Scratch & Win

Ian Coss: so how did you start working at the lottery?

Sheila Dubrawski: Okay, so I got out of high school and went to work part time in the state house.

MUSIC: Fade in

David O'Reilly: 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.

Ian : Sheila Dubrawski and David O'Reilly were just teenagers when they both heard about jobs opening up at the Massachusetts State Lottery.

Sheila Dubrawski: And they were looking for people to work the night shift

David O'Reilly: it would be a night job.

Ian : Working the overnight shift, six at night to seven in the morning.

Sheila Dubrawski: so it wasn't really that desirable.

David O'Reilly: They just asked if I had a driver's license and how many hours I could work.

Sheila Dubrawski: and I said, Hmm, that sounds like an opportunity

David O'Reilly: They hired me on the spot. They needed people right away.

MUSIC: Post

Ian : 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 scratch ticket first 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 got to pick their own numbers.

David O'Reilly: picking your own number, was a completely different form of gambling.

Ian : It was called simply "The Numbers Game."

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: three or four?

Ian : 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.

David O'Reilly: The customer kept a copy, the store kept a copy and we had to bring a copy right back that night.

Ian : 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.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : When O'Reilly and Dubrawski first started at the lottery, they were the foot soldiers in this daily effort.

David O'Reilly: We had these gremlins, if you remember what a gremlin is. It was a very small car that we used. We used the state cars.

Ian : Picture it: nineteen-year old kids in Gremlins fanning out across the state. Each with a route and a list of lottery retailers: names, towns, addresses -- all organized on color-coded index cards.

David O'Reilly: Remember those great big books that had maps, um, that helped out a couple of times.

Ian : 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.

David O'Reilly: Girlfriend, friend, sister, yeah, anybody who would want to go, really

Ian : But the stakes here were real.

David O'Reilly: I hadn't been trusted like that with a job. ever you couldn't be late.

Ian : 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.

Sheila Dubrawski: It was icy and I spun out and, and the tree just came at me . So yeah. I hit a tree. Yeah. Totaled my car. Totaled my car.

Ian Coss: And did you still have to get the lottery tickets in? Oh, yeah.

Sheila Dubrawski: Absolutely. Absolutely. They send somebody out to get the tickets.

MUSIC: Post

Ian : 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 pre-determined from the moment it's printed. You don't choose your winning numbers; they are 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.

Sheila Dubrawski: the lottery was taking over for the, The old bookies.

MUSIC: Theme

Ian : From GBH News this is Scratch & 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. And 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 3: Have you played your number?

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

Ian : 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?"

Ian Coss: How do you pick your numbers every day?

VOX POP: I play my dog's birthday. I play my birthday.

last four numbers of my mother's bone, you know. Shit like that.

Ian Coss: You've been playing the same number for 10 years. What's the number? I can't, I can't tell. Right.

Ian : It's hard to overestimate the power and allure of choice. In a world of long odds, factors far outside all of our control, there is 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.

VOX POP: That's that number. I be here my first day here.

Ian : I met a 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.

VOX POP: Maybe the gods will throw money on me…

It's really a kind of mystical act, with all the rituals and traditions you might expect.

Ian Coss: do you play the same numbers every day?

VOX POP: I don't know, change every day.

Ian : Dreams, astrology, numerology...

VOX POP: So 3 plus 2 is 5 plus 5 is 10. That's a 1.

Ian : Sports, dates, license plates -- it's all mixed up in there, even the New York Yankees.

Speaker 31: I keep the 99 in there because Judge, he's my man. So I get double nines in one of my numbers. I'm

Ian Coss: done. Hey, can I get your name real quick? Nope.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian : 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.

MUSIC: In town, it's alright, with a pencil writing numbers down.

Ian : 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.

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,

Ian : Stephen Robertson is the co-author of the book "Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars."

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.

Ian : So these early numbers games had a limited reach, until sometime in the 1920s somebody in Harlem made the breakthrough.

Stephen Robertson: And for our money, that somebody is probably Casper Holstein,

Ian : Casper 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 City. 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 financial class of the city lived.

Stephen Robertson: The story 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 realized that he could use those numbers and bring them over to the kind of gambling that was going on.

Ian : And he would do this, using the so-called "Clearing House Numbers."

Stephen Robertson: So the clearinghouse was reporting each day on the total transactions between banks in New York City, as well as a number for the Federal Reserve.

Ian : Every day, a clerk walked out of the Clearing House building at and wrote these various figures on a blackboard. They were also published in the financial pages, just like how papers publish 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 Clearing House 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 Clearing House Numbers was born.

MUSIC: I've got no credit, I see.

Ian : 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 the with money you were 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 six hundred fold.

In an instant, ten cents could become sixty dollars -- real money in the 1920s.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : Playing the numbers became a fact of life in 1920s Harlem. It was everywhere. And this is what Robertson and his co-authors document.

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.

Ian : They found human interest stories about people who had hit the number, and how much money they won. 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, and the career of boxer Joe Lewis.

Stephen Robertson: There's a whole numbers kind of supporting industry that you can track.

Ian : The newspapers also had ads for so-called "dream books".

Stephen Robertson: Books that would literally tell you, that if you saw, you know, I don't know, a cow jumping over the moon in your dream, that this was the three digit number that you should play.

Ian : Dreaming of apples: play 416. Bugs: 305. A gravestone: 999.

Stephen Robertson: And they sold thousands of copies of these dream books.

Ian : 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.

Stephen Robertson: So he passed the collection plate round instead of the hundred of dollars that he usually collected, they collected something like ten dollars only because everyone in the congregation was playing numbers. And so the clergyman then recanted and he sent the plate around again and said, all right, okay, I'll take your money even if you played numbers and suddenly there's hundreds of dollars there again.

Ian : 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.

Stephen Robertson: And it really highlighted that numbers was literally everywhere. In the neighborhood -- they're all talking about it, they're all placing the bets, and it's in every institution in the city.

MUSIC: Post

Ian : Given how much has been written about New York, the Harlem Renaissance, the Roaring 20s -- 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.

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.

Ian : The stock market was all the rage in the 1920s -- before it crashed that is -- but only about two or three percent of Americans actually owned stocks at that time. So most people, certainly most black people, were not involved.

And the Clearing House numbers, even though the game was illegal, even though it was purely a game of chance, offered a way into that world.

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.

Ian : 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.

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.

Ian : 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 Pokeno.

Pokeno Player: Yeah. Ten clubs. Okay, nine clubs.

Ian : It's kind of like Bingo, and the women here -- they were all women -- are playing for pennies. Red solo cups filled with pennies.

Pokeno Player: clear the board. Alright.

Ian : 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.

Pokeno Player: Two there, two there, two there,

Ian : 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 game becomes gambling.

It seems we were in the right place.

MUSIC: Transition

Joanne Chambers: I think I came to Boston in 1969.

Ian : One of the people Isabel met that day was Joanne Chambers. And she was happy to talk about the numbers. It had changed her life.

Ian Coss: Could you tell me, where were you from originally? Where were you coming from when you moved to Boston?

Joanne Chambers: I was born and raised in a place called Lovejoy, Illinois, better known as Brooklyn, Illinois.

Ian : Brooklyn is in southern Illinois, much closer to St Louis than Chicago. And so moving to Boston in the 1960s was a big change.

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.

Ian : 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.

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're just black as we are. But they don't talk like us. I'm kind of ashamed that I didn't, but that's really all I knew in 1969 and 68 when I first came here.

Ian Coss: So when, when you first came to Boston, had you ever heard of the numbers?

Joanne Chambers: No, never, never, never, never, never heard of the numbers, no.

Ian : 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.

Joanne Chambers: I can remember, in the morning, the kitchen table would be crowded there. You know, the in laws, , but once, one morning I'd get up and I'd look to see what they were doing, and this man was there, and they were writing, you know.

Ian : 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.

Joanne Chambers: To find out what he was there for was to pick up numbers. they would give him so much money on this number. So my husband found out and he got into it.

Ian : Joanne never played the numbers herself, but Mr. Chambers did.

Joanne Chambers: He didn't have no dream books, I know that, but he may have been consulting his dreams

Ian : And one day, his number hit. Sandy came back to the house with $3,000 cash.

Ian Coss: At the time, was that more money than you had ever seen before?

Joanne Chambers: In 2024, I don't see that today. It's not pretty for me. I mean, when you're poor, you're poor. So you, you know, that kind of money back then went a long ways. and I remember 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'll never forget these end tables. They were long, big, strong, gorgeous. And a couch. All of that, and maybe a 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.

Ian : 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.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : By the 60s and 70s, when Joanne Chambers stumbled on the game in Boston, the numbers was not simply a local affair in black neighborhoods. It had spread to white working class communities too.

David O'Reilly: My aunt played it all the time

Ian : At some point in doing interviews, I just started asking everyone I talked to if they remembered the numbers.

David O'Reilly: She'd always play 7 11, and she did really well with it.

Glen Myette: In Dorchester. It was the cobbler. And he was running numbers. I played 107, that was my address, my lucky number, I never hit it though.

Ian : And it was kind of amazing to me how universal these stories were.

Renee Loth: I had a cousin who was a, bookie, a numbers runner.

NARR: Even out in the suburbs, you could play numbers.

Andy Solari: I remember going into a store and a guy handed me a piece of paper and a quarter and saying, take this down to the hairdresser. I guess I was actually running numbers at the time, unknowingly.

Ian : 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.

MUSIC: Post

Joanne Chambers: It was just something mysterious about him coming there to that house then bringing the money to you.

Ian Coss: And who did he work for?

Joanne Chambers: Who knows? Ha, ha, ha, ha. I don't know.

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

Ian Coss: When does the mafia start getting involved in numbers?

Stephen Robertson: So very much at the end of prohibition

Ian : 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.

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 neighborhoods 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, that, you know, once they want control of, of the numbers, it's something that's going to happen.

Ian : Prohibition ended in 1933. By the end of that decade, the Harlem numbers game was in the hands of white organized crime.

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 black people into the pocket of of black numbers runners in the same kind of way.

ARCHIVAL: Gerry Angiulo has one million and a half dollars out on the street at one percent…

Ian : 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.

ARCHIVAL: Angelo and his brothers operate two businesses, out of this office on Prince Street in the north end of Boston.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : The Angiulo 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 ten local offices, reaching out into suburbs like Watertown, Medford and Revere -- miles from the North End. The man who ran it all was Gennaro, the second oldest of the brothers. People called him Jerry.

ARCHIVAL: Jerry Angiulo 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

Ian : Gennaro Angiulo was a small man, maybe just 5ft 6. He wore lifts in his shoes for extra height, and big heavy framed glasses -- like Junior on The Sopranos.

Ian Coss: What were his special skills? What made him good at running the numbers?

Edward Harrington: To use the term, he was good with figures.

Ian : Ted Harrington, who we heard back in episode one, ran the city’s organized crime strike force, so he had his eyes on Angiulo. He told me that Angiulo, 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.'

Edward Harrington: he gained, uh, ascendancy. Not because he was a brutal person. He just was a brilliant businessman.

Ian : Gennaro Angiulo 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.

Ernie DiNisco: Jerry really didn't like the sports betting business because of the risk involved.

Ian : Ernie DiNisco was a federal prosecutor on mafia cases, so he knew Angiulo’s operation well. And knew that Angiulo was very cautious.

Ernie DiNisco: With sports betting, 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.

Ian : Sports betting also carried more legal risk for the house, because people were betting large amounts at one time, often on credit.

Ernie DiNisco: the one thing about gambling is it always leads to loansharking, inevitable. like night following day. I mean, the FBI used to have a saying that on Friday afternoons, they would wait for, um, a loan shark victim to come walking through the door, and they would make a case against, uh, mobsters in New York, uh, because, ran out of time. They had nowhere to go. And they thought the best alternative would be to, uh, to cooperate. that was the risk that Jerry and his brothers for the most part sought to avoid it or very smart at it

Ian Coss: and so the, 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, that it came to that.

Ernie DiNisco: With the numbers, you 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.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : 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 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.

Ernie DiNisco: that was the meat and potatoes. That's where they made the money

MUSIC: Post

Ian : 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.

MUSIC: Out

Ian : 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 ten thousand 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.

Stephen Robertson: And they actually called it the numbers

Ian Coss: they called it the numbers

Stephen Robertson: Oh, wow.

Ian : 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.

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, and So, 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 buyer criminal activity strikes me as astonishing.

Ian : 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.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian : 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 the top of the slide thinking about climbing back down.

David O'Reilly: I remember the director at one of my interviews and he said Throughout history that lotteries come and go.

Ian : Again, David O'Reilly -- one of the early staff on the Numbers Game.

David O'Reilly: 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, uh, that this will end.

Ian : 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.

ARCHIVAL: Six, and the second digit. Six, and now the third digit.

Ian : 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 Dubrawski were only hired on a temporary basis. Their jobs depended on whether the game survived.

Sheila Dubrawski: Because if the integrity was compromised, then nobody would want to play.

Ian : Which brings us to that mad dash across the state, the teenagers in 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.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : 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 in with an X. Every afternoon at 5pm, as piles and boxes of those forms arrived at lottery headquarters, they would get scanned through a microfilm camera.

Sheila Dubrawski: You'd have to check it periodically to make sure that it was film, because it was very fast. It was a two, two, two, two,

Ian : That was part of Sheila Dubrawski’s job.

Sheila Dubrawski: Once all tickets were accounted for, that was the okay to go ahead and draw a winning number.

Ian : 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

Sheila Dubrawski: They would go back to the film and verify that this was the winning ticket.

Ian : And the system held up. The story was, there was no story. No fraud. No scandal.

MUSIC: Shift

ARCHIVAL: This is Lottery Live, the daily number…

Ian : In fact, the game was a hit.

Sheila Dubrawski: The daily number was huge. You know, people lived by it when that number was going to go off

Christy George: Lottery was incredibly popular.

Ian : Christy George was a reporter for WGBH. And she remembers when those nightly drawings began, the newsroom would get the number right around 10 o'clock, when their show aired.

Christy George: Well, I worked for a nightly news show on public television, we, covered Boston, we also covered Beirut. Um, but out in the field, you'd be talking to people and they'd say, Oh, I watched that show and, and you'd go, wow, what do you like about the show? And they'd say, it's the first place I can see the number.

Ian : Just like the old Clearing House numbers, it was a ritual, an institution.

Sheila Dubrawski: You don't remember the jingle?

Ian Coss: I don't.

Sheila Dubrawski: Have you played your number? Have you played your number? Have you played your number today? Yeah, that was big.

ARCHIVAL: Have you played your number? Have you played your number? Have you played your number today?

MUSIC: Out

Ian : 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.

Larry DiCara: And I just decided maybe it was time to do things differently. And I ran.

Ian : 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 have also met before, wanted to rein it in -- specifically the way they advertised new games.

Ian Coss: How aggressive was the lottery advertising in the late 70s?

Larry DiCara: Mighty aggressive because it was creating a brand.

Ian : The challenger was Boston City Councilor Larry DiCara.

Larry DiCara: 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.

Ian : 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 has always been most popular in low income neighborhoods, and specifically Black neighborhoods. That's who the game was targeting, and Larry DiCara thought the lottery was taking it too far.

Larry DiCara: Yes, I thought that lottery advertising, gave the incorrect message. Just like sports betting does today, I looking for people who don't have a lot of money to spend it.

ARCHIVAL: Some candidates will offer slogans. I will talk about The substance of issues.

Ian Coss: So you decide to run for treasury. What's your pitch?

Larry DiCara: My pitch was that he'd been there a long time.

Ian : DiCara ran as a reform candidate -- he wanted to 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.

ARCHIVAL: I've done my homework. It's time to actively campaign. Very much.

Ian : DiCara saw it as a principled stand, his critics saw it as prudish, stuck up even.

Larry DiCara: A Globe columnist, did a brutal piece on me. I think he said, john Calvin, walks among us, or something like that, Uh, 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.

Ian : What DiCara did not expect, were the hijinx.

First there was the high school history teacher.

MUSIC: Enter

Larry DiCara: at Doherty High in Worcester.

Ian : 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'd offered DiCara his help.

Larry DiCara: Maybe a month later, we were having something out in Worcester and I said, call him up.

Ian : But all of a sudden, this teacher didn’t want to have anything to do with him.

Larry DiCara: turns out that he'd gotten a job working part time for the lottery. And that's the last I heard of him.

Ian Coss: Not a coincidence in your mind?

Larry DiCara: Not a coincidence at all.

MUSIC: Post

Ian : Then there were the other candidates – two of them, both with kind of suspicious names – who jumped into the race right after DiCara. This was a statewide race though; DiCara couldn't get too hung up on one highschool history teacher. He needed to focus on getting his name out there.

The problem was that once Larry DiCara got in the race, two other candidates jumped in, who were also trying to get their names out there. And the names themselves were somewhat suspect.

Larry DiCara: one of whom whose first name was Larry.

Ian : There was another Larry -- Larry Black.

Larry DiCara: And the other a city councilor from Everett whose name is Paul Cacciotti.

Ian : And another City Councilor, also with an Italian last name.

Larry DiCara: and I don't think it was by accident.

Ian : But here's the kicker: on the ballot, the candidates were listed in alphabetical order: Crane the incumbent, followed by Black, Caccioti, and finally DiCara.

MUSIC: Out

Larry DiCara: So, inevitably just human nature somebody would get the Larry's mixed up. Inevitably, human nature Somebody would get the Italian city councilors mixed up.

Ian Coss: And inevitably, inevitably I imagine some people just don't even make it to the fourth name down the list.

Larry DiCara: Inevitably people don't.

Ian : The theory here, which DiCara has maintained ever since, is that Treasurer Crane convinced those other candidates to run in a deliberate effort to split the vote.

Larry DiCara: And the rules of politics are very simple, Ian. You cannot play offense when you're playing defense.

Ian Coss: I just love that they, that they found somebody named Larry. I mean, that's just too good.

Larry DiCara: And he was my classmate at Boston Latin School.

ARCHIVAL: Have you given any thought to possibly dropping out and putting your support to anyone?

Ian : DiCara stuck it out until election day, hoping against hope that he could break through in that muddled field.

ARCHIVAL: I would rather be struck by lightning, uh, here at Channel 2, uh, this evening, uh, tis the will of God.

Ian : But the breakthrough never came.

Larry DiCara: It was called early, 9. 30, 10 o'clock. and I gave a little speech and, you know, I remember standing up and saying, I may be broke, but I'm not a broken man. I remember that line and, um, it was a tough day.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian : 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 when other states faltered.

By the way, there is no concrete evidence to back DiCara'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 the legislature had hoped for was working, and the lottery's advertising could keep on working as well.

ARCHIVAL: Excuse me, Jimmy. I'd like to tell you how to play the numbers game from the Mass State Lottery.

Ian : 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 from organized crime. You can see it in the press quotes from Treasurer Bob Crane. He would always reference the illegal rackets, how there are all these people out there gambling anyway, so they might as well do it with us. 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.

Joanne Chambers: You know, like, oh wow, now you, it's legal. That's the first thing you think of.

Ian : 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.

Joanne Chambers: oh, it's, it's really, it just something gets into you and you, you go, I ain't got nothing anyway. Can't got nothing to lose but a dollar.

Ian : She remembers going to try the new game after it launched in April, and playing her birthday: April seventeenth, 417. After that Chambers became a regular. 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.

Joanne Chambers: it's a mind thing. Something's about that number business. Because, you know self consciously is not going to win, but still it overpowers the thought of winning.

ARCHIVAL: This is Lottery Live. Last night, the daily number on a 1 bet.

Ian : 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.

Joanne Chambers: and you scrape it up look in your bag for four quarters

Ian : So you rush out to the store in the middle of the night, just before the betting closes.

Joanne Chambers: You write those numbers, there's a feeling. Ooh, good high. At the moment

ARCHIVAL: the official daily number, 6 2 2 5.

Joanne Chambers: Then that feeling dies, you go back to the same old.

ARCHIVAL: All four numbers in exact order. Paid off 6, 052.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian Coss: Do you still play the lottery?

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.

Ian : By the time of the 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 Angiulo’s numbers racket was also doing just fine. Even several years after the lottery’s copy-cat started up, the Angiulos 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.

Ian Coss: Would you ever see Gennaro Angiullo out in the streets of Boston?

Edward Harrington: I don't think I ever did, But when I was used to him, he came in to see me. Really?

MUSIC: Transition

Ian : Again, Ted Harrington with the organized crime strike force.

Edward 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, uh, talking like if he were a big shot. 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.

MUSIC: Suspense

Ian : Angiulo 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 Angiulo had a few men around him as he ran his mouth in the corridor, but when Harrington made the invitation, those guys stayed outside.

MUSIC: Out

Edward Harrington: came in alone. and he was very thin. He was a wiry sort of guy.

Ian Coss: What was his message to you?

Edward Harrington: Well, he was, he was talking big when he was out in the corridor. but most of the, gangland figures at least pretended that they were gentlemen. That was part of their stick.

Ian : Inside the office, Angiulo was subdued, measured. The two men talked cordially for 15 minutes.

Ian Coss: But you knew at that point that, you were coming after him and he knew you were coming after him.

Edward Harrington: Yeah

Ian : What Angiulo 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 Angiulo was a big talker, that he liked to brag. So all they had to do was get him on tape.

ARCHIVAL: Multiple acts of murder and acts indictable under various federal statutes including illegal gambling businesses (Fade)

Ian : In Boston, the numbers was about to be put on trial.

ARCHIVAL: This may be the first time that the corporate structure of organized crime has been so completely dissected for public view.

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.

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 gives a great window into the world of bookies and wiseguys. 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 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.