The Magic Number

In the beginning was the lottery....

Wait a minute.

When I was a young buck with my first real job working at Fedders in Edison, there was a guy named Raoul who was, in the parlance, a numbers runner.

Every morning around first coffee break he'd come around and take everyones' bets on the numbers. There were a lot of players on the chassis line where I worked.

A little explanation. The numbers or "policy" was a daily lottery operated by organized crime. What you'd do is pick three numbers and play a quarter dollar. The payoff was 600 to one, so that bet could win you $150.

People had their lucky numbers and played them regularly. You could "box" the numbers, i.e., play them in any sequence they appeared. Say your pick was 1, 2, and 3. You'd play combinations.:

1-2-3
3-2-1
3-1-2
2-3-1
2-1-3
1-3-2

I might have missed a few.

The winning number was usually the last three digits of the number of stocks traded that day or the handle at Aqueduct as listed in the New York Daily News or other fine newspaper.

The odds were pretty decent that you'd take home a roll of cash, the game was honest, and it was customary to tip Raoul a $20 bill if you won.

But it was bad, because it was illegal, and certain Italian gentlemen ran it.

Then we had the New Jersey lottery, the odds were longer, bit it was good, because it was the government that was picking your pocket. Then we had casino gambling in Atlantic City which was even gooder because it was a state franchised operation.

Then, we had the Powerball and Megamillions, where the odds are infinitesimal, there's no real chance of winning, pathetic people stand in line to lay down their social security checks against a chance but it's better because it is Fair and Honest and Could Not Possibly Be Corrupted because it was All Nice and Legal.

But Eddie Tipton knew better.

Eddie Tipton was a computer geek with a checkered past who, somehow, ended up as the security director for the Multi State Lottery Association.

He had a felony jacket all right, but even though a person cannot work for the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission, you can work for the MSLA just fine.

Tipton, it seems, wrote the software for the random number generator that is supposed to Make Sure Everything Is Above Board And Honest To A Fault.

As he tells it on a whim he inserted code which allowed him to set winning numbers on any given day and it worked like a charm. I think Eddie was an inherently criminal guy who tumbled over a really big score, and like other criminals he didn't know when to quit.

In 2005 he suggested to his equally larcenous brother who was taking a trip to Colorado that he should play certain numbers on certain days and something nice3 was sure to happen.

And it did. Eddie's brother Tommy through a straw man split a three way win worth 4.6 million dollars with two innocent bystanders.

But things went bad. Tommy fell from a tree while, improbably, hunting Bigfoot, and came to the attention of the Effa Bee Eye about why he was trying to exchange $450,000 in consecutively marked bills.

Eddie wasn't finished yet.  Eddie eventually was instrumental in obtaining $24 million or more-nobody really knows how much or where it's hidden-in rigged lottery prizes.

In 2010, a Hot Lotto winning ticket in Iowa worth $16.5 million went uncashed for nearly a year until Robert Rhodes, who should have known better, tried to redeem it on behalf of an anonymous trust.

That's when the wheels came off the project.

It's a fascinating story, and you can read about it here.

Twelfth Year Of Dougloids

Here we are and this is the twelfth year we've been publishing the Dougloid Papers and as is customary we add the photograph of the cranky kid who is our mascot.

I'm guessing he is probably a cranky adolescent these days thinking about the stuff that cranky adolescent boys muse over while they're pretending to have their noses in a book or paying attention to the schoolmarm.

I've started writing a story in the noir fiction genre, and it looks like it could be a novella. All I'll tell you about it is that it's the tale of a slightly dodgy ex military police investigator veteran of the Korean war who looks up an old barracks pal and rapidly finds himself  deep in a pool of crap. It has to do with murders, gunplay, a road trip to Los Angeles and the quest for a small time hoodlum who made a big score by accident.

The title is "Rocket 88" and of course it features a hot rodded Oldsmobile Rocket 88.

That's the creative effort. There are also some legal type writings in the works.

Yr editor is currently without a teaching gig as of last December 17.

That was a Monday and as usual I graded papers and assignments, posted the week's grades, read up on the topic du jour for the week, created a power point for my students, and did a bit of research.

All that took place in the morning and about 4:30 in the afternoon I logged onto my faculty email to find a notice from the administration that Vatterott College had closed in its entirety, effective immediately, thus hanging out to dry anyone who depended on their job, a cohort of students, and all the instructors.

Talk about a head snapper....I'll be following the story with interest as I scuffle around for another teaching gig but I do have a significant backlog of guitar amps to repair and a number of long term projects to work on.

 I'll stay occupied.

I get my next month visit with the oncologist to see whether I renew my lease for another six months. I am hopeful and I feel good physically, or as well as a 70 year old guy can feel.

An acquaintance of mine  has cut off all contact with me, and I expect it to be permanent unless something changes on on the other end and they decide that I'm worth talking to, even if it's just for information like "Any hereditary diseases I should know about?"
We do have them, y'know, and a weakness for the healing grape runs deep among the women of this family. It's something to talk about. The first step in dealing with something, anything, is to acknowledge its existence and speak out.

I remain hopeful. I was listening to George Mitchell talking today on IPR about negotiating the Good Friday Accords in Ireland, and that seemed to be considerably more difficult than this ought to be.

It turns out I'm not the only one in this pickle, and it seems that communicating through social media makes it easy to dump people who are inconveniences.

Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven as it is said.

Stick around. There's more to come.