Middletown man splits Lottery winnings with waitress
By Richard J. Bayne
Times Herald-Record
TOWN OF WALLKILL – It all started at Maddy’s Diner a day before New Year’s Eve. Henry “Pucho” Brown ordered a BLT and a coffee. He offered waitress Kimberly Cruver a $2 tip.
Cruver said she wouldn’t accept the money. Brown, who lives in Middletown, eats at Maddy’s almost every day, and Cruver wasn’t going to take a $2 tip for a sandwich and a coffee.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Brown told her. “I’ll play your birthday in the Lottery, and if the number comes in, I’ll give you half.”
Cruver’s birth year is 1965, so on that Wednesday morning before New Year’s Eve, Brown, a regular Lottery player, called his “man,” John at Middletown Liquor on Route 211, and asked him to put Cruver’s birth year on two $2 Win 4 tickets.
Too many people were trying to play 1965 that day, Brown said, and the system wouldn’t take his entry. So they ended up playing 9561.
Brown won $10,000.
On New Year’s Eve, when Brown found out he had won, he called Maddy’s right away. Everyone at the diner knew that Brown, a celebrated Latin percussion musician, founder of Pucho and his Latin Soul Brothers and a 2003 inductee of the International Latin Music Hall of Fame, would honor the agreement.
“Some people in my family thought I was crazy, but I’m a man of my word,” Brown said.
He confessed, there was a brief moment of hesitation. Sitting at the counter at Maddy’s this week, Brown, 77, described a scene right out of a Warner Bros. cartoon, in which Greed, sitting on one shoulder, and Larceny, on the other, tried to talk him into keeping mum about the win, and pocketing the entire $10,000.
“But the heart won out,” Brown said, punching himself in the chest.
After Brown finished his story, the crowd at Maddy’s buzzed about the 1994 Nicolas Cage-Bridget Fonda movie, “It Could Happen to You,” in which an NYPD officer wins $4 million in the lottery and splits it with a waitress.
In the movie, the waitress buys the diner where she works.
Cruver, a single mom, said she plans to spend every penny of her $5,000 on her two sons.
“It’s me and my boys against the world,” she said.
Brown, who traveled the world with Pucho and his Latin Soul Brothers, said his share of the money is already gone. He had some bills to pay.
And then he picked up his flip phone and called John with a new round of Lottery pick
