Yes, Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch Trust Won $85 Million in the Oklahoma Lottery Two Days After He Went to Prison, and No One Asked Any Questions.
Part One in a Four-Part Series I'm Calling Zorro Ranch: Follow the Money.
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This is the first installment of a four-part series I’ve written in which I follow the money related to Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, from its purchase from the King family in 1993 to its new owners, Don and Mary Catherine Huffines. By following the money, a terrifying picture begins to emerge, an existential threat to the national security of the United States of America.
In 1993, former New Mexico governor Bruce King and his son Gary King, who later served as New Mexico’s attorney general, were in deep shit, financially. This, despite Bruce King, a democrat, having been the longest-serving governor in the state’s history, with three non-consecutive 4-year terms under his big ole cowboy belt.
Archives from the Albuquerque Journal show the King family businesses owed nearly $21 million in loans they couldn’t pay that year. So they reorganized their assets, and made the heartbreaking decision to sell off about half of Bruce’s beloved Pine Canyon Ranch and King Land and Cattle company in Stanley, New Mexico.
The buyer —who paid $12 million for the nearly 7000-acre portion of the ranch, including water rights — was something ridiculously named Zorro Trust, headed by a man named Jeffrey Epstein and based in that hotbed of ranching, New York City. That amount is equivalent to $27 million today.
The King estate told the local news media Epstein had plans to turn the site into something called Zorro Ranch, but when the Journal called Epstein for comment, he declined. Perhaps because the reporter was not a 12-year-old runaway girl. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Bruce King’s parents, William Samuel King and Mary Sue "Mollie" Schooler King, moved from Texas to New Mexico in 1917 as ranching pioneers. Bruce was born and raised on their W.S. King & Sons Ranch. The very same ranch his poor choices would later force him to sell off to a city slicker from Manhattan who planned to rename the place after a fictional masked vigilante who disguised himself as a wealthy nobleman.
As the granddaughter of a Mountainair, New Mexico, ranching family myself, I can only imagine the shame and ridicule something like that might have brought to the family in ranchy rural circles around here. Real cowboys in these parts have no love for fake cowboys from the coasts who come out here to stomp around in their dayglow $5000 boots that ain’t never touched the sides of a horse.
I’d almost feel sorry for Bruce King, if he wasn’t also the same piece of shit who refused, in 1979, to designate a massive uranium mine spill in Church Rock, on the Navajo nation, at the hands of United Nuclear Corporation, as a disaster. The spill released 1,100 short tons of solid radioactive mill waste and 94 million gallons of acidic, radioactive tailings solution into the Puerco River. The waste killed the sheep who drank it. It burned the feet of children who waded in the river. The plume carried 70 miles downstream and seeped 30 feet into alluvial soils and groundwater. You’ve probably heard of Three Mile Island, right? Welp. Church Rock was bigger. You haven’t heard of it because people like Bruce King didn’t want you to, and he didn’t want you to because it was “only Indians” who suffered. It remains the largest release of radioactive material in United States history. To this day, there’s been no real cleanup. But, again, I digress.
It’s impossible now to know whether the King family was aware, at the time of the ranch’s sale, that Epstein had no intention to run cattle on the land — that he, in fact, had plans to run an entirely different sort of flesh-selling operation there. Human. Children, to be precise.
Epstein survivor Annie Farmer has recounted being taken to Zorro Ranch to be raped by Epstein as a child. And among the most recent 3.5 million pages of Epstein-related files released by the United States Dept. of Justice was the hand-written journal of a minor child who was imprisoned there, impregnated by Epstein multiple times, and forced to give birth at least once. She was forced to hand her newborn daughter over to Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell. The diary is horrifying, with the girl describing Ghislaine attending the birth and telling the child not to look at the baby, to cover her eyes. She heard the baby cry, then nothing.
Epstein was not shy about his goals for the ranch. He told friends in science and tech that he wanted it to be a place where he could impregnate dozens of girls at once, to populate the world with his genetics. Reports say the ranch compound included six underground floors.
Despite this evidence and other testimony from witnesses who said they knew of two "foreign girls" who were raped and buried in the hills of Zorro Ranch on orders of Epstein and Maxwell — allegations contained in a redacted email in the DOJ files — the federal and state governments had never searched the property. In 2019, federal prosecutors in New York asked then-New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas to stand down his state investigation, citing concerns about parallel proceedings compromising their case. Balderas complied, handing over his materials. The federal prosecution he was promised never came. Epstein died in his cell that August. This year, New Mexico's state legislature created and funded a truth commission to investigate what really happened at Zorro Ranch and who was involved in what appears to be a massive coverup. For the first time ever, the property is finally being investigated — though it's hard to tell how much evidence might be left, given that the new owners have been engaged in extensive excavations and new construction. More on them later in this series.
We don’t know if Bruce’s son Gary knew about the child sex trafficking, rape, abuse and forced births taking place at what used to be his dad’s ranch. But he did know about the Florida conviction when he accepted several large cash donations from Epstein — one of the most notorious pedophiles and child sex traffickers in human history — and his associated trusts years later.
The first time Epstein was arrested was 2006, in Florida. Upon hearing this news, Gary King returned a $15,000 donation the Zorro Trust had given him for his campaign to be New Mexico’s attorney general. You think that ordeal might have stopped Gary from ever accepting cash from Epstein again. But it didn’t. Because Gary King, apparently, is a greedy conscience-free whore.
In 2014, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction (and far-too-brief, far-too-lenient “work release” 13-month imprisonment in Florida for procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute) Epstein sent at least three checks to King through two Epstein-owned companies and one from Epstein himself, totaling more than $15,000. These were for King’s campaign for governor.
In June of that same year, King sent Epstein an email thanking him for a pledged contribution of $50,000.
This all happened despite Gary King running on a promise to prosecute crimes against children. To avoid an appearance of impropriety, Epstein’s lawyers arranged for the donations to come from shell companies to avoid media scrutiny.
I guess it worked, kinda. At least until the latest round of Epstein files was released in January 2026.
One thing conspicuously missing from the files, however, is the surreal fact that on July 2, 2008, two days after Epstein began serving his Florida prison sentence, a company called Zorro Trust won the Oklahoma state Powerball lottery, in the amount of $85 million. The trust opted for a one-time cash payout that amounted to $29.3 million, after taxes.
There are few serious news stories connecting this win to Epstein. Having been a reporter in big newsrooms for a decade, I can tell you why. It’s because plausible deniability is built into the way the Oklahoma blind-trust lottery laws shield the identities of the winners. At the time, Oklahoma was one of only a handful of states that allowed lottery tickets to be purchased in the name of a trust whose owners would by law remain anonymous to the public. Even a freedom of information act request from a reporter would not be enough to compel the state to reveal the names of the individual or individuals behind the trust — only a court order can do that.
My investigations lead me to believe the winning ticket in July 2008’s Oklahoma Powerball was, indeed, Epstein’s Zorro Trust, and not, you know, some other Zorro Trust. Sources familiar with operations at Zorro Ranch tell me Brice Gordon bought the ticket — and, yes, they are too scared to let me use their names. We do know the winning ticket was purchased at a Stripes convenience store in Altus, Oklahoma, a town of 18,000, near an Air Force base — and a mere six-hour drive from Stanley, New Mexico. Gordon and his wife Karen co-managed the Zorro Ranch. They are both former soldiers in the New Zealand military. My sources here in New Mexico tell me they both used to prowl in Santa Fe and Albuquerque for underaged girls to bring to the ranch, and that they hosted large “sex parties” where the girls were raped by multiple people who were often in disguise. The Gordons inherited at least $2 million when Epstein died, and have since disappeared from the public eye.
Incredibly, on that same night Zorro Trust won the lottery — July 2, 2008 — a computer malfunction preempted the live televised broadcast of Oklahoma’s Pick 3 lottery drawing. Viewers tuning in to KOKH-FOX and KOCB-CW at 9:58 p.m. saw only a notice that the drawing wouldn’t be shown due to technical difficulties. The glitch wasn’t fixed in time for the 10 p.m. newscasts. The drawing was held later that night, monitored by an auditing firm, according to lottery marketing director Jay Finks. The Powerball drawing — the one whose winning ticket the Zorro Trust would claim nearly two months later — was a separate draw. Whether it too was affected that night, I have not yet been able to confirm.
While I’ve seen a few internet references to the Zorro Trust lottery win, I’ve never seen anyone look at the mysterious man who was in charge of the Oklahoma Lottery Commission in 2008, when it took place.
So, let’s do that, shall we?
But not now. This piece is already getting pretty long, and I know y’all have other things to do. So do I.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell you all about this official, and all about how the Zorro Trust win was not the first time he was involved in a massive fishy lotto win involving a private trust.
It’ll all be in tomorrow’s Part 2 of Zorro Ranch: Follow the Money. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss it.
Hello Alisa.... This is an Excellent Piece of Sleuthing... The MSM has totally ignored it... Epstein-Gate is opening one of the Gates of Hell, and I can understand why DJT is starting Wars to Distract from it...
You are a phenomenal reporter. Thank you.