This one, having to do with a suspicious lottery ticket worth $16.5 million, was full of dead ends. Now, Miller was offloading cases to colleagues. He had hired Sand four years earlier and made him the youngest prosecutor in a nine-attorney team that handled challenging cases all over the state.
His boss, an Iowa deputy attorney general named Thomas Miller, was retiring in July 2014 after nearly three decades of prosecuting everything from murder to fraud. Despite holding the contents of an investigation still open after more than two years, the file was barely half an inch thick. The file landed on Rob Sand’s desk with something less than a thud.