ever won by a single ticket holder.
The winning ticket itself was a Quick Pick, a set of numbers chosen by the machine rather than by the player, bought at a Publix supermarket in Zephyrhills. In a statement provided to the Florida Lottery, MacKenzie said that while she was in line at the store, another lottery player had kindly let her go ahead in line to buy the ticket. She also said that before the drawing, she and her son Scott had agreed to split any proceeds. It was a small act of courtesy in a supermarket queue, followed by a twist of fortune so large that it is still retold as a lesson in patience: the person behind her in line stepped aside, and the ticket MacKenzie bought became the one that changed her life.
MacKenzie chose the lump-sum option, taking just over $370 million before taxes rather than the full jackpot spread across 30 annual payments. She claimed the prize at the Florida Lottery's Tampa headquarters and left quickly, without speaking to reporters, asking for privacy. Under Florida law, her name could not remain anonymous, so the announcement itself became the story: an 84-year-old widow, living quietly, suddenly holding one of the largest lottery fortunes ever paid to one person. The scale of the win, and the ordinariness of the winner, were precisely what made it so widely reported.
The harder part of the story came later, and it is the part that gives the win its lasting cautionary weight. In 2019, MacKenzie sued her son Scott and his financial adviser, alleging that her money had been mismanaged. According to reporting on the lawsuit, she claimed her portfolio had been placed in low-return investments such as certificates of deposit and money market funds while she was paying about $2 million in fees, and she alleged breach of fiduciary duty, negligence, and exploitation of a vulnerable adult, seeking damages in excess of $10 million. Scott Mackenzie's side disputed the account, saying the investments matched his mother's conservative objectives and effectively preserved her wealth. The dispute, whatever a court might ultimately have made of it, exposed the central problem of a sudden fortune: the winner must suddenly become an employer, a client, and a judge of financial advice, all at once, and usually with no experience in any of those roles.
MacKenzie's story is often told as a joke about a queue, but its real lesson is quieter and more practical. A windfall does not come with a management team, and the people closest to the winner are not automatically the right people to run the money. Family trust and financial competence are different things, and they need to be kept separate: independent advice, written terms, a clear understanding of fees, and a second opinion before large sums move. The kind stranger in the Publix line gave MacKenzie a moment of good luck. What she needed next, and what any winner needs next, was something far less cinematic: advisers chosen for their record rather than their relationship, and a plan that protects the winner's independence as carefully as it protects the money itself.
The lesson: Vet your advisors like the money depends on it — even family can be the wrong manager for a fortune.
Source: original reporting · How we source stories