He’s Got the Luck o’ the Yugoslavians

“God was tired of me winning only once,” Huntington Beach real estate broker John Cirson proclaimed, “so last Saturday, I won twice.”

It’s that easy, when you’re Orange County’s winningest state lottery entrant. You just drive up to the Chevron station, buy 22 tickets, and one of them turns up as an entry for the Big Spin. So then you go to the 7-Eleven and buy eight more, and one of those turns up with a Big Spin entry.

Cirson, who’s won four $100 prizes, one $1,000 ticket and five others that could qualify him any day now for the Big Spin, has probably cashed in more from the California Lottery than anyone in Orange County. He’s won so many times that he brings flowers now when he arrives at the regional lottery office to cash in.

“He’s in here so often it’s ridiculous at times,” lottery official Jim Braxton said.

It’s not that Cirson, a Yugoslavian immigrant who claims to look like Marlon Brando, has won more money than anyone else. He’s probably won more times than anybody else--and he just keeps winning.

“It’s incredible to count--maybe 150 times. Who knows?” he said.

Cirson blames it on “chance,” aided by his two diamond horseshoe rings and an uncanny sense about things he can’t explain.

“Look, I try to explain: Yesterday, I come to 7-Eleven store, and I bought a little drink for me, apple juice I think, and there were two guys and a girl that came in and bought two tickets each. I go up after them and buy four tickets--and I had three $2 tickets. There.”

He pulls on his Brando mustache and waits for the impact to set in. “Sometimes I buy two, three, five, 10 tickets a day. It depends on how I feel, depends on if I have money, too. One day I drive by and I see Albertson’s store, and I say: ‘Let me go in.’ So I go in and I buy eight tickets, and I get three entries (a ticket for the Big Spin).”

It started in Yugoslavia during World War II, he said, when Germans invaded his village and killed nearly all of his family. “Somebody, I don’t know if it was a guard or who, come up to me and said: ‘Hey Jim, run!’ So I was a kid, I didn’t know nothing, I run.”

He jumped over a fence in a hail of machine-gun fire and still has the scar at the base of his thumb where the last bullet nicked him. “That thing follow me all of my life, I don’t know why; it’s like somebody there, telling me: ‘Hey, bozo, do this, do that.’ ”

So when the voice says, go to Albertson’s, he goes. He buys. Cirson figures on balance that he’s surely lost a lot more money than he’s won. But he’s got those five tickets in there, any one of which could give him a shot at the big money. He’s just waiting for the call.

“I tell these people at state of California Lottery, I do not even know how Sacramento looks, I would so like to go see it! I think it should be about time for somebody to call me and say: ‘Hey, bozo, come over and spin that wheel.’ I would be a real attraction for the lottery: this good-looking guy? Marlon Brando! And by the personality I have; also, I have a voice better than Mario Lanza.”

Cirson broke into a chorus of “It’s Now or Never,” as his son, Eugene, filled the suburban tract home with the sound of his accordion.

Then he ordered Eugene back to the phone to start dialing again. Somebody left a toll-free number on the answering machine Thursday afternoon, but it was busy all day.

Cirson is sure it was Sacramento.

“The feeling I have, like they’re going to call me, and I believe I’m going to win,” he said. “I can’t say how big or how small, but I got a feeling like hundred thousand.” He thinks for a few moments. “I’m not greedy. Hundred thousand would be fine.”

He thinks a few moments more. “I know how to turn that into a million.”