DAILY NEWS WRITER
Courtesy of the New York Daily News
Samih (Sammy) Zabib holds up big check from the Borgata in Atlantic City. He hit the slots after his girlfriend bugged him to go buy her fancy pair of jeans.
Samih (Sammy) Zabib holds up big check from the Borgata in Atlantic City. He hit the slots after his girlfriend bugged him to go buy her fancy pair of jeans.
Zabib, from Astoria, hit the jackpot on a 2-cent slot machine at the Borgata Friday after going to the Atlantic City casino solely to buy a pair of pricey designer jeans his nagging sweetie Anna just had to have.
Armed with an Internet printout of the jeans she wanted, Zabib got in his car at the crack of dawn for the 2-1/2-hour trip.
“She was mad all week that I had forgotten to buy the pants. We had an argument, maybe more. So I drove down at 6:30 in the morning,” Zabib, 42, told the Daily News. “When I got there, the store wasn’t open. So I decided to kill some time and play a little.”
After about 30 or 40 minutes, “this one machine froze on me. So I got security. He looked up and told me I’d won. I said, ‘Won what?’ And he said, ‘All of it,’ pointing to the top. It said $779,000.”
Zabib, who fled the civil war in Lebanon 20 years ago, was “in shock.”
“My legs started to crumble. I had to sit down or I would have fallen to the floor. This is the most I’ve ever won. I’ve won a few jackpots – like $1,500, $2,000 – but never like this.”
After verifying his good fortune, Zabib called Anna.
“She was driving to work,” he said. “She started screaming. I told her to calm down. I was afraid she’d crash. Thank God she didn’t.”
Zabib, a fleet manager for a limousine company, estimates he played “a couple hundred” before hitting it big. Although it was a 2-cent slot, he had “maxed out” each spin by playing $4 at a time.
“I come down here once a week because I like the place. I play different machines all night long. But I never look at how much I’ve lost. If you do that you’ll never come back,” he added with a laugh.
Zabib plans to send some of his winnings to his mother and sister back in Lebanon.
“I always send them money,” he said. “The civil war was tough. I have very bad memories of that. But at least I can help them now.”
As for marriage to Anna – he refused to reveal her last name – Zabib thought for a moment before saying, “We don’t know yet.”
But he finally did get the pants – a pair of $149 Dojo by Seven jeans from the Borgata’s upscale and trendy Whim shop. For free.
