Scratch & Win

Ian Coss: If you want to understand what sets the Massachusetts lottery apart from all its peers, you have to understand the man at the top of it all: State Treasurer Bob Crane, who built the lottery from an idea on the page to a gambling juggernaut known throughout the world.

Crane is your classic Boston Irish pol: gleaming white hair, gleaming white teeth, huge smile. And there's one story about treasurer Crane that looms largest in his political mythology. It takes place long before the state lottery was created… before he was State Treasurer even, but it explains a lot.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : I first heard the story from Renee Loth, longtime columnist for the Boston Globe. BOB CRANE

Renee Loth: Okay, so the way I heard it,

Ian : She had heard it from Frank Phillips, one of the elder deans of the local press corps.

Frank Phillips: You want a good story on Bob Crane?

Ian : And he heard it from our sitting Secretary of State, William Galvin

William Galvin: obviously it's not firsthand to me. It was 1960

Ian : None of them could verify that this story is strictly speaking, true. So we'll treat it, like I said, as mythology: the legend of Bob Crane and the infamous stickers.

Frank Phillips: 1960, he was, um, running for re election.

Renee Loth: Bobby Crane was running for state rep.

Ian : In 1960, Crane had already been in the state legislature for a few years, serving his local Boston neighborhood of Brighton. So he was running that cycle as an incumbent.

Frank Phillips: And, no one took out papers against him. No one was running against him. So he said, I can go out and around the country and work for Jack Kennedy

ARCHIVAL: kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy.

Ian : That year Crane neglected his own campaign to go out and help his party -- his team -- in a historic race to put an Irish Catholic, like himself, in the White House.

Frank Phillips: So he's out there all summer long working for Kennedy. And all of a sudden, some guy in Brighton decides to run against him.

Renee Loth: And his opponent was a write in candidate. What we call it in Massachusetts is running on stickers.

William Galvin: running on stickers

Frank Phillips: on stickers.

Renee Loth: Uh, the reason they call it that is that, you know, the candidate's campaign would hand out stickers with the candidate's name printed properly on it.

Ian : Stickers you could put right on the ballot, in the box for write-in candidates.

Renee Loth: To like save the voters from having to worry about getting it correct.

William Galvin: And the opponent came very close because of the fact that Crane had not been paying a lot of attention to the area.

Ian : Some say the election was close. Some say Crane lost outright. And from here on, the facts become harder to verify.

MUSIC: Post

William Galvin: subsequently there was a recount

Frank Phillips: Bob calls for a recount.

Ian : There's a recount...

Frank Phillips: And he, knows they store the ballots in the schoolhouse there over the weekend before they're gonna do it.

Renee Loth: The way I heard it, somebody in the Crane campaign, had the bright idea of cranking up the heat in this school or wherever the ballots were being stored.

Frank Phillips: They Turn up the heat to 90 degrees,

Renee Loth: to have the sticker glue basically melt off

Frank Phillips: all the stickers fall off the ballots, and Bob wins.

William Galvin: And that's the story.

Renee Loth: That's the way I heard the story.

Frank Phillips: Wonderful Boston Irish political story.

MUSIC: Out

Ian : Bob Crane passed away in 2018, but for what it's worth, he always denied the stickers story.

ARCHIVAL: It's very far fetched and not true. The fact is, I won a very close election, uh, by 93 votes, which I should have won by considerably more if I had paid attention to my own fight.

Ian : But setting aside whether this story is true or not, it tells us two things about the reputation of Bob Crane. First, that he was a team player, a man who would put his party ahead of himself. And second, that he was someone who would do whatever it took to win. And for the state Democratic party, that is exactly the kind of person you want in charge of your lottery.

MUSIC: Theme

Ian : From GBH News this is Scratch & Win: the making of America’s most successful lottery. I'm Ian Coss.

When states got into the gambling business in the 1960s and 70s, what they wanted out of it, were the same things organized crime wanted: money and power. Lotteries offered both. The question now, was who in government would get to wield that awesome power?

This is Part Two: The Lottery Czar

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BREAK

Ian : The idea of a Massachusetts state lottery was not a new one in the 1970s. In fact, it had been kicked around the statehouse for decades by that time. And the man doing most of the kicking was named Francis Kelly.

Larry DiCara: Attorney General Kelly lived around the corner.

Ian : Larry DiCara is a former Boston City Councillor, but more importantly here, he was once a kid from the neighborhood of Dorchester -- and a very Irish corner of Dorchester.

Larry DiCara: He had a big house by Dorchester standards, and every year at Christmas, they'd have a sleigh with make believe presents on the lawn and all the kids wondered whether the Kelly kids got more presents than anybody else. He was a character.

Ian : Francis Kelly held a number of political posts in his career: attorney general, lieutenant governor, city councilor. But that's not what he's known for. He's known for a lonely and quixotic campaign that he waged for over thirty years.

ARCHIVAL: It was the Irish sweepstakes, wasn't it? Yes, and I'm Irish myself. Is that the luck of the Irish that brought it to you?

Ian : Sometime early on in World War II, Kelley became enamored with the idea of a statewide sweepstakes, modeled on the then popular Irish Sweepstakes.

ARCHIVAL: Mr. Comiskey, how does it feel to be a winner of 75, 000? I feel pretty happy over it.

Ian : These were lottery drawings held regularly in Dublin. But even though the drawings were in Ireland and raised money for Irish hospitals, the tickets were popular abroad, and very popular in this corner of Dorchester.

Larry DiCara: It was a big deal, even when I was a kid.

ARCHIVAL: You folks may have kissed the Blarney Stone for good luck, but I'll rub your head for good luck. All right, take a good rub. I hope you win next time. So do i.

Larry DiCara: people would send money to Ireland and get sweepstakes tickets. And he thought this was a great source of revenue.

Ian : So Kelly began a tradition.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : Once a year, every year he would go before the state legislature and hold hearings on sweepstakes. It was like a holiday -- in fact, people called it Frankie Kelly Day. It started in the 1940s, continued all through the 1950s, and through the 1960s. Eventually earning him the name: Sweepstakes Kelly.

Larry DiCara: Sweet Stakes Kelly.

Ian : And the campaign wasn't just in the legislature.

Larry DiCara: He would go on the Jerry Williams Show, the beginnings of talk radio in Boston, and advocate for sweepstakes.

ARCHIVAL: This is Jerry Williams here on, uh, this wonderful night. We'll be joined by

Ian Coss: he'd just been on that horse forever.

Larry DiCara: He'd been on it a long time. And I remember his children. Standing at the Charles Taylor school, vote for my father, Francis Kelly. He'll give you sweepstakes. I'll still remember it.

Ian : And in due time, that promise would come true.

One of the questions you have to ask about modern state lotteries, is why did they start when they did, and where they did? Why, after all those annual hearings, did Sweepstakes Kelly's idea finally take hold?

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Ian : I mentioned in the last episode that the first state lottery was in New Hampshire -- the famously tax-averse New Hampshire. But within a decade, most of the northeast followed suit: New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts -- as far south as Maryland and as far west as Michigan.

All these states needed new sources of revenue. That's a big piece of it, that we'll get to. And to some extent, there was an actual contagion effect happening, where lotteries would spread from one state to the next. Because if your residents are just driving across the state line to buy tickets anyway, you might as well keep those dollars in your own state. But there was something else going on that helps to explain why this cluster of states would all adopt lotteries around the same time.

I first read about it in the work of lottery historian Jonathan Cohen.

Jonathan Cohen: There's a direct correlation between the catholic share of a state's population and the likelihood that it enacted one of the nation's first lotteries.

Ian : The x-factor is Catholics.

Jonathan Cohen: Which explains the concentration of lotteries. The first 14 are all in the Northeast or so called Rust Belt.

Ian : All states with high percentages of Catholics. And of course one of the highest percentages, one of the most Catholic states in the nation, has for a long time been Massachusetts.

The cultural divide between Protestants and Catholics does not feel especially salient in American society today. It's been blunted, crossed, and layered over -- but for a big slice of our history, this divide was very real – as in my grandmother was disowned for marrying a catholic – and it was a major force in our politics.

Bingo Night: Door open

Ian : Catholicism has traditionally been tolerant of gambling. It was seen as a neutral act by the church, not necessarily good nor bad, as long as it was conducted morally. Just think about the Bingo games that Catholic parishes hold to raise funds. That is church-sponsored gambling.

Ian Coss: Could you just introduce yourself? Tell me who you are.

Linda: My name is Linda Torregrossa. I come from Revere, Massachusetts for the last 55 years.

Ian Coss: And, uh, are you a Catholic?

Linda: Oh, yes. Of course I am. I'm at St. Anthony's.

Ian : St. Anthony's in Revere hosts Bingo every Monday evening in a long, brightly lit church basement. Linda helps run the game here on Mondays, then she helps out on Wednesdays at St Joseph, and Thursdays at Knights of Columbus. She loves it. She usually plays thirty bingo cards at once.

Linda: And I can watch my daughter when she comes, I can watch her cards.

Ian Coss: And how many does she have?

Linda: 12 to 15.

Ian Coss: What does the Catholic church say about gambling as like a social activity?

Linda: I don't think we could run our church without bingo. At all. So, They teach you not to gamble your money away. But without this, we would have no Catholic Church.

Ian Coss: I think that's what you call a paradox.

Linda: I was going to say that, but I was being nice. Five and five?

No, no.

Ian : As we talked, a steady stream of players was coming up to Linda's table, funding the church a few dollars and a few games at a time.

Linda: Do you have a dollar?

MUSIC: Fade in

Ian : The game Bingo was first sold during the Great Depression, really as a board game meant to be played by just a few people at a time. It was a Catholic Priest who saw its potential as a revenue generator: if you could get enough people playing -- and buying in -- at once, you could have a handsome payout for the winner and keep some real money for the house -- the church in this case.

Linda: You want these? Ten?

Ian : The problem was that if you have hundreds of people playing Bingo in a church basement, and some people like Linda playing thirty cards at a time -- you need a lot of unique Bingo cards. If any two are the same you could get double winners. So this priest actually approached the game manufacturer with this idea, and soon enough they were offering the game with not hundreds but thousands of unique, non-repeating Bingo cards. A phenomenon was born.

Ian Coss: what does the shirt say?

Bingo Night: I don't know, you read it.

Ian Coss: Okay, it says, what has balls and keeps the ladies smiling

Bingo Night: bingo! Oh,

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Ian : Bingo is part of that long cultural process of softening public opposition to gambling, of normalizing it. A lot of that softening took place in the basements of Catholic churches like this one.

Bingo Night: Go is good people. No, this is number four

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Ian : In Protestant churches, the situation was different. For many Protestant leaders the very idea of gambling was an affront to their values and specifically their work ethic. Whether it's legal or illegal -- gambling was, as one reverend put it: "The antithesis of work." And if you look at survey data from the 1960s, a healthy majority of Catholics supported the idea of a state lottery, while barely forty percent of Protestants supported it. The thing that had changed by the 60s, is that there were a lot more Catholics than there used to be.

It started of course, with waves of immigration from Ireland and Southern Europe in the 1800s, but the demographic shift continued well after the actual immigration had slowed down. One of Boston's first Irish mayors, Michael Curley, described it pretty succinctly:

Larry DiCara: Curley stood up and once said, The Irish shall prevail.

Ian : I heard the quote from Larry DiCara.

Larry DiCara: What do you mean? Well, the Protestants will lose. Well, how do you predict that, Mr. Mayor? Ah, he said, the Catholics have children, the Protestants have dogs. And what happened is, catholics had lots of kids, especially after World War II, when most people were happy to still be around. We had three in our family, and we were sort of the smallest family in the street. There were fives and sixes, it was common. So, Catholics had lots of babies, and eventually the babies turned 21, and they voted for Catholics. So You can see, decade by decade, the legislature becoming less and less Protestant, happened all over the state.

Ian : One of the great ironies of this state's love of gambling, is that Massachusetts was once the domain of so-called Yankee Republicans: White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, descended from the Puritanical Pilgrims. People who didn't want you to drink on Sunday, let alone play Bingo in a house of worship.

Larry DiCara: You couldn't do this on Sunday, you couldn't do that on Sunday, you couldn't gamble, you couldn't drink on election day, all these are these remnants of the Puritan, settlers of Massachusetts.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : But as the state became more Catholic, those old morality politics started to fade. By and large, the recent immigrants and their children gravitated towards the Democratic party, which for them was more welcoming, less elitist of the two options. And immigrants made the party strong. In 1948, the Democrats, led by Tip O'Neil, took control of the lower chamber of the state legislature. In 1958 they took the upper chamber. And of course in 1960 they lifted one of their own, JFK, to the highest office in the land.

Here is Erin O'Brien, a political scientist at UMass Boston.

Erin O'Brien: we talk a lot about the South and the South's transition from you know, Democratic dominance to Republican dominance. An equal and opposite shift has happened here in Massachusetts.

Ian : From the 1960s on, Republicans in the state legislature entered a long decline from a formidable opposition, to a vocal minority, to an endangered species.

Erin O'Brien: There really were. Yankee Republicans back in the day, And then the Irish become a real power center. But that was a transition.

Ian : The longtime Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank told me, that the state lottery was the last gasp of that cultural struggle, between the Yankee Republicans and the Catholic Democrats. Momentum was building for lotteries all around the region. New York approved theirs in 1966. New Jersey in 1969. And in 1971, with a solidly Democratic statehouse, and solid support among the public, the lonely crusade of Sweepstakes Kelley was finally going to get a proper hearing.

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Ian : But there was another -- and perhaps more important -- reason why those Democrats were interested in a state lottery, a more self-interested reason.

William Galvin: The patronage piece of it was very important to members of the legislature of that time. I know that.

Ian : That’s William Galvin, who again is our current Secretary of State. And Galvin looks at all the possible motives for a state lottery, a very simple one rises to the top of the list: jobs. Or in political parlance: patronage.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian : Democrats in particular had a strong tradition of patronage. The modern Democratic party of the north, the one that thrived in immigrant communities and dense urban centers, was built on a very transactional kind of politics.

Larry DiCara: Very difficult for younger people today to understand that working for the government was something people really wanted to do.

Ian : Again, Larry DiCara.

Larry DiCara: When I was on the city council, 72 through 81, , we had an incinerator right by the old expressway. And we would get guys who had come back from Vietnam, jobs shoveling the stuff into the incinerator for 135 bucks a week. People needed those jobs. We were not a prosperous state. We were in a state which had been in economic decline probably since World War I. People would sit in my office asking for help getting on a payroll, getting a lifeguard jobs, which now they can't find people to be lifeguards. Every potential action of government was viewed as an opportunity to put people to work.

Ian : In that kind of politics, the party was a social ladder. And once you got a foot on, it became part of your job to help get the next person on, and the next person. And at the time, that kind of patronage was perfectly normal -- it's literally what politics was for.

Larry DiCara: Tip O'Neill once told me that one Christmas, he put a thousand people on at the post office to work part time because the post office needed people at Christmas and people with four and five and six kids needed the money to buy Christmas presents. And you went through the congressman to do it. Very different from the culture today.

Ian : So now think about the business of gambling: it was everywhere. By one estimate illegal bookmakers employed ten thousand people in Massachusetts alone. If the state lottery could take over that business it would be a patronage bonanza. Warehouse jobs, delivery jobs, security jobs. Plus all the contracts you could dole out for marketing and research, the relationships with small businesses, the millions of dollars that would have to be banked somewhere. It all adds up to one thing: political capital. A huge pile of political capital. Now, the trick was to make sure that it was Democrats who controlled that capital.

ARCHIVAL: Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!

Ian : But that would not be easy.

ARCHIVAL: A fight is on.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian : The trouble began in 1970. After a divisive and at times violent party convention, the Democrats failed to rally around their candidate and lost the governor's race that year.

ARCHIVAL: The people of this state have spoken clearly, and they have chosen Frank Sargent as their governor. Please.

Ian : This might seem to go against everything I've been saying about the rising power of Democrats, but this state has for a long time fancied moderate Republican governors, and Frank Sargent was very much that.

A few months after Sargent took office, the legislature introduced a bill to create the state lottery. It was modeled very closely on the New Jersey lottery, but with one glaring difference. In New Jersey, the lottery was controlled by the governor. In Massachusetts, it would not be controlled by the governor.

William Galvin: The legislature did not want to give the patronage that they perceived as part of the creation of the lottery to a Republican.

Ian : Again, William Galvin.

William Galvin: And, uh, therefore who else was there?

Ian : Who else but State Treasurer Bob Crane, what at that moment also happened to be the chair of the State Democratic Party.

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Ian : When I started working on this story, I was kind of confused about what a Treasurer does, why they matter. And everytime I read about it or asked people about it, I would get this kind of grab-bag list of responsibilities that made my mind wander. There was debt management, state bonds, unclaimed property, but also the convention center, and public pensions, and the Clean Water Trust. And the job is that: a collection of responsibilities tied together under the loose theme of "money," I guess. But here's how I've come to think about the job.

ARCHIVAL: Bob Crane's domain stretches as far as the eye can see.

Ian : The treasurer oversees a domain, with plots of land scattered across state government.

ARCHIVAL: He's responsible for 18 percent of the state budget and has 270 employees.

Ian : The individual plots are small enough that you don't necessarily see just how big the domain is. But it's there.

ARCHIVAL: Under Crane, the treasurer's office has become rich in power and patronage.

Ian : And in 1971, the legislature was offering to tack on one more plot.

Ian Coss: as somebody who knew Crane, why do you think he wanted to run the lottery?

William Galvin: I'm not sure he did. Um, in fact, I'm pretty sure he didn't.

Ian : According to William Galvin, Treasurer Crane didn't actually want the lottery -- not at first. It was really the legislature pushing the idea that he should run it. Crane himself was a teetotaller. He never drank, and had no personal interest in gambling. And if all the role entailed was handing out low level jobs to the friends of legislators -- then it wasn't all that exciting.

William Galvin: he knew he was only sort of holding it as a placeholder for democratic patronage and that's true.

Ian : But there was another side to Crane you have to understand, a less political side, that the lottery did appeal to.

Jack Connors: when you think about the job of state treasurer, you're thinking about a banker. Uh, Bob was not a banker.

Ian : Jack Connors did advertising work for the Massachusetts lottery, but before and after that, he was a longtime friend of Bob Crane.

Jack Connors: Bob was a people guy. Bob was a showman. Bob was an entertainer. He never saw a camera he couldn't fall in love with.

ARCHIVAL: Them the old rassle dassle, rassle dassle. Back since the

Ian : when Bob Crane was a kid in the 20s and 30s, his dad worked as a stagehand for vaudeville shows. Bob was a bit of a caboose child, the youngest of five, so he was the one who got to tag along, watching while his dad worked the lights and raised the curtain.

Mary Lou Crane: He went to a lot of the shows and he was able to be backstage. And he saw all of the great performers

Ian : This is Crane's daughter, Mary Lou.

Mary Lou Crane: His friend Jack Connors, Once, told me, your father knows the lyric to every song that was ever written. And he did.

ARCHIVAL: They'll let you get away with murder.

Mary Lou Crane: He wasn't a bad singer. You know, he had his own group, right?

Ian : As treasurer, Crane had a piano installed in the statehouse. And he assembled a singing group called...get this: The Treasury Notes, or T-Notes for short. In the 1970s, WGBH sent a crew out to film them in concert at a nursing home -- think wood paneled walls, linoleum floors, red and white checkered table clothes.

ARCHIVAL: Luck to you. Makes no difference how I carry on. Please don't talk about me when I'm gone

Ian : In the footage, Crane is out in front dressed in a three-piece blue suit with wide lapels, paisley tie, and a lot of buttons. He's flanked by back-up singers with tambourines. Everyone is sweating, the pianist has pushed aside the bench so he can dance as he plays.

Jack Connors: A nursing home, It's a pretty conservative operation, until they started singing.

Ian : Again, Crane’s old friend, Jack Connors

Jack Connors: Then in came the wheelchairs, in came the canes, in came the crutches, in came the folks, and they, oh my.

Ian : As the song builds, Crane wades out into the elderly crowd, snapping in time and then holding out his arm as he delivers the final refrain.

His daughter Mary Lou keeps a picture in her living room of Crane in that exact pose.

Mary Lou Crane: and he is, he's the happiest man on the planet.

ARCHIVAL: Please don't talk about me when I'm gone. Not a word about me. Yay!

Ian : What Crane came to realize, was that the lottery could be more than a patronage machine. If he ran it well, if he hired talented people, if those people created games that were fun, and those games created millionaires all over the state, Crane would be the face of all that.

MUSIC: Transition

William Galvin: he said, you know, it's not about the money. It's about the dreams.

Ian : With the lottery, a boring old State Treasurer, could become the purveyor of dreams.

William Galvin: He saw it as an opportunity to reinvent himself he was a performer He was vaudeville he enjoyed the status. He enjoyed the power. Not so much. He wasn't into that. He enjoyed. Being sort of on the stage literally and figuratively.

Ian : So Crane was in.

But it would be up to the legislature to put Crane up on that stage. And not surprisingly, the brand new Republican governor had other plans.

ARCHIVAL: when I fought with the legislature, , it's been when the legislature was taking care of its own interests. And I disagreed with them.

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BREAK 

Ian : It's September of 1971, and the Democratic – and largely Catholic – legislature have finally followed through on the old dream of Sweepstakes Kelly. House Bill number 5925 sits on the governor’s desk: “An Act Providing for the Establishment and Operation of a State Lottery.” Now all the bill needs is one last signature.

The governor is Francis Sargent, who a reporter once described as quote: "the Yankee Republican posterboy, spare and angular with sandy hair, a lantern jaw, and the ‘S’ whistling through his teeth, living out in horse country, growing his own vegetables, and spending not a nickel more than necessary." End quote.

In other words, Sargent was an old school Protestant who everyone would expect to oppose the lottery. Sargent was skeptical about the state getting into the gambling business, but more than anything he was defiant, offended that the Democrats would create the lottery in such a brazenly partisan fashion. And now, Sargent faced a dilemma, because he was staring into the mouth of a political snare, laid two hundred years earlier for a governor just like him.

Ian Coss: Tell me about the Massachusetts state constitution. Why is that document important in American history, well as state history?

Erin O'Brien: just laughing. No one has ever asked to get teed me up in such a nice, easy way when the nerdiest of all, I love it. Thank you.

Ian : Once again, I'm speaking with UMass political scientist and unabashed history nerd, Erin O'Brien.

Erin O'Brien: So it's incredibly, uh, important because it really serves as the model for the American constitution.

Ian : Remember what I was saying last episode about how this state loves to tout our firsts? Well here's a pretty good one. The Massachusetts state constitution is the oldest functioning constitution in the world, and as O'Brien said, really the template for many others.

Erin O'Brien: Political scientists take such interest in it because they will compare the American Constitution, to, Massachusetts and then see how the two have diverged.

Ian Coss: Wow. It's almost like a, you know, scientists love twins.

Erin O'Brien: Yes,

Ian Coss: You know, it's like they find twins separated birth for some reason, and then they study their whole lives.

Erin O'Brien: Yes.

Ian Coss: So what are the traditions that the U. S. Constitution gets from the Massachusetts Constitution?

Erin O'Brien: The biggest one, is legislative supremacy.

Ian : Legislative supremacy.

Erin O'Brien: And it makes complete sense you know, you don't have to know much about American history to understand that they were de that the founders, I'm gonna teach something today. The, the founders were deeply distrustful of the crown.

Ian Coss: So even though we are now no longer a colony, the governor is the bad guy, is the crown, is overlord, the legislature is the

Erin O'Brien: mm-hmm . They're like, no, we're going to have legislative supremacy.

Ian : If you read Article 1 of the US Constitution, you'll see that the first thing it lays out is the legislative branch and all its powers: spending, taxation, declaring war, regulating commerce, confirming judicial appointments. In theory and on paper, the legislature is clearly the most powerful of the three branches.

Ian Coss: So then how do the u. s government and the massachusetts state government diverge over time?

Erin O'Brien: as I say in class sometimes, listen, um, a commonality of the modern American presidency is that every president has tried to expand his power. Right, to take more power into the executive branch. Massachusetts, we haven't seen that happen.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : So here's where our twin governments, separated at birth and nurtured by very different kinds of politics, have grown into very different political animals. I swear this is not just more Massachusetts chauvinism, but our state government works much more like how the federal government is supposed to work: legislative supremacy.

Erin O'Brien: two most powerful people in Massachusetts politics are the Speaker of the House and the Senate President, not the governor.

MUSIC: Post

Ian : This is why Governor Francis Sargent was in a bind. His campaign slogan was " ." Now, with the lottery bill sitting on his desk, Sargent was being confronted with the fact of his own weakness, and that is something no politician likes to face.

MUSIC: Out

Ian : But if he wanted to fight back he would need allies, inside the legislature.

Marty Linsky: for Republicans in the House, of which I was one, the only real role you had was to carry the governor's water. Or to be a pain in the ass to the governor. There was no other role.

Ian : Marty Linsky was in 1971 the number two Republican in the Massachusetts House. And he was prepared to carry his governor's water. He would vote against the lottery bill, and if the governor vetoed he would sustain that veto. But the math was not great. Democrats had healthy majorities in both chambers, especially the House. And it was made worse for Sargent by the fact that Bob Crane -- the subject of the whole feud -- was ultimately one of their own. Crane had started his career in the state legislature. That's where he built his relationships. And those relationships mattered.

Marty Linsky: When I first was elected to the legislature in 67, There were no offices and, uh, there was a small reading room, uh, right off the chamber with a bunch of couches. And there was a mail room where you got your mail. Uh, so there was a lot of hanging around and a lot of sitting and schmoozing when the legislature was in recess. It was a very, collegial place, and he was like everybody's kid brother.

Ian : Everybody's kid brother -- Crane, that is.

Marty Linsky: very unthreatening, very charming, knew everybody, and not like many members, not burning with ambition, either politically or legislatively.

Ian : Even after Crane left the legislature to become State Treasurer, he went out of his way to maintain those relationships, and maintain that good will.

Linsky recalls a special, if unofficial arrangement Crane offered to his old colleagues. Every year, when the legislature adjourned in the fall, everyone would get one last paycheck for the remainder of their salary. And that check had to then last them through the holidays.

Marty Linsky: And so it was not atypical that members would run out of money near the end of the year.

Ian : So those legislators would go across the hall of the state house to the Treasurer's office, and see Crane.

Marty Linsky: When I went into his office, he said, I'll make a call, go down to Citibank, and go to the teller, and you'll get an advance on your salary.

Ian : It was basically an interest free loan -- nothing sketchy, nothing secretive -- just a small thing Crane as treasurer had the power to offer.

Marty Linsky: Had this arrangement, anybody could take advantage of it.

Ian : Crane had spent years cultivating these relationships around the statehouse, which meant that once he did set his sights on the prize of the lottery, he would be a difficult man to deny.

Marty Linsky: people were motivated by This was something we were doing for Crane.

MUSIC: Transition

Marty Linsky: it was, it was probably the only moment in my time in the State House where something was important to Crane. And it, it's very, it's very personal. I

Ian : All through the summer of 1971, Republican legislators fumed about the idea of Crane controlling the state’s gambling operation. One feared the Treasurer would be like “the czar of the lottery” – with almost no checks on his power.

And yet, on September 9th, both chambers passed the bill, sending it to the governor’s desk. And two weeks after that governor Sargent decided to make his stand. He sent it back with a veto.

MUSIC: Out

Ian : The creation of the lottery was always going to be a team effort. And it took one last Irishman to get it the rest of the way there: Kevin Harrington.

ARCHIVAL: I am honored to place the name of Kevin B. Harrington of Salem in nomination for the position of President of the Massachusetts Senate.

Ian Coss: Could you just describe him physically, what he looked like, his demeanor?

Ed Burke: Kevin could be very imposing, he was 6 feet 10.

Ian : Ed Burke served with Kevin Harrington in the State Senate, where Harrington, who depending on who you ask was either 6 foot 9 inches or 6 foot 10, had just been elected president of the chamber.

ARCHIVAL: the senators voted?

Ed Burke: And as his older brother once said, what was a source of awkwardness when he was an adolescent became in his adult life, his height, his demeanor, his presence could be scary,

Ian : He smoked long Churchillian cigars -- long as croquet mallets in Burke's memory -- and people called him "King Kevin". He was intimidating. But he was also cunning, a vote counter. He had a boat that was named "Roll Call," if that says anything about his love of the legislative process.

ARCHIVAL: Therefore, Kevin B. Harrington has been duly elected President of the Senate

Ian : And in 1971, Kevin Harrington also had a lot to prove.

Ed Burke: He's the brand new Senate president. He really wanted to make his mark. He wanted to make sure that he could bring home the bacon.

Ian : In essence, Harrington -- King Kevin -- chose to bet his power on the lottery. If he could get it over the hill, his reputation would be established. If he failed, he would have more to worry about than just one bill -- his reputation and potentially his position were at stake.

The numbers were pretty close in the Senate, and the problem for Harrington was that six of his members -- six of his fellow Democrats -- had already gone on record opposing the lottery bill, including freshman state senator Ed Burke.

Ed Burke: I did not want to change my position. However, that's when your vote gets noted.

Ian : Burke was in his first term, 27 years old. In his words, he was still figuring out where the bathrooms were in the statehouse, when he was first asked to take a position on the idea of a state lottery.

Ed Burke: I remember getting letters back then most of our constituent, uh, communication was either a phone call or letters from especially Protestant ministers.

Ian : And those ministers in his district felt very strongly that the state had no business promoting gambling.

Burke himself was no Protestant. He was an Irish Catholic Democrat who was familiar with church bingo games. But his district was competitive; he could not afford to alienate people, and he did have some personal doubts about a state lottery -- that it would function as a regressive tax on the state's poorer residents. For Burke, it just didn't add up.

Ed Burke: My sense is that we were pretty much left to our own. Thinking as to how to vote, and I voted no, , as did maybe five or six of my Democratic colleagues, some of whom I, you know, respected a lot. It was really the override that really the, pressure mounted .

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : Here is how the math broke down for the override. There were 40 members of the state senate, except one had recently passed away of a heart attack.

Ed Burke: I'm sure he was a lottery supporter. He died of a heart attack, I think, in the summer of 1971.

Ian : That meant there were 39 senators. Harrington needed 26 to override. But the week of the veto, he only had 22 committed. So the pressure was on those Democratic defectors -- he needed four of them to switch their votes, and back the lottery.

Ian Coss: Is it kind of a bad look to change your vote like that?

Ed Burke: I thought so. I thought so. That's when your name would get in the newspaper oh, why did you switch? What motivated you? Maybe being able to get your brother in law appointed to the lottery administration.

Ian : Burke did not want to be in that position of looking like a flip-flopper, an opportunist. And nor for that matter did anyone else.

The Governor's veto came down on a Monday. Harrington had hoped to override that same week, but by Thursday it was clear he didn't have the votes. Just one defector had flipped. Another said he would attempt to survey his district over the weekend -- including rabbis, ministers, priests and sisters. The other defectors were holding firm, or saying very little.

MUSIC: Out

Ian : But Harrington, we can only assume, wasn't just asking nicely.

Erin O'Brien: if you were a member of the Senate who stepped out of line, from the Senate president, guess what? , then you're not going to be on the key committee.

Ian : Again, political scientist Erin O'Brien.

Erin O'Brien: You're not getting ways and means. You're getting dog catching. get that? And so, they've been able to rule with an iron fist because they control the goodies, the spoils of being in office.

Ian : Part of what I find so fascinating about the system of political patronage is that it all flows from the very top. It's like a mountain stream. The senate president hands out key committee jobs. Those jobs provided an opportunity to hand out more jobs and more goodies, flowing all the way down to regular citizens at the base of the mountain: the lifeguards and trash collectors.

Everyone was beholden to someone, and at the very apex of the system were the two most powerful people in government: the House Speaker and Senate President.

Erin O'Brien: So it was easy to keep the, you know, the horses in line, if you will.

Ian : One of the defectors on the lottery bill happened to chair the Committee on Social Welfare. He eventually opted to switch his vote. Another defector chaired the Committee on Banks and Banking. He also opted to switch his vote, and his brother-in-law was later named assistant council to the Lottery. Finally, the senator who spent the weekend polling ministers and rabbis in his district, he switched his vote as well.

That left Harrington just one vote short, but when the Senate reconvened on Monday, King Kevin was not celebrating -- there was still trouble in the ranks.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : A rumor was circulating that Governor Sargent was doing some lobbying of his own, and had offered a plum job at a state college, to a Democratic senator known as James "Blackie" Burke. This is not the Senator Ed Burke we have heard from, it's a different Burke. This Blackie Burke, also happened to be Harrington's rival, a man who had sought the senate presidency himself. He had originally supported the lottery bill, but now rumor had it, he was prepared to vote against it.

As one Globe columnist pointed out: the verb "burke" has an appropriately sinister meaning: "to murder by suffocation or strangulation." It appeared that King Kevin was about to get burked.

The vote was scheduled for that day: Monday at 5pm.

ARCHIVAL: Senate will come to order.

MUSIC: Transition

Ed Burke: When a roll call was open, a bell, like a school bell would ring, outside the Senate chamber.

Ian : Again, Senator Ed Burke.

Ed Burke: And would keep ringing during the time that the vote was being cast and tabulated

Ian Coss: the bell just keeps ringing until every vote is cast

Ed Burke: over. Then the bell shuts. It was like a a siren going down Center Street in Jamaica Plain. It had this, you know, penetrating ring. But that's the way it was

Ian : As the bell rang on, an almost choreographed drama unfolded inside the chamber. All the Republicans voted to sustain, standing with their Governor. While most of the Democrats voted to override. That brought the total to 23 and 13. But one of Harrington's key flip votes was suddenly looking wobbly.

During the debate period, a leading Republican senator named David Locke had personally singled out this flip flopper -- pressed him right there on the Senate floor for going back on his principles.

Ed Burke: It never got to be ad hominem. But he was, there was a certain amount of sarcasm. You know, why now are you considering, because I think David might have heard there were maybe, uh, some patronage issues that might have been involved in that. So Dave will know how to embarrass him

Ian : Now that embarrassed senator remained seated during the roll call, not even responding when his name was called, just looking down at the papers in his hand.

And meanwhile Blackie Burke, the other big question mark, was nowhere to be seen. He wasn't even there.

Ed Burke: Blackie had not been in the chamber, as far as I know.

Ian : Tension was building. And Harrington, though he may have loomed over that chamber at six feet nine or ten inches tall, was looking precarious.

And the bell, we can only assume, kept on ringing.

MUSIC: Out

Ian : But Harrington, surely knew more than he was letting on. He had allowed this vote to take place, and very quickly the choreography became clear.

First Harrington delivered his own vote of "yes" on the override -- which itself is unusual, the president generally only votes as a tiebreaker. So now there were 24 votes. Then Harrington personally called on his wobbly flip vote, the man staring at his papers. The senator at last stood; he too voted "yes." 25 votes. Just one more to go, and it could only come from one person.

Ed Burke: It's 25 to 13. The roll call is still open. The bell, I think, was still ringing. That's where it was.

MUSIC: Transition

Ed Burke: there was a curtain that people would come through as they entered the Senate chamber.

Ian : A blue velvet curtain, hung over the chamber door. And just as the reluctant vote number 25 sat down, the curtain opened.

Ed Burke: Blackie pops in through the curtain, is recognized immediately. By Kevin Harrington This is the whole ball game. How this guy's going to vote. and Mr. President, I vote to override. And then disappeared. Poof.

Ian : As the Boston Globe's David Nyhan reported: "there was a gasp and a slight ripple of applause in the chamber as the bill became law over the veto."

Ed Burke: 26 13. Deal is done.

ARCHIVAL: The Senate will be in a brief recess.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian : Treasurer Bob Crane gave a quote for that Globe article, calling the vote "a great victory for the Democratic Party and the Democratic Legislature." Yes the lottery was created, but just as important -- party loyalty was maintained, and the governor was reminded of his place.

Ed Burke by the way -- the man I interviewed -- never did change his vote. He was one of only a few Democrats who continued to oppose the lottery. And yet somehow he avoided the Senate President's withering gaze.

Ed Burke: Kevin later told me, he said, listen, you're, first year, you're here for the right reasons. Uh, I thought I might be able to get the votes without having to lean on you.

Ian : As a brand new senator from a competitive district, the younger Burke had been spared the embarrassment of changing his vote. Somehow that detail more than any other I think, reveals how calculated the entire effort was. Democratic politics, especially in those days, was a true team sport. Everyone had their part to play. And this bill, this vote, was not Burke's time to sacrifice himself for the team. I'm sure his time would come. He served in the senate for another 20 years -- and you don't usually last that long unless you're a team player.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian : Today those church Bingo games are a fading tradition. There are maybe just a few dozen left in the whole state. Saint Anthony’s in Revere, Divine Mercy in Quincy, Sacred Heart in Worcester, Saint Cecilia in Leominster. In a way, they are a victim of their own success. They charted the path for their competition, from the shadows and margins of society, out into the open. Now the weekly Bingo game is just one of many many places you can try your luck on a game of chance -- the corner store, the casino, your phone.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian : But in 1971 nothing about that future seemed certain.

It was time for Bob Crane, the showman, to step up and play his part. Crane understood from the beginning that yes the lottery was serious business, yes they were government employees tasked with raising revenue for the state, but ultimately their job was to sell a product and the product had to be fun.

That’s the great irony of Crane’s lottery. People expected him to load it up with political hacks and run it into the ground. They thought they were getting Crane the partisan, but they were also getting Crane the entertainer.

We won't always see Crane's hand at work in this series, but know that he is always there. He was there in 1974 when the state took a chance on the first scratch ticket, and he was there in 1976 when the state took on an even riskier endeavor: challenging the underworld of illegal gambling head on by copying their most popular game.

ARCHIVAL: This is Lottery Live! Last night, the daily number on a 1 bet. All four numbers in exact order.

Ian : That's next time.

The series is produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Ian Coss. It’s edited by Lacy Roberts. The editorial supervisor is Jenifer McKim with support from Ryan Alderman. Mei Lei is the project manager, and the Executive Producer is Devin Maverick Robins.

Special thanks to Mary Lou Crane, who in addition to sharing stories of her father, also shared some wonderful images and archival material. There are also a few people who helped me understand Crane and this era, whose voices you don’t hear: Barney Frank, Kenny Young, George Regan, William Young, Al Kramer, Jack Murphy and George Sacco. I’m grateful for your time.

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 with incredible archival footage.

The artwork is by Bill Miller and Mamie-Hawa Bawoh (Mah-mee How-wah Bah-woh - like whoa, slow down). Our closing song is “You Made Me Love You,” performed by Massachusetts State Treasurer Bob Crane.

Scratch and Win is a production of GBH News and distributed by PRX.