An Ontario man who pleaded guilty after trying to trick a group out of a $7-million lotto win says he still “can’t make it up to them” more than three years after the betrayal.

In a St. Catharines courtroom Tuesday, Frank Galella, 67, entered a guilty plea to theft over $5,000 and counselling to commit the crime of false pretenses, tied to an attempt to keep the jackpot in the family rather than splitting it among his 10 fellow Lotto 6/49 winners.

“Am I feeling all right? Of course, I’m not feeling all right,” Galella said from his home in Niagara Falls.

“I can’t make it up to them.

“I’m a Catholic,” Galella added. When asked if he has he been to confession recently, he replied: “Not lately.”

It all started in late July 2013. Galella, acting in his regular role as “group captain” of his Niagara-area lottery crew at the time, shelled out $11 for a $7-million jackpot draw, said OLG spokesperson Tony Bitonti. He said the group won with a string of seven lucky numbers on July 31, 2013 — but the 10 other men on the ticket didn’t seem to know it.

Instead, Galella’s daughter, Joanne Galella, now 35, and his son appeared at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. prize centre at Yonge and Dundas Sts. in Toronto, presenting the winning ticket, Bitonti said.

The cash never made it into the family’s hands.

“From my understanding, (Frank Galella) told the group members that (their ticket) wasn’t a winner, but that his daughter won,” Bitonti said. “That’s when the suspicions arose.”

All ticket claims over $1,000 go through a brief review process, but “the one piece of information we don’t have is who bought the ticket,” he said. The OLG doesn’t record the identity of lotto ticket buyers, he said.

Soon after the supposedly exclusive jackpot, group members got suspicious.

“I was quite surprised,” said Angelo Long, one of the 10 men who would eventually collect their rightful winnings in the draw.

Calls to OLG from some of the 10 other winners — still uncertain of the windfall that awaited — escalated into a police probe and eventually to the Ontario Provincial Police’s investigations and enforcement bureau, attached to the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario.

In a release Wednesday, the OPP stated: “Mr. Galella was the group leader of a lottery group that won $7,036,047 in a Lotto 6/49 draw.

“In an agreed statement of fact read before the courts, Mr. Galella enlisted the assistance of two family members to claim the winning Lotto 6/49 ticket as their own.”

Frank Galella, who was the 11th member of the group, was arrested in October 2014.

His daughter was charged in connection with the case, which is still before the courts, according to a St. Catharines courthouse staffer.

Frank Galella is due back in court for sentencing on Sept. 8, 2016, in St. Catharines Superior Court, according to an OPP press release.

He’s the only one who hasn’t come forward to claim his share of the loot. He did not offer a reason for holding off on collecting the cash.

Bitonti said there’s no apparent reason for OLG, a Crown corporation, to withhold it should he show up, “but we’re not proactively going after him.”

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Ultimately, Bitonti said OLG documents from the winners, dated and signed from July 2013, showed them to be the rightful winners — along with Frank.

The 10 other winners received their novelty cheque in October 2014, each basking in about $640,000 of jackpot cash.

The 11 Ontarians typically played “quick pick” computer-generated numbers, gambling on two $11 tickets for each of the Wednesday and Saturday Lotto 6/49 draws, Bitonti said.

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