Fortune Cookie: Bonding with the Lottery King

Nearly every member of Martin’s immediate family, including his second son Martin Jose Daison, brother-in-law John Kennedy, and daughter Daisy, are directors of about 20 companies and partners in several others. Their social media accounts are all about CSR initiatives, social work, and philanthropy, punctuated by the oc­casional new Rolls Royce, a birth in the family, and footage from their homoeopathy college and their mansions. Seen through a glass darkly, these companies, with names like Scintillating Vil­las Pvt Ltd, DPF Textiles Pvt Ltd, Charles Property Developers Pvt Ltd, Dominant Skyscrapers, Martin Happy Home, and Martin Farms Pvt Ltd, seem like legitimate real estate businesses until you start to wonder where the capital came from and chase the trail of crumbs down to the not-so-secret lair that is the business of lottery. If the rags-to-riches story of a labourer from Myan­mar who started distributing and later printing lottery tickets in Coimbatore in the late 1980s is remarkable, then that of his vertiginous rise to becoming the sole distributor for several lotteries is downright thriller-worthy. Anyone who has ever bought a lottery ticket in Northeast India has likely been an un­witting participant in Santiago Martin’s rise to fame and power. He made precocious forays into Nagaland, Sikkim, West Bengal, Mizoram, Punjab, Maharashtra, Kerala, Bihar, Jharkhand and other states where lotteries were legal, bidding for distributing and marketing government lottery tickets. Selling hope to mil­lions every day, he quickly made millions in return, much of it quasi-legal and allegedly illegal.