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- [00:00]
Ian Coss
Support for Scratch and win comes from Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law not available in all states. So how did you start working at the lottery?
- [00:26]
David O'Reilly
Okay, so I got out of high school and went to work part time in the state house.
- [00:32]
Sheila Dabrowski
I was working in a warehouse, sort of a dead end job, and my dad told me that I should go apply at the lottery.
- [00:41]
Ian Coss
Sheila Dabrowski and David O'Reilly were just teenagers when they both heard about jobs opening up at the Massachusetts State Lottery.
- [00:49]
David O'Reilly
And they were looking for people to work the night shift.
- [00:52]
Sheila Dabrowski
It would be a night job, working.
- [00:53]
Ian Coss
The overnight shift, six at night to seven in the morning, six.
- [00:57]
David O'Reilly
So it wasn't really that desirable.
- [00:59]
Sheila Dabrowski
They just asked if I had a driver's license and how many hours I could work.
- [01:03]
David O'Reilly
And I said, hmm, that sounds like an opportunity.
- [01:06]
Sheila Dabrowski
They hired me on the spot. They needed people right away.
- [01:14]
Ian Coss
We're picking up the story in 1976, it's been five years since the lottery bill passed into law and two years since the first scratch ticket came out. But once again, sales of the lottery's existing games were in decline. The scratch ticket craze had worn off. And so the lottery was staffing up to launch a new game. A new kind of game really, that required a level of infrastructure and people power unlike anything the state had attempted before. For one thing, it was a daily lottery drawing rather than weekly. But the real difference, the thing that made this game so much more complicated to pull off, was that for the first time, players cut to pick their own numbers.
- [02:00]
Sheila Dabrowski
Picking your own number was a completely different form of gambling.
- [02:05]
Ian Coss
It was called simply the numbers game. You want number? You want five? I won number five. Number seven. But for the game to work, all the betting slips with the players numbers had to be received and recorded by the lottery before the drawing took place.
- [02:25]
Sheila Dabrowski
The customer kept a copy, the store kept a copy, and we had to bring a copy right back that night.
- [02:31]
Ian Coss
Betting closed at 5pm the drawing was at 10.30pm just a few hours to collect thousands of slips from stores around the entire State. When O'Reilly and Dabrowski first started at the lottery, they were foot soldiers in this daily effort.
- [02:49]
Sheila Dabrowski
We had these gremlins, if you remember what a gremlin is, it was a very small car that we used. We used estate cars.
- [02:57]
Ian Coss
Picture it 19 year old kids in gremlins fanning out across the state, each with a route in a list of lottery retailers. Names, towns, addresses, all organized on color coded index cards.
- [03:11]
Sheila Dabrowski
Remember those great big books that had maps that helped out a couple of.
- [03:17]
Ian Coss
Times and it was a pretty good gig. The store owners would sometimes let the drivers grab a soda out of the fridge. They could even bring a friend along for the ride, as long as no one noticed.
- [03:27]
Sheila Dabrowski
Girlfriend, friend, sister, yeah, anybody who would want to go, really.
- [03:33]
Ian Coss
But the stakes here were real.
- [03:35]
Sheila Dabrowski
I hadn't been trusted like that with a job, ever. You couldn't be late.
- [03:40]
Ian Coss
These tickets carried the weight of dreams. They had to get back to the lottery every day, rain or shine, traffic accidents, no matter what.
- [03:49]
David O'Reilly
It was icy and I spun out and the tree just came at me. So yeah, I hit a tree. Yeah, total my car, total my car.
- [03:58]
Ian Coss
And did you still have to get the lottery tickets in?
- [03:59]
David O'Reilly
Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. They send somebody out to get the tickets.
- [04:04]
Ian Coss
In the early years of state lotteries, all they offered were so called passive games. You buy a ticket, the ticket comes with a number. You wait to see if your number comes up. Even a scratch ticket, however interactive it might seem, is all predetermined from the moment it's printed. You don't choose your winning numbers, they're assigned to you. So why change it up? Why all this effort? Why send teenagers out driving around in snowstorms just so that lottery players can choose their own numbers? The reason is that a game just like this already existed. People already loved it. And it was run by gangsters.
- [04:45]
David O'Reilly
The lottery was taking over for the old bookies.
- [04:56]
Ian Coss
From GBH News, this is scratch and win the making of America's most successful lottery. I'm Ian Coss. Before the Massachusetts lottery could claim to be number one, they had to take out the competition. Because it just so happened that one of the most profitable illegal gambling enterprises in the entire country was operating right at their doorstep in Boston. The question now was, could the state beat the mob at their own game? This is part three. Have you played your number? When I started spending time at lottery stores and talking to lottery players, I struggled a bit with how to start a conversation. Questions like, why do you play the lottery? Would produce short, routine answers. The question that always seemed to get people talking was, how do you pick your numbers? How do you pick your numbers?
- [06:09]
Elvis
Every day I play my dog's birthday, I play my birthday last four numbers of my mother's phone.
- [06:15]
Ian Coss
You know, shit like that. You've been playing the same number for 10 years. What's the number? I can't tell. It's hard to overestimate the power and allure of choice In a world of long odds, factors far outside of all our control. There's a magic in picking your own number, A strange mingling of chance and choice, however unlikely it is that the number will actually come up at that number. I'll be here. My first day here, I met this man from Brazil who every week plays the date that he first arrived in the United States and the date of his daughter's birth again and again, as if the gambles and dreams of his entire life are bound up in these simple three digits. Maybe the God throw money to me. It's really a kind of mystical act. With all the rituals and traditions you might expect. Dreams, astrology, numerology. So three plus two is five, plus five is 10. That's a one. Sports dates, license plates. It's all mixed up in there. Even the New York Yankees.
- [07:26]
Elvis
I keep the 99 in there. Cause Judge, he's my man. So I got double nines in one of my numbers.
- [07:32]
Ian Coss
I'm done. Hey, can I get your name real quick? Nope. Thank you.
- [07:37]
Elvis
Elvis.
- [07:38]
Ian Coss
Just call me Elvis.
- [07:39]
Stephen Robertson
That's my first name.
- [07:40]
Ian Coss
All right. You can call it the numbers game, call it the daily number, or simply the numbers. Whatever you call it. This game we're talking about has its roots in Harlem in the 1920s. There's a gang in town that hangs around with a pencil writing number down. Many different lottery traditions converged in New York in the 1920s. From Italy, from Ireland, from the Caribbean. So even back then, the idea of betting on random numbers was not exactly new.
- [08:22]
Stephen Robertson
A lot of the earlier games, the numbers that people bid on were drawn out of barrels or people were sold numbered tickets.
- [08:31]
Ian Coss
Stephen Robertson is the co author of the book Playing the Gambling in Harlem between the Wars.
- [08:37]
Stephen Robertson
And, you know, there were limits to the extent to which that allowed people to bet on the numbers they wanted. And there were all sorts of questions about whether those games could be fixed or not.
- [08:47]
Ian Coss
So these early numbers games had a limited reach until Sometime in the 1920s, somebody in Harlem made the breakthrough.
- [08:56]
Stephen Robertson
And for our money, that somebody is probably Caspar Holstein.
- [09:00]
Ian Coss
Caspar Holstein worked as a red cap at Penn Station, which at that time was one of the better jobs that a black man could get in New York. Red caps would carry people's luggage, give directions, hail taxis. And so Holstein would have seen up close how the rich, powerful, and white class of the city lived The Story.
- [09:21]
Stephen Robertson
Is he was collecting financial pages. He was trying to find a way to get ahead. He was paying attention to numbers. You know, the stock market was people making money off numbers. And at some point he realised that he could use those numbers and bring them over to the kind of gambling that was going on.
- [09:39]
Ian Coss
And he would do this using the so called clearinghouse numbers.
- [09:43]
Stephen Robertson
So the clearinghouse was reporting each day on the total transactions between banks in New York City as well as as a number for the Federal Reserve.
- [09:53]
Ian Coss
Every day a clerk walked out of the clearinghouse building in lower Manhattan and wrote these various figures on a blackboard. They were also published in the financial pages, just like how papers published the NASDAQ and Dow averages today. What Holstein worked out in this possibly apocryphal story is that all he had to do was pick certain digits out of those clearinghouse numbers, combine them and you get a truly random three digit number. It would be public, it would be daily, and most important, it would be impossible to fix. However it happened, the Clearinghouse Numbers was born. The game had a very simple structure. You pick your three digits, write them on a slip of paper and deliver it to one of the many numbers runners in the neighborhood. Along with the money you're betting, maybe just a few pennies or a nickel. All these bets are pooled together and at 10am the day's number is revealed. If your number hit, meaning it matched, the money you had bet would be multiplied often 600 fold. In an instant, 10 cents could become $60 real money. In the 1920s, playing the numbers became a fact of life. In 1920s Harlem. It was everywhere. And this is what Robertson and his co authors document.
- [11:26]
Stephen Robertson
One of the things that we did in that project was to look really closely at Harlem's two black newspapers, the New York Age and the New York Amsterdam News. And we were really surprised by what we found.
- [11:37]
Ian Coss
They found human interest stories about people who had hit the number and how much money they want. Stories about the lavish lifestyles of the so called bankers who ran the games. Stories about how the profits from numbers were being used to finance a black baseball team in the career of boxer Joe Louis.
- [11:56]
Stephen Robertson
There's a whole numbers kind of supporting industry that you can track.
- [11:59]
Ian Coss
The newspapers also had ads for so.
- [12:02]
Stephen Robertson
Called dream books, books that would literally tell you that if you saw, you know, I don't know, a cow jumping over the moon in that this was the three digit number that you should play.
- [12:12]
Ian Coss
Dreaming of apples. Play 416 bugs. 305. A gravestone. 999.
- [12:20]
Stephen Robertson
And they sold thousands of copies of these dream books.
- [12:23]
Ian Coss
Then there were endless newspaper columns criticizing the numbers as immoral or ungodly. There was even a story about a priest who told his parishioners that if they were playing the numbers, he didn't want their dirty money in his collection plate.
- [12:38]
Stephen Robertson
So he passed the collection plate round. Instead of the hundreds of dollars that he usually collected, they collected something like $10 only because everyone in the congregation was playing numbers. And so the clergyman then recanted, and he sent the plate round again and said, okay, I'll take your money, even if you played numbers. And suddenly there's hundreds of dollars there again.
- [12:56]
Ian Coss
Seeing as the numbers were, of course, illegal, there were also stories of arrests and court proceedings. The researchers could then map these arrests block by block, building by building.
- [13:07]
Stephen Robertson
And it really highlighted that numbers was literally everywhere in the neighbourhood. They're all talking about it, they're all placing the bets, and it's in every institution in the city.
- [13:22]
Ian Coss
Given how much has been written about New York, the Harlem Renaissance, the roaring twenties, I think it's surprising and also telling that this simple, ubiquitous activity is rarely part of those narratives. But it should be. The numbers was called the most popular indoor sport in Harlem. It was one of the most important forms of black owned business, a source of capital for the neighborhood.
- [13:48]
Stephen Robertson
But I think the other real magic of this as a game is that connecting it to financial institutions in the 1920s gave it a kind of connection with playing the stock market.
- [14:00]
Ian Coss
The stock market was all the rage in the 1920s, before it crashed, that is. But only about 2 or 3% of Americans actually owned stocks at that time. So most people, certainly most black people, were not involved. And the clearinghouse numbers, even though the game was illegal, even though it was purely a game of chance, offered a way into that world.
- [14:24]
Stephen Robertson
People talked about investing when they played the numbers. You know, where the people who ran the games were known as bankers, and it was the bank that was paying out. And, you know, and there's a lot of evidence that this is how people who played the game understood it.
- [14:39]
Ian Coss
It's a little hard today to think of betting money on a random number as a form of investment. But for black residents of Harlem who maybe didn't have access to the banking system at all, betting a few cents on the number every day was not such an irrational act.
- [14:56]
Stephen Robertson
It makes perfect sense to put a little bit of the money you've got onto this number because it could transform your life in a way that almost nothing else in Your life could. And, you know, and it really, if it comes down to it, is the share market really that more rational than numbers gambling? You know, I don't kind of think it is.
- [15:16]
Ian Coss
The numbers eventually spread to black communities all over the northeast, from Baltimore to Philadelphia to Boston, where it remained a cultural staple for decades. So when we started working on this series, my co producer, Isabel Hibbard, and I knew that we would want to talk to people who had played the numbers here in Boston, especially in the black community. But we had trouble finding people willing to talk about it, even now, decades later. The numbers, after all, was illegal. In a final effort, Isabel went to visit a senior center in a neighborhood called Grove hall in the heart of black Boston. For good measure, she brought along her grandmother, who is exactly the right age to be hanging out at the center. And there the two stumbled on a lively game of poquino. It's kind of like bingo. And the women here, they wear, all women are playing for pennies, Red solo cups filled with pennies. Everyone antes up, and at the end, someone will be going to the bank with rolls of coins or maybe just saving them for next week. Apparently, the women here had wanted to play for quarters, but the senior center wouldn't allow it. Somewhere between pennies and quarters, a casual gain becomes gambling. It seems we were in the right place.
- [16:51]
Joanne Chambers
I think I came to Boston in 1969.
- [16:56]
Ian Coss
One of the people Isabel met that day was Joanne Chambers, and she was happy to talk about the number. It had changed her life. Could you tell me where were you from originally? Where were you coming from when you moved to Boston?
- [17:10]
Joanne Chambers
I was born and raised in a place called Lovejoy, Illinois, better known as Brooklyn, Illinois.
- [17:16]
Ian Coss
Brooklyn is in southern Illinois, much closer to St. Louis than Chicago. And so moving to Boston in the 1960s was a big change.
- [17:25]
Joanne Chambers
Oh, my God. It was like three grocery stores, a fish market all down Washington street, and bars, you know, we'd go clubbing.
- [17:36]
Ian Coss
Chambers settled in the historically black neighborhood of Roxbury, where there was a black owned newspaper and nearby, a black owned jazz club. It was a gathering place of black cultures unlike anything she had experienced before.
- [17:49]
Joanne Chambers
I can remember that train, the orange line, somebody sitting next to me speaking another language. And they were dark as me. I'd never seen a Haitian. I didn't know what a Jamaican was. I was mortified. I'm serious. I ran home one day, got on the phone, called my girlfriend back home. Girl, these people here, some people here, they just black as we are, but they don't Talk like us. I'm kind of ashamed that I did, but that's really all I knew in 1969 and 68 when I first came here.
- [18:22]
Ian Coss
So when you first came to Boston, had you ever heard of the numbers?
- [18:26]
Joanne Chambers
No, never, Never, never, never, never heard of the numbers? No.
- [18:32]
Ian Coss
Even then, in the 60s, the numbers was mostly just a Northeast phenomenon. Chicago did have its own variant of the game called policy, but Chambers had never played that either. When she arrived in Boston, Chambers and her husband moved in with some family who were already living here. That's where they first saw the paper slips and the numbers.
- [18:53]
Joanne Chambers
I can remember in the morning, the kitchen table would be crowded there, you know, the in laws. But once the one morning I get up and I look to see what they were doing, and this man was there and they were writing, you know.
- [19:08]
Ian Coss
The man's name was Sandy. He always wore a suit and hat, maybe a trench coat in the winter. And he would make house calls in the neighborhood to find out what he.
- [19:18]
Joanne Chambers
Was there for was to pick up numbers. They would give him so much money on this number. So my husband found, and he got into it.
- [19:25]
Ian Coss
Joanne never played the numbers herself, but Mr. Chambers did.
- [19:30]
Joanne Chambers
He didn't have no dream books, I know that, but he may have been.
- [19:32]
Ian Coss
Consulting his dreams and one day his number hit. Sandy came back to the house with $3,000 cash. At the time, was that more money than you had ever seen before in 2024?
- [19:46]
Joanne Chambers
I don't see that today. For me, I mean, when you pour, you poor, so you. You know, that kind of money back then went a long ways. And I remember it was a store named Ferdinand's in Dudley Square at the time. And they sold the furniture. It was gorgeous. And we went there, and for $3,000, that was like a million we got. I never would forget these end tables. They were long, big, strong, gorgeous. And a couch. All of that and maybe some few other things for $3,000. That was our start, see. So when we get this apartment, we're gonna be all set. And we was all set.
- [20:30]
Ian Coss
There are countless stories like this of lives transformed and histories altered by a single hit. One that stuck out to me was the story of Secretary of State Colin Powell. When Powell was young, his father saw a number in his dream and then saw the same number up on the hymn board at church. He pooled together the money to bet $25 and wound up with a brown paper bag filled with $10,000, enough to move the family out of the Bronx and put a down payment on a house. By the 60s and 70s, when Joanne Chambers stumbled on the game in Boston, the numbers was not simply a local affair. And in black neighborhoods, it had spread to white working class communities too.
- [21:19]
Sheila Dabrowski
My aunt played it all the time.
- [21:21]
Ian Coss
At some point in doing interviews, I just started asking everyone I talked to if they remembered the numbers.
- [21:27]
Sheila Dabrowski
She'd always play 7 11, and she did really well with it.
- [21:31]
Ian Coss
In Dorchester, it was the cobbler and he was running numbers. I played 107. That was my address. That was my lucky number. I never hit it, though. It was kind of amazing to me how universal these stories were. I had a cousin who was a bookie, a numbers runner. Even out in the suburbs, you could play numbers.
- [21:49]
Joanne Chambers
I remember going into a store and.
- [21:51]
Ian Coss
A guy handed me a piece of.
- [21:53]
Joanne Chambers
Paper and a quarter and saying, take.
- [21:55]
Ian Coss
This down to the hairdresser.
- [21:56]
Joanne Chambers
I guess I was actually running numbers.
- [21:58]
Ian Coss
At the time, unknowingly. Just try to imagine hundreds of bookies across an entire metro area, each collecting small bets, maybe just a nickel or a quarter at a time, from thousands and thousands of regular players. And all that money, all those bets would be combined into a single pot with a single winning number. It was an operation with layers of management, coordination, infrastructure. And who could run an illegal business of that complexity? There's really only one answer. The mob.
- [22:38]
Joanne Chambers
It was just something mysterious about him coming there to that house and bringing the money to you.
- [22:46]
Ian Coss
And who did he work for?
- [22:48]
Joanne Chambers
Who knows? I don't know.
- [23:17]
Ian Coss
When does the Mafia start getting involved.
- [23:19]
Stephen Robertson
In numbers so very much at the end of prohibition?
- [23:22]
Ian Coss
According to historian Stephen Robertson, it's really the re legalization of alcohol that draws in the big time gangsters. Because right up to that point, bootlegging liquor had been their main business.
- [23:36]
Stephen Robertson
If you're a white gangster, you need a racket to replace it. A lot of the venues for illegal liquor in black neighbourhoods were also sites for numbers gambling. So they saw the amount of money changing hands, but they bring an extra level of violence. That means that, you know, once they want control of the numbers, it's something that's gonna happen.
- [23:58]
Ian Coss
Prohibition ended in 1933. By the end of that decade, the Harlem numbers game was in the hands of white organized crime.
- [24:06]
Stephen Robertson
A lot of the people actually collecting the bets on the streets are still blacks, but they're making a lot less of the money, smaller commissions. The money is leaving Harlem and going into the pocket of white gangsters, not into the pocket of black numbers runners in the same kind of way.
- [24:27]
Ian Coss
By the 1970s, there were mob run numbers games in cities around the country. But here in Boston, there was one mobster who elevated the game to the true peak of its potential. Jerry angelo has over 1 million and.
- [24:42]
Jerry Angiulo
A half dollars out in the street in Shylock at 1.
- [24:45]
Ian Coss
Angelo and his brothers operate two businesses out of this office on Prince street in the north end of Boston. The Angelo brothers ran the biggest numbers racket Boston had ever known. By some accounts, it was the most profitable mafia run gambling operation in the whole country. Besides that office on Prince street, there were three mid level offices and 10 local offices reaching out into suburbs like Watertown, Medford and Revere, miles from downtown. The man who ran it all was Gennaro, the second oldest of the brothers. People called him Jerry. Jerry Angelo is a man described as a powerful gangster. That's ironic. When you learn what he wanted to be, you're looking at his high school yearbook picture. Back then his goal was to become a criminal attorney, but he never did. Jerry Angelo was a small man, maybe just 5 foot 6. He wore lifts in his shoes for extra height and big heavy framed glasses like Junior on the Sopranos. And what were Gennaro Angulo's special skills? What made him good at running the numbers?
- [25:57]
Ted Harrington
To use the term, he understood figures.
- [26:00]
Ian Coss
Ted Harrington, who we heard back in episode one, ran the city's organized crime strike force. He told me that Angulo, even with all his power, was known as a numbers guy, not a tough guy. There were even rumors that he had never killed anyone, at least not with his own hands. That in mafia speak, he never earned his bones.
- [26:23]
Ted Harrington
He gained ascendancy not because he was a brutal person, just was a brilliant businessman.
- [26:35]
Ian Coss
Gennaro Angullo didn't just take control of an existing gambling operation. He consolidated what had once been a loose network of independent bankers and bookmakers into a single regional operation. And the numbers game was always his specialty.
- [26:53]
Ernie Danisko
Jerry really didn't like the sports betting business because of the risk involved.
- [27:00]
Ian Coss
Ernie Danisko was a federal prosecutor on mafia cases. So he knew Angiulo's operation well and knew that Angelo was very cautious with sports betting.
- [27:10]
Ernie Danisko
On certain weekends you can have a rough weekend. And Jerry was just, he was just adverse to that. He just didn't want to do it.
- [27:18]
Ian Coss
Sports betting also carried more legal risk for the house because people were betting large amounts of money at one time, often on credit.
- [27:27]
Ernie Danisko
The one thing about gambling is it always leads to loanstracking. It's inevitable, like night following day. I mean, the FBI used to have a saying that on Friday afternoons they would wait for A long shot victim to come walking through the door. And they would make a case against mobsters in New York because they ran out of time, they had nowhere to go, and they thought the best alternative would be to cooperate. That was the risk that Jerry and his brothers, for the most part, sought to avoid. And they were very smart at it.
- [28:00]
Ian Coss
And so the advantage of running a numbers racket was just that the individual amounts were small enough that people weren't getting in so deep that it came to that.
- [28:11]
Ernie Danisko
Exactly. With the numbers, you're not going to get way, way in over your head. And the numbers game is a complete winner. You cannot lose if you're the house. And you have to remember, back then, there was no competition from the state lottery.
- [28:31]
Ian Coss
The Boston mafia was unusually reliant on their gambling rackets, thanks to a quirk of history. Unlike some other big cities on the east coast, Italian Americans were always outnumbered here by the Irish. They were not the dominant ethnic group like they were in New York or nearby Providence, Rhode Island. What that meant is that the mafia couldn't break into some of the bigger institutions of the city, like labor unions or construction. What they did have was numbers.
- [29:02]
Ernie Danisko
There was the meat and potatoes. That's where they made the money.
- [29:06]
Ian Coss
Given how lucrative the numbers was and how vital it was to the whole underworld, it's kind of surprising the lotteries didn't get in on the action right away. I mean, they had the model right there for exactly the kind of game people wanted. And yet in state after state, they didn't follow it. They offered weekly drawings, they offered scratch tickets, but no daily game where players got to choose their own numbers. There was, of course, the logistical challenge of pulling it off. But maybe even more frightening was just the fear of association, that this was the mob's game. New Jersey took the plunge first this time in 1975. Then in 1976, Massachusetts followed. To get the game design right, the lottery held secret meetings with former bookmakers and studied 10,000 betting slips. The goal was to replicate the illegal game as closely as possible, from the number of digits down to the different combinations you could bet on, right down to the name of the game itself.
- [30:21]
Stephen Robertson
And they actually called it the numbers game.
- [30:23]
Ian Coss
They called it the numbers game.
- [30:24]
Stephen Robertson
Oh, wow.
- [30:25]
Ian Coss
I showed Stephen Robertson, the historian of the numbers, one of the original paper betting slips printed by the state lottery, which says right across the top, the numbers game.
- [30:36]
Stephen Robertson
I mean, on the one hand, it makes great marketing sense because, you know, you're using the name recognition, but by the same token, you know, numbers was illegal, you know, so the fact that they, you know, in that imbalance, decided that they wanted the name recognition and they, you know, they were quite happy. Calling a state enterprise by a kind of criminal activity strikes me as astonishing.
- [31:00]
Ian Coss
Clearly, there was no running or hiding from what this game was. The Globe headline on the day of the launch read, the state is your bookmaker. The reason I'm spending so much time on the caution and peril surrounding this moment is that I think it's really easy to take for granted that the state lotteries succeeded and thrived and continued. Even in 1976, that was not in any way assured. If you think of legalized gambling overall as a kind of slippery slope, then America at this point was definitely still sitting on top of the slide, thinking about climbing back down.
- [31:46]
Sheila Dabrowski
I remember the director at one of my interviews, and he said throughout history that lotteries come and go again.
- [31:56]
Ian Coss
David O'Reilly, one of the early staff on the numbers Game.
- [32:00]
Sheila Dabrowski
But it always ends because the integrity wears off and the trust runs out. And he goes, if everybody does their job right, this will last. But one big mistake, that this will end.
- [32:15]
Ian Coss
Just the year before, in 1975, the New York Lottery had temporarily ceased all operations and let go of all its employees after issues arose in its ticketing system. Later on, someone actually managed to rig the Pennsylvania numbers game by injecting the balls with liquid to make some heavier than others, resulting in the ominous winning number of 666. Six and the second digit. There were constant fears that the mafia would find a way to infiltrate the lottery, corrupt it as if everything gambling touches will eventually rot from the inside. Which meant that the legal numbers game, more than any other, had to be flawless, squeaky, squeaky clean. The new personnel, like O'Reilly and Dabrowski, were only hired on a temporary basis. Their jobs depended on whether the game.
- [33:12]
David O'Reilly
Survived, because if the integrity was compromised, then nobody would want to play.
- [33:20]
Ian Coss
Which brings us to that mad dash across the state. The teenagers and gremlins with their free sodas and friends in the front seat. That whole system was about maintaining the game's integrity. Here's how it worked. Players made their bets on a paper form that looked like the answer grid for an old standardized test. Rows of numbered boxes that you marked with an X. Every afternoon at 5pm as piles and piles of those forms arrived at lottery headquarters, they would get scanned through a microfilm camera.
- [33:56]
David O'Reilly
You'd have to check it periodically to make sure that it was good film, because it was very fast. It Was a choo choo, choo, choo.
- [34:03]
Ian Coss
That was part of Sheila Dabrowski's job, scanning every single betting slip.
- [34:07]
David O'Reilly
Once all tickets were accounted for, that was the okay to go ahead and draw a winning number.
- [34:13]
Ian Coss
Almost immediately. Scammers tried to game the system by showing up with winning tickets that they had filled in after the number was drawn. But of course, those tickets wouldn't show up on the microfilm.
- [34:26]
David O'Reilly
They would go back to the film and verify that this was the winning.
- [34:31]
Ian Coss
Ticket and the system held up. The story was there was no story, no fraud, no scandal. This is Lottery live. The daily number on a $1 bet, all four numbers, in fact, the game was a hit.
- [34:44]
David O'Reilly
The daily number was huge. You know, people lived by when that number was going to go off.
- [34:51]
Ian Coss
The winning number in the Massachusetts daily numbers game, 0281-lottery was incredibly popular. Christy George was a reporter for WGBH and she remembers when those nightly drawings began. The newsroom would get the number right around the time their show aired Tonight on the 10 o'clock news.
- [35:10]
David O'Reilly
Well, I worked for nightly news show on public television. We covered Boston.
- [35:16]
Ian Coss
We also covered Beirut.
- [35:18]
David O'Reilly
But out in the field, you'd be.
- [35:19]
Ian Coss
Talking to people and they'd say, oh.
- [35:21]
David O'Reilly
I watched that show.
- [35:22]
Ian Coss
And you'd go, wow, what do you.
- [35:25]
David O'Reilly
Like about the show?
- [35:26]
Ian Coss
And they'd say, it's the first place.
- [35:27]
David O'Reilly
I can see the number.
- [35:28]
Ian Coss
Chilly mid-50s, just like the old clearinghouse numbers. It was a ritual, an institution.
- [35:36]
David O'Reilly
You don't remember the jingle?
- [35:37]
Ian Coss
I don't.
- [35:38]
David O'Reilly
Have you played your number? Have you played your number? Have you played your number today? Yeah, that was big.
- [35:46]
Joanne Chambers
Have you played your number?
- [35:49]
Ian Coss
Have you played your number? Have you played your number today? So the worst fears of corruption and infiltration did not come true. But the numbers game was such a success that it created a different but equally dangerous kind of scandal that the lottery was too successful.
- [36:12]
Elvis
And I just decided maybe it was time to do things differently. And I ran.
- [36:18]
Ian Coss
In the very next election cycle, 1978, State Treasurer Bob Crane faced a primary challenge. Crane, you'll remember, was the so called czar of the lottery. He set the tone and he wanted the lottery to grow, wanted it to prosper. His challenger, who we've also met before, wanted to rein it in, specifically the way they advertised new games. How aggressive was the lottery advertising in the late 70s?
- [36:48]
Elvis
Mighty aggressive because it was creating a brand.
- [36:51]
Ian Coss
The challenger was Boston city councilor Larry dicara.
- [36:55]
Elvis
There really had not been the lottery for that long. And the lottery came up with some catchy you can't win unless you play. You know, that kind of stuff.
- [37:06]
Ian Coss
Not to mention that classic jingle. Have you played your number? It is catchy stuff. And these ads were especially concerning with the numbers game. Because compared with other kinds of lottery drawings, this game had always been most popular in low income neighborhoods and specifically black neighborhoods. That's who the game was targeting. And Larry decara thought the lottery was taking it too far.
- [37:33]
Elvis
Yes, I thought that lottery advertising gave the incorrect message, just like sports betting does today. Looking for people who don't have a lot of money to spend it. Some candidates will offer slogans. I will talk about the substantive issues.
- [37:49]
Ian Coss
So you decide to run for Treasury. What's your pitch?
- [37:52]
Elvis
My pitch was that he'd been there a long time.
- [37:56]
Ian Coss
Decara ran as a reform candidate, someone who would modernize the treasury and how it handled the state's money. But also, like I said before, reform, the lottery and the way it was, actively promoting gambling among the public.
- [38:10]
Elvis
I've done my homework. It's time to actively campaign.
- [38:13]
Ian Coss
Thank you very much. Dicara saw it as a principled stand. His critics saw it as prudish, a little stuck up.
- [38:21]
Elvis
Even the Globe columnist did a brutal piece on me. I think he said, john Calvin walks among us or something like that. I'm a lot of things. I'm not a Calvinist. So, yeah, I took some heat. But when you're in politics, you expect to take heat.
- [38:39]
Ian Coss
What De Cara did not expect were the hijinks. First, there was the high school history.
- [38:47]
Elvis
Teacher at Daugherty High in Worcester.
- [38:50]
Ian Coss
This teacher was a well known local figure involved with little league baseball. The kind of person you'd love to have come up and introduce you at a campaign stop. And he had offered Dicara his help.
- [39:02]
Elvis
Maybe a month later we were having something out in Worcester and I said, call him up.
- [39:08]
Ian Coss
But all of a sudden this teacher didn't want to have anything to do with him.
- [39:12]
Elvis
Turns out that he'd gotten a job working part time for the lottery. And that's the last I heard of him.
- [39:18]
Ian Coss
Not a coincidence in your mind?
- [39:19]
Elvis
Not a coincidence at all.
- [39:23]
Ian Coss
Then there were the other candidates, two of them, both with kind of suspicious names, who jumped into the race right after decara.
- [39:32]
Elvis
One of whom, whose first name was Larry.
- [39:35]
Ian Coss
There was another Larry, Larry Black.
- [39:38]
Elvis
And the other a city council from Evergreen whose name is Paul Cacciotti.
- [39:42]
Ian Coss
And another city councilor, also with an Italian last name.
- [39:46]
Elvis
And I don't think it was by accident.
- [39:48]
Ian Coss
But here's the kicker. On the ballot the candidates were listed in alphabetical order. Crane, the incumbent, followed by Black, Cacciotti, and finally Decara.
- [40:01]
Elvis
So inevitably, just human nature, somebody would get the Larry's mixed up. Inevitably, human nature, somebody would get the Italian city councillors mixed up.
- [40:13]
Ian Coss
And inevitably, I imagine some people just don't even make it to the fourth name down the list.
- [40:19]
Elvis
Inevitably, people don't.
- [40:21]
Ian Coss
The theory here, which de Cara has maintained ever since, is that Treasurer Crane convinced those other candidates to run in a deliberate effort to split the vote.
- [40:31]
Elvis
And the rules of politics are very simple, Ian. You cannot play offense when you're playing defense.
- [40:38]
Ian Coss
I just love that they found somebody named Larry. I mean, that's just too good.
- [40:45]
Elvis
And he was my classmate at Boston Latin School.
- [40:49]
Joanne Chambers
Have you given any thought to possibly dropping out and putting yourself?
- [40:53]
Ian Coss
Dicara stuck it out until election day, hoping against hope that he could break through in that muddled field were I.
- [41:00]
Elvis
To be struck by lightning here at Channel 2 this evening. TIS the will of God. Other than that.
- [41:06]
Ian Coss
But the breakthrough never came.
- [41:07]
Elvis
It was called early 9, 30, 10 o'clock. You know, remember standing up and saying, I may be broke, but I'm not a broken man. I remember that line. And it was a tough day.
- [41:24]
Ian Coss
This is one of several moments when the lottery faced a political challenge that could have limited or at the very least disrupted its operation. Crane's ability to beat back those challenges was part of what made the lottery keep growing even as other states faltered. By the way, there is no concrete evidence to back Dakar's theory about the spoiler candidates, but there is circumstantial evidence. Shortly after that election, the other city councilor with the Italian last name, he got a comfy job working with Crane. So it seems the patronage machine that the legislature had hoped for was working. And the lottery's advertising could keep on working as well. Excuse me, Jimmy, I'd like to tell you how to play the numbers game.
- [42:13]
Elvis
From the Mass State Lottery.
- [42:15]
Ian Coss
Hey, hold it. Hold it. You off the mound now. And here we find the basic irony of the numbers game. In this state and elsewhere, it was sold as a way to take business away from organized crime. You can see it in the press quotes from Treasurer Bob Crane. He would always reference the illegal rackets. How there were all these people out there gambling anyway, so they might as well do it with us. Time out. Hey, buddy, you got one of those numbers game betting slips on you?
- [42:43]
David O'Reilly
Sure got one right here.
- [42:45]
Ian Coss
That was the argument. But that's not all that happened. The state's numbers game and the advertising around it were tapping into a whole bunch of new people who were open to gambling if it was legal.
- [42:58]
Joanne Chambers
You know, like, oh, wow, now you. It's legal. That's the first thing you think of.
- [43:04]
Ian Coss
Joanne Chambers, remember, never played the illegal numbers herself. That whole world felt a little mysterious and suspect. But once you put it at the corner convenience store and on tv, that's something else.
- [43:19]
Joanne Chambers
Oh, it's really. It's just something gets into you and you go, I ain't got nothing anyway. Can't, got nothing to lose but a dollar.
- [43:29]
Ian Coss
She remembers going to try the new game after it launched in April and playing her birthday, April 17, 417. After that, Chambers became irregular. She kept her playing in check. The game didn't ruin her life or anything, but still, Chambers told me she doesn't think the state should be in this business at all. It's too powerful.
- [43:52]
Joanne Chambers
It's a mind thing, something about that number business, because, you know, self consciousness is not going to win, but still it overpowers the thought of winning.
- [44:10]
Ian Coss
She described how once you've been playing the same number every day for a long time, you start to feel this pressure build, almost a paranoia that if you don't play that day, well, that'll be the day your number comes up.
- [44:25]
Joanne Chambers
You know, and you scraping up, looking in your bag for four quarters.
- [44:29]
Ian Coss
So you rush out to the store in the middle of the night just before bedding closes.
- [44:33]
Joanne Chambers
You write those numbers as a feeling good high at the moment.
- [44:37]
Ian Coss
The official daily number, 6000, 225.
- [44:40]
Joanne Chambers
Then that feeling dies. You go back to the second.
- [44:43]
Ian Coss
All four numbers in exact order paid off.
- [44:46]
Joanne Chambers
6052.
- [44:48]
Ian Coss
Do you still play the lottery?
- [44:50]
Joanne Chambers
Yeah, I do. I don't care how much you play, how much you lose. You always think you're going to win, and that's going to be the day every time you play. And it's not, trust me.
- [45:09]
Ian Coss
By the time of that 1978 primary race, the numbers game was bringing in more money than scratch tickets, the lottery's last big experiment. But here's the thing. Jerry Angullo's numbers racket was also doing just fine. Even several years after the lottery's copycat started up, the Angulos were bringing in tens of thousands of dollars a day, tens of millions of dollars a year. It appears that the state had increased the size of the gambling pie. They had not entirely taken the Mafia's slice of it. To do that, the state would need some help from another corner of government, the FBI. Would you ever see Gennaro Angiulo out in the streets of Boston.
- [45:56]
Ted Harrington
I don't think I ever did. But when I was U.S. attorney, he came in to see me.
- [46:01]
Ian Coss
Really? Again, Ted Harrington with the Organized Crime Strike Force.
- [46:09]
Ted Harrington
With all his intelligence, he was kind of a loud mouth type of guy. So he was, you know, watching the grand jury room and talking like if he were a big shot. I'd like to see Harrington give him a piece of my mind. He's out there bragging he wants to see me. So I called him in.
- [46:33]
Ian Coss
Angullo had faced competition before. He had been investigated and raided before. But it seemed like no one could touch him at the courthouse that day. And Julo had a few men around him as he ran his mouth in the corridor. But when Harrington made the invitation, those guys stayed outside.
- [46:53]
Ted Harrington
He came in alone, and he was very thin. He was a wiry sort of guy.
- [47:01]
Ian Coss
What was his message to you?
- [47:02]
Ted Harrington
Well, he was. He was talking big when he was out in the corridor. But most of the gang figures at least pretended that they were gentlemen. That was part of their shtick.
- [47:17]
Ian Coss
Inside the office, Angelo was subdued, measured. The two men talked cordially for 15 minutes. But you knew at that point that you were coming after him. And he knew you were coming after him.
- [47:30]
Ted Harrington
Yeah.
- [47:33]
Ian Coss
What Angelo probably didn't know was that Harrington had signed off on an elaborate FBI scheme to bug his center of operations on Prince Street. Everyone knew Angullo was a big talker, that he liked to brag. So all they had to do was get him on tape. Multiple acts of murder and acts indictable under various federal statutes, including illegal gambling businesses. In Boston, the Numbers was about to be put on trial. This may be the first time that the corporate structure of organized crime has been so completely dissected for public view. That's next time.
- [48:14]
Jerry Angiulo
You made me love you. I didn't want to do it I didn't want to do it. You made me want you. And all the time you knew it. I guess you always knew it. You made me happy. Sometimes you made me sad. But there were times, dear, you made me feel so bad.
- [48:51]
Ian Coss
The series is produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Ian Coss. It's edited by Lacey Roberts. The editorial Supervisor is Jennifer McKim, with support from Ryan Alderman. Mae Lei is the project manager, and the executive producer is Devin Maverick Robbins. One of my first introductions to numbers gambling was actually through a documentary film I collaborated on about a boxing gym in East Boston called Never Be a Punching Bag for Nobody by Naomi Yang. The film is a great window into the world of bookies and wise guys. I highly recommend it. I also want to thank the subject of that film, Sal Bartolo Jr. For sharing some of his own memories of running numbers with me. The song Clearing House Blues, which we heard a clip of, is by the great blues singer Clara Smith, the Queen of the Moaners. For more info on the series and full Transcripts, go to gbhnews.org scratchandwin. You can also find videos of the episodes on the GBH YouTube channel, along with incredible archival footage. The artwork is by Bill Miller and Mami Haoebawo. Our closing song is yous Made Me Love youe, performed by Massachusetts State Treasurer Bob Crane. Scratch and Win is a production of GBH News and distributed by prx.
- [50:28]
Jerry Angiulo
Know I do so gimme gimme gimme gimme what I cry for you know you got the brand of kisses that I die for. You know you made me, you know you made me, you know you made me love you and all the time you know it. Thank you.
- [51:15]
Ian Coss
Hey I want to make sure that you know this series you're listening to right now is part of an ongoing feed telling stories from the past to help us understand our present. Our first season is all about infrastructure. The second season is about gambling, and we've got more seasons planned. So if you want to stay on top of what the team and I are doing, go ahead and follow or subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen. We've got some really exciting stories coming up and I hope you'll stay with us. Thanks from PRX.