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.