Annie Donnelly’s love of Take 5 will get her four years behind bars, at least.
The petite Long Island mother of three yesterday pleaded guilty to stealing $2.3 million over a 3 1/2-year period to feed her lottery gambling addiction.
She said she spent $6,000 a day on a variety of Lotto and scratch-off lottery games.
Donnelly, 38, of Farmingville, admitted she used her job as trusted bookkeeper to a group of doctors to write checks to herself, to cash and to petty cash to fund her “out of control” gambling habit.
“I started playing the Lotto numbers for fun, hoping I would win a little extra money. In the beginning I would spend about $20 a day,” she wrote in a statement to police. “I would even do a couple of scratch-offs if I had the money.”
But within months, she noted, “my betting escalated” – first rising into the hundreds of dollars, and then into the thousands.
“I really started getting out of control,” she said, describing how she eventually was visiting a greeting-card shop near her home twice a day to buy tickets.
“I couldn’t keep up with my addiction . . . so I started taking money out of my home equity.” And then, she confessed, “I hit rock bottom . . . I started stealing money from my job.”
“I knew I was going to get caught eventually. I actually wanted to get caught because I knew that is the only way I could or would ever stop doing the things I have been doing.”
Donnelly wrote all the checks for amounts under $3,000, and she moved money around to different business accounts – again to avoid raising red flags, said prosecutor Donna Planty.
And while she made the checks out to herself or cash, Donnelly entered them in the medical office’s computer accounting system as payments to vendors, Planty said.
The stealing started in June 2002, soon after Donnelly began working for Great South Bay Surgical Associates in Babylon, the prosecutor noted.
That year, Donnelly took $41,261, Planty said. The next year, she stole $225,482; the next, $675,247.
And last year, before her arrest in November, she ripped off $1,381,927.
Although she won jackpots ranging as high as $25,000, she never hit it really big, Planty said.
Sources said it’s likely that her total winnings were less than $100,000.
Donnelly’s scam was exposed after a check written by one of her employers bounced.
“She had the run of the accounts. She plundered their entire outfit,” said a spokesman for Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota.
But, he noted, Donnelly didn’t live high on the loot – she used it solely to feed her addiction.
“She lives in an extremely modest house, drives a very modest car. She blew it all on Lotto,” he said.
Under the terms of her plea agreement, Donnelly, who’s being held on $150,000 bail, will get four to 12 years behind bars when she’s sentenced Sept. 20.
She also will have to repay the stolen money – meaning she’ll have to sell the house she lived in with her husband and three kids, which has an estimated value of $375,000.
At the house yesterday, her husband, Scott, said, “More than going to jail, she needs help.”
“She was a great woman. She got sick,” he said. “She got hooked into gambling.”
He said he hadn’t known the extent of her obsession.
“She played Lotto and never made much of it,” he said. “She would tell me she won once in a while.
“As long as the bills were paid, why would I doubt what she was doing?”
At M&K Cards, where Donnelly spent most of her millions, storekeeper Shawn Haq described her as “one of our best customers.”
He said he thought she was rich – “nobody else could play that much money.”