Number-conscious Gregg hits a lucky one

WASHINGTON -- He rarely takes a chance with lottery tickets, but, on a whim, Senator Judd Gregg, a notorious fiscal conservative, plunked down $20 for 20 Powerball tickets Monday night when he stopped at a gas station on his way to the Capitol for a vote.

That small, random investment won a stunned Gregg $853,492 yesterday, when he learned that he was one of 49 people to get a piece of the Powerball Lottery jackpot.

''I always considered myself to be one of the luckiest people in the country, just to represent New Hampshire, and now that's been confirmed," a jubilant Gregg said yesterday.

Of course, the antitax Republican lawmaker cautioned, the award is a mere half million or so, after federal taxes. But he'll be spared having to hand over any of it to state bureaucrats, because New Hampshire has no state income tax.

Gregg isn't in desperate need of money; his Senate financial disclosure statements show he owns between $1.5 million and $6.2 million in stocks and other investments.

Asked what he would do with the windfall, Gregg quipped, ''whatever my wife tells me to," but he added that he would give an unspecified portion of the cash to his family's Hugh Gregg Foundation, which helps local charities in New Hampshire.

The 58-year-old senator explained that he had been pumping gas at a Citgo station in Washington when he happened to notice a sign advertising the $350 million Powerball jackpot. ''I said, 'Wow,' " Gregg recalled, and went in to buy 20 tickets, the numbers selected by machine.

Gregg almost left one page of the numbers at the register by mistake, but the checkout clerk, ''a very nice young woman," chased him to give him his missing ticket receipts. ''She was very nice," Gregg said. ''She could have kept the ticket herself. For all I know, that was the winning number."

When he first checked the paper the next morning, the senator said, he noticed immediately that he matched several of the winning numbers and thought, ''Wow; I got four out of the five numbers. I must have won about a hundred bucks."

Instead, he had won more than $850,000, missing the Powerball bonanza by four digits (it was 29; Gregg's ticket had 25).

He wasn't the only winner with New England ties. Someone, identified by WCVB-TV as Kristin Daley of Hanover, Mass., bought a ticket at Rockingham Mobil in Salem, N.H., and also won about $853,000.

News of Gregg's win spread quickly through the Capitol yesterday, just as senators were quarreling over how to trim the federal budget. The normally staid Gregg grinned broadly as he went about his work yesterday, while his colleagues taunted him about what to do with the cash influx.

Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, joked as he passed Gregg that there would be no more Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, for New Englanders to rely on, but instead ''Powerheap."

''They want drinks; they all want drinks," Gregg said of his fellow senators. ''Josh Bolten's already told me how to get the offsets," Gregg quipped, referring to the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The conservative senator's windfall sparked a bemused and sometimes envious reaction from his political opponents.

''There is a God; he did not win the whole thing," said Kathy Sullivan, chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. ''Judd Gregg was born with a horseshoe on his posterior." But, she added, ''if he wants to send $10,000 my way, I won't complain."

Keith Ashdown, vice president of policy for Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group, said that because Gregg is already well-off, he might consider donating the lottery winnings to reduce the federal debt. ''Lawmakers, since they're the ones who got us into this mess, should start paying down this uncontrollable debt," Ashdown said.

Jay Heidbrink, spokesman for the Center for American Progress, quipped that the Republican lawmaker might use the money to buy a state-of-the-art strategy facility for GOP colleagues in political and legal scandals.

Gregg has made one impulsive purchase. On the day he found out that his personal wealth would increase by more than $500,000, he went out and bought each member of his staff a special token of his affection: a lottery ticket.

Rick Klein of the Globe staff contributed to this report.