Scratch & Win

Ian: In the early 1980s, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch bought one of Boston's two big dailies, the Herald, and he made some changes.

Frank Phillips: People say, Oh God, Murdoch, that was, that was fun.

Ian Coss: Frank Phillips was a reporter there.

Frank Phillips: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was real fun journalism. These guys with Australian accents, I'd say, you know, we've got a budget story here. The governor, I can get a piece of it before it comes out. We get a scoop and they said, Frank, Frank fuck the budgets. says, we want you to, we want you to stir up the animals. We don't need budget stories.

Ian Coss: That was the Murdoch mandate.

Frank Phillips: Go out and stir up the animals. And I said, okay.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian Coss: Phillips was a politics reporter. He wasn't going to file splashy stories about mob hits, or the latest meltdown of the Boston Red Sox. But he had faith that in this town, the world of politics could be just as stirring.

He told me that every morning he'd drive in from the suburbs, and just as he crested the hill in Belmont and beheld the city below, Phillips thought about the scene in Roger Rabbit when the investigator character first enters Toontown.

ARCHIVAL: Toontown

Ian Coss: A red curtain lifts, and suddenly the world comes to live in absurd cartoonish color.

Boston was Toontown, the politicians were the toons. And Phillips was here to tell their stories -- the more scandalous the better.

Frank Phillips: there are people cutting corners, people doing favors patronizing jobs. I would go in there to this press room and all these young Ivy Leaguers would be in a Globe Bureau and, oh, God, these people, can you imagine what they're doing? I'd say, what are you complaining about? They're characters, and we want them to screw around. I said, guys, catch them.

Ian Coss: As it turned out, 1986 would be a memorable year in Toontown: a great year for catching mischief and stirring up the animals.

Frank Phillips: Oh yeah, this is great. This is, this is when politics is politics in Massachusetts.

Ian Coss: It was an off year for president, but an on year for all the big statewide offices: governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and of course Treasurer. Bob Crane, master of the lottery, had already been elected to an unprecedented five terms -- thanks to the legislature lifting term limits on his job -- and he was now running for a sixth.

At the beginning of that year there was no reason to believe Crane's race would be the race to watch. But then, there was also no reason to believe what was about to happen in the governor's race.

Frank Phillips: Let me go back to 86. Um,

Ian Coss: Early in the election season, Phillips got a tip that the Republican nominee for governor suffered from occasional mental breakdowns. He had been spotted talking to himself on the phone, and wandering around his office stark naked first thing in the morning.

Frank Phillips: and I remember talking to even the, you know, my, editors with their Aussie accents says, oh Jesus Christ, how do we write that?

ARCHIVAL: I've never seen anything like this. Two thousand signatures?

Ian Coss: Then it came out, that the nomination papers for this same candidate included forged signatures.

ARCHIVAL: All told, local officials have corroborated 649 such alleged forgeries

Ian Coss: Once that story broke, the Republican Party hastily drafted a new candidate, but pretty soon it came out that this second candidate had claimed to be a Vietnam veteran, when in fact he had never even served.

ARCHIVAL: he's been lying about his military service for years.

Frank Phillips: and He finally withdrew so they were absolutely in turmoil,

MUSIC: Post

ARCHIVAL: The continuing confusion at the top of the ticket has made the GOP a laughingstock.

Ian Coss: Finally the party drafted a third candidate...But even then, the original candidate -- the one with the forged signatures -- was still listed on the ballot, and refusing to remove himself because, well, he was mad at his party for dumping him...

Frank Phillips: Here, they kicked him to the curb. He was a mess.

Ian Coss: And the turmoil went on and on and on.

ARCHIVAL: and Republicans hope last, candidate for governor.

MUSIC: Fade out

Ian Coss: Once the drama on the Republican side settled down, there was no more story. The general election would be a blowout for the incumbent Democrat, Michael Dukakis, which meant that attention that year shifted down ballot, to the Treasurer's race.

Frank Phillips: There was no other race,. No other statewide race.

Ian Coss: Which was actually shaping up to be quite interesting.

MUSIC: Theme

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

All through the formative years, there was one man making the key leadership appointments, one man making sure the revenue kept going up: Treasurer Bob Crane. As you may recall, Crane was handed the keys to the lottery partly to ensure that the patronage jobs would go to Democrats, which they did. The whole machine was well oiled to deliver money and jobs, year after year, when the 1986 election arrived and suddenly, Crane found himself in the fight of his life.

This is Part Seven: the Dirtiest Race in the Commonwealth.

BREAK

Ian Coss: You told me that if this story were a movie, it should open with a shot of the St. Patrick's day breakfast in South boston. Could you tell me why?

Christy George: That was the gathering of the clan, of old Irish Catholic, power players in Massachusetts.

Ian Coss: Christy George was for many years the statehouse reporter for WGBH. And when I told her I was doing something on Bob Crane, she immediately mentioned this breakfast, which she covered many times.

Christy George: It's an old hall brown walls and trestle tables and as a reporter, I never ate, but, uh, it was the Irish breakfast with, uh, the eggs and the blood sausage and potatoes.

ARCHIVAL: If you're Irish, come I'm in the power. Earth is a welcoming for you.

Christy George: And Every year they would gather in South boston and listen to jokes and songs and barbs, and celebrate their kinship and their grudges and their power.

ARCHIVAL: If you're Irish, this is the place for you. Hey! Come on

ARCHIVAL: Father McDonald and, uh, distinguished guests, my colleagues in government…

Ian Coss: The main event for these breakfasts was and is the roasting. A chance to skewer friends and enemies alike. And Bob Crane was always there.

Like a good meme, the jokes at these events are dense, layered with insider references. I don’t understand most of them.

But the running joke about Bob Crane was pretty simple: he was a rogue.ARCHIVAL: Bob Crane. About six months ago, when the heat was really on. I'm not sure what investigation that was. Was it the condos? Was it the place down on the street? Well, one of those, you know, scams that he gets involved in, you know.

Ian Coss: It’s not that Crane was necessarily rotten or crooked, not deep in some gangster's pocket. But that he was always right on the edge of what was considered fair play in the game of politics.

ARCHIVAL: I was very happy to get 61 percent of the vote. I understand that's, uh, almost as much as your commission on the retirement fund?

Ian Coss: OK that one's a little in the weeds. This one's more clear.

ARCHIVAL: My advice to you, Mr. Treasurer, would be next time use a shredder.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian Coss: There are many accusations that swirled around Crane -- his handling of state money, his relationships with banks, his wily election tactics. But the one that never ever went away, that was so constant it barely felt newsworthy at all, was patronage.

Ian Coss: So, how did hiring work at the lottery? Did you really need to know somebody to get a job there?

David O'Reilly: I think mostly.

Ian Coss: David O'Reilly, who we heard in Part 3, started out as a part-timer picking up paper betting slips in a state-owned Gremlin, but he stayed at the Lottery for over forty years.

David O'Reilly: Yeah, we used to say, who is your godfather, and it usually was godfather rather than godmother. And it was a senator or a rep, you know, who would then, get in touch with Crane and say, hey, I got this person, I'd really like to help.

Ian Coss: Godfather was the casual term for it. The more formal term was "sponsor."

David O'Reilly: And. That, that was like the first question you would ask somebody when they came in the door for, for the new job. You know, who should sponsor?

Ian Coss: So Tell me, how did you start working for the Massachusetts State Lottery?

Andy Solari: I actually answered an ad in a Wednesday paper, I remember, and I was just out of the service.

Ian Coss: Andy Solari, the communications technician we heard in Part 6, claims that he was one of those rare unsponsored hires. But he had the benefit of very specialized skills, and also serving in the military.

Andy Solari: Somebody told me you never see ads for a lottery job in the paper cause it's really political and stuff. So, but I went in and interviewed and, one of the first, um, questions you get when you start at the lottery is, who's your sponsor, you know? And I didn't, you know, I didn't even know what that meant, but everyone had a sponsor there,

Ian Coss: so when you met other employees at the lottery you sort of tell, Oh, this person is from, you know, the Senate president's office and this person is from, you know, the state rep from Canton or like, would you kind of know?

Andy Solari: Well, if they had a good sponsor, they'd let you know, you know, like, okay, don't mess with me, you know,

MUSIC: Enter

Ian Coss: Patronage is probably as old as politics -- certainly in this country. It's right there in the constitution that the president gets to appoint people, presumably, their people. That's the origin of the phrase "to the victor belong the spoils." It was spoken by a Democratic Senator from New York in 1832 as a defense of patronage. As in: get over it, we won, now we get to hire whoever we want.

Over the years, Crane provided jobs to the son of House Speaker Thomas McGee -- the former tank commander from episode five who dropped lots of F-bombs -- and to multiple aides of Bill Bulger, lord of the State Senate, as well as not one but three children of Attorney General Frank Bellotti.

Andy Solari: there was Pilates, there were kings, there were Volpes, there, you know, names you'd recognize from politicians and stuff

Ian Coss: A Republican state senator once claimed to have studied the "political make-up" of the Lottery, and found that 98 percent of employees were registered Democrats. 98 percent. Treasurer Crane certainly made good use of his political spoils.

By the mid-1980s, the Massachusetts lottery employed over four hundred people. It was famous for doing everything in-house, from ticket design to IT, which allowed it to hire way more people than other states. Crane himself estimated that half of those people had a sponsor.

And to Crane, it was not anything to be secretive about.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: There is nothing wrong with patronage.Patronage, in my opinion, is giving a job to someone who has been sent to you for an interview by a person in government as a sponsor. If that person is qualified and can do the job,

Renee Loth: He was , unapologetic,

Ian Coss: Renee Loth is a longtime opinion columnist for the Boston Globe, and she did an extended interview with Crane towards the end of his career.

Renee Loth: completely sanguine, about, his reputation. About the patronage that he, presided over at the lottery or favors he did for friends and political allies that, you know, today would make your hair curl

Ian Coss: And Crane had a simple argument to back it up: just look at the lottery's results.

ARCHIVAL: And I've been successful, uh, by hiring people that probably came to me from a legislator. Hiring people I probably went to college with. Hiring people that I knew from another walk of life. But they all were qualified and did their job and made me look good.

Ian Coss: Lottery sales were up, payouts to players were up, and not one major scandal in all its years of operation.

Andy Solari: I got to say that even for all the politics, it was run like a business.

Ian Coss: Again, Andy Solari.

Andy Solari: You know, that was, that's a big cash cow, obviously, It was something you didn't want to screw it up. and I don't know, I don't want to disparage anybody here, you know, but there were guys that were there just because they knew somebody, but most of the time. People knew their job and did their job and took it very seriously.

Ian Coss: David O'Reilly -- who got his first job through a family connection -- argues that in many cases, people took those patronage jobs even more seriously.

David O'Reilly: don't know. There's something that comes with that too. Like you really, uh, there you know, representing that person who gave you the job. So it comes with More responsibility really that you don't, you don't want to screw it up.

Ian Coss: There was a sense of a shared purpose. For an employee to rig a drawing, or misprint a ticket, or botch a product roll-out -- they weren't just failing themselves, they would be betraying the lottery family.

David O'Reilly: The Crane days we were honestly a family. it is not like that anymore. It's just totally not like that because we've gone through, um, I think five or six treasurers since Crane. But when you think of the early days, it was only Crane so, It was his family of employees.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian Coss: And like any family, it came with expectations: for one thing, you had to step up around election time.

David O'Reilly: When I first started, I was given nomination papers and I said, what are these?

Ian Coss: The nomination papers were for Crane's re-election campaign.

David O'Reilly: I wasn't very political. I wasn't very aware of the politics behind, the lottery. So I said, what am I supposed to do with this? That's And this guy told me you go door to door and you get signatures for Bob Crane. He's the boss.

Andy Solari: They didn't ask, they said, hey, you're gonna collect the signatures for Bob Crane

Ian Coss: Andy Solari got the same...request.

Andy Solari: I had bought this house in Brockton and need a lot of work. And I was, I had the floors ripped out. I'm standing in the basement, I'm surrounded in dirt. Guy comes to the door and he goes, Hey, you got those signatures yet? And, and, uh, I go, you know, I'm tied up with all this stuff. And he goes, well, I need them.

Ian Coss: And it was not a request.

Andy Solari: I didn't take it that way. Do you want to work overtime this week, you know, so it was, it was always implied, I guess, but heavily implied.

Ian Coss: Here the power of patronage comes full circle. Crane doles out the jobs in order to gain political support, and then of course all those people know their jobs depend on him being in power, so they work to keep him there.

It's classic machine politics, the kind of thing you associate with New York ward bosses in the 1890s. But alive and well in the Massachusetts state lottery of the 1980s.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: What do you think changed fundamentally? It's like, why did that fall out of favor?

Renee Loth: I just think that Watergate, and all of the fallout from that seeped into, politics even at the local level, even at the street level.

Ian Coss: As Renee Loth recalls, it was really after Watergate that patronage started to become a dirty word.

Renee Loth: The feeling that, uh, we needed to clean up. government, that there was too much corruption, and that we just needed to clean house.

ARCHIVAL: Next in number 1520, Elrod against Byrne.

Ian Coss: In the mid 1970s, soon after Watergate, the Supreme Court heard the first in a series of cases challenging the practice of patronage -- this one about a local sheriff's office in Illinois.

ARCHIVAL: The so called patronage practice

Ian Coss: That case was followed a few years later by another, brought by public defenders in Rockland County, New York.

ARCHIVAL: I believe there are two central questions before this court. First, whether it is in the best interest of this country to virtually end the patronage system.

Ian Coss: Both cases resulted in rulings that limited patronage.

ARCHIVAL: Resume there at one o'clock, counsel.

Ian Coss: But those rulings were just part of a larger political movement of reform that sought to root out cronyism and inside dealing -- that embraced transparency….

Renee Loth: Jimmy Carter represented part of that, Mike Dukakis represented part of that, a new generation was coming in with, more idealism and, less pragmatism maybe. But it took a long time for the old ways to, to die out.

Ian Coss: In Massachusetts, Robert Crane was one of those last practitioners of the old ways. He had become Treasurer back in 1964, with some help by the way from the previous treasurer, who also happened to be the best man at Crane's wedding. That's how it worked then. But in the era of squeaky clean Michael Dukakis, Crane was looking more and more out of step. He was ripe for a challenger. And in 1986, he got one.

ARCHIVAL: Massachusetts has the most powerful democratic machine in the country. And if I win, I'm going to root out the corruption and cronyism that exists in the state treasurer's office.

Ian Coss: The challenger was named Joyce Hampers, a former state revenue commissioner and a Republican. But she barely ever mentioned her party affiliation or pedigree. Hampers ran on a message of cleaning up government, including at the lottery.

ARCHIVAL: Hamper says she would make some changes. Bigger payoffs for megabucks runner ups, for one, and an end to patronage hiring. The people who can really measure up, stay. The people who can't, go.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian Coss: Patronage, this thing that had been business as usual at the lottery since the beginning, was now up for debate.

ARCHIVAL: about half the lottery employees were sponsored, so to speak.

This is a 1. 6 billion dollar business. You don't run it with hacks.

Ian Coss: And it looks like the Hampers campaign succeeded in making patronage an issue, because in 1986 you suddenly see Globe reports about Lottery hiring, with stats and tables comparing our lottery to other states.

ARCHIVAL: The charge, the treasurer's staff is five times larger than the national average.

Ian Coss: Not surprisingly, the reporting showed that Crane's family of employees was overwhelmingly white, even more so than other parts of state government. In 1986, only five and half percent of Lottery employees identified as members of a minority group. And the family was likely larger than it needed to be too. At that time, the Massachusetts lottery had more employees than the New York and Pennsylvania lotteries put together -- and those are both, much bigger states.

ARCHIVAL: I'm sorry my campaign had to use negative advertising. It's not the campaign I wanted to run. But I know of no other way the voters could have known about the hiring practices

Ian Coss: Crane was not expecting a serious challenge that year. No Republican had been elected Treasurer since the 1940s, and Crane hadn't even had to debate an opponent since the 1970s. He had not seriously fund raised or staffed up.

But the challenge from Hampers came on fast and hard. She and her husband owned a healthcare business with a lucrative patent on a dialysis machine. By the summer of '86, she had spent $200,000 of her own money on TV and radio ads. By the end of the campaign she would spend $1.5 million. Joyce Hampers did not respond to our request for an interview.

Frank Phillips: She had money to put into it, and that's what caught our eye.

Ian Coss: Frank Phillips, reporter for the Boston Herald, started to tune in. This could be a story.

Frank Phillips: And the Republicans and operatives were chewing on our ears and say, Hey, listen, this is going to be a real race. Ukraine's vulnerable. You could get them. And he could lose this.

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

Ian Coss: When you're attacking the integrity of a politician, you don't need proof. You just need enough shady sounding stuff that the public can draw their own conclusions. And Bob Crane supplied plenty of good material, including a decades old business relationship with a man named Eugene Merkert.

Jack Connors: So, Gene Merkitt owned a company called Food Enterprises. I think it was based in Canton. Mass.

Ian Coss: This is ad executive Jack Connors.

Jack Connors: And he was a food broker.

Ian Coss: A food broker is the person who gets products onto grocery store shelves. And not just on the shelf, but on the best spot on the best shelf.

Jack Connors: And I happen to be a victim of Gene America because, When I got out of college and out of the army, I was a Campbell's Soup salesman. In the frozen food division, Swanson TV dinners, which I don't recommend, Pepper's Farm turnovers, which are pretty good, and I'd go into a supermarket, and now if you walk into a supermarket, you walk down these rows of glass, freezer cases. But back then, they were like refrigerator cases with frost.

Ian Coss: Back then, the world of food brokering was also pretty ruthless.

Jack Connors: And you're moving their dinners out to move your dinners in, and you came back the next week. Your dinners were gone, their dinners were back.

Ian Coss: The disappearing dinners? As far as Connors is concerned, that was Merkert's doing. At one point, Merkert Enterprises was the biggest food broker in the entire country.

Jack Connors: They were the best of the food brokers. And probably the toughest. And I don't know the details, but Gene Merkitt hired Bob Crane.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian Coss: While Crane was working as Treasurer, collecting his treasurer's salary, he was also working as a consultant for Merkert Enterprises. In some years he made a lot more money from Merkert than he did from the state. That, plus the use of a company Cadillac.

Jack Connors: Bob Crane became an asset. It was part of the selling picture, if you will.

Ian Coss: The brokerage business after all, like politics, is all about relationships. That's how you get your client's frozen dinners at the front of the supermarket case. As far as Connors understands, Crane was helpful in cultivating those relationships -- part of the 'entertainment package' if you will.

Jack Connors: So when Gene Merkitt had Birdseye coming in or whatever, wouldn't it surprise me if Bob Crane was there to sing two or three songs at the end of dinner. And it just made people's hearts a little happier.

Ian Coss: One of the charming and confounding things about Bob Crane, is that he had a 'what you see is what you get' quality to his politics. It was not a secret that he had a lucrative side gig, any more than it was a secret that the lottery was loaded up with patronage jobs. These were not things to be ashamed of. Crane worked for Merkert, Merkert supported Crane's campaigns, Crane deposited state funds in a bank that Merkert helped run. This was simply how the game was played.

Jack Connors: It never occurred to me that that was anything but Smart business. Didn't bother me.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: The Merkert story had made headlines back in the 1970s. Crane was even investigated by a federal grand jury at one point. But they never brought charges. And it seemed like the issue was settled, until the summer of 1986, when Joyce Hampers launched her media blitz.

ARCHIVAL: Bob Crane's been giving us the same old song and dance for 22 years. Now people wonder, just who's been pulling the strings? He gets 130, 000 a year on the side, while he's supposed to be serving the Commonwealth.

Ian Coss: Hampers bet was that if the public knew about Crane's dealings, they would turn on him -- even after electing him five times before.

ARCHIVAL: Joyce Hampers put her money on a high risk strategy, gambling that she could win by exposing things like Bob Crane's outside income.

Ian Coss: All through the summer of '86, Crane did not really engage. His campaign hadn't formally kicked off, and he wasn't even planning to run TV ads at all. No debates were scheduled.

ARCHIVAL:That's right. Last year alone, Bob Crane made over 130, 000 on the side, no wonder he's smiling.

Ian Coss: Meanwhile, the media campaign against him reached its peak on September 17th. That night at 6:55pm, primetime, viewers of all three major Boston TV stations were greeted with a five minute attack ad, more like an infomercial really, outlining a litany of accusations against Crane, and claiming that, quote: "Bob Crane has been playing us all for fools."

Afterwards, a Boston Herald poll showed the race in a dead heat. Both candidates had exactly 37% of the vote. The rest were undecided. Clearly, Crane could not ignore Hampers any longer.

ARCHIVAL: The following special edition of Point of View is being jointly sponsored by WLBI TV 56,

Ian Coss: The day after those poll results were reported, Crane and Hampers met for their first debate.

ARCHIVAL: The Treasurer of Massachusetts is also the Receiver General

Ian Coss: Crane's white hair is combed neatly to one side. Hampers is wearing a big pearl necklace, and even bigger pearl earrings. I'd say they're both going for 'respectable.'

ARCHIVAL: And let me, if I might, start with you, Mr. Crane. If you are re elected you will have been given the opportunity to serve as treasurer for 26 years. Why is it good for the people of Massachusetts to have the same treasurer for so long?

Well, it's good

Ian Coss: From the very beginning, Crane is put on the defensive, forced to explain his record, his hiring practices, his long tenure -- something he had not really had to do in a long time.

ARCHIVAL: But just let me tell you this, Judy. Kalia Sremski played in the Red Sox outfield for 23 years, and I didn't hear anyone complain about it. Senator Kennedy

Ian Coss: And he mostly sticks to a simple line in his defense: so what? Who cares?

ARCHIVAL: Mrs. Hampers…

Ian Coss: Hampers on the other hand, took the opportunity to press her line of attack and keep the focus where she wanted it: on Crane.

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: We're talking about ethics, we're talking about integrity, uh, we're talking about the old gang, we're talking about cronyism

Ian Coss: The debate setting, I should say, is very intimate. They are sitting in chairs, side by side around a low table, almost uncomfortably close.

ARCHIVAL: Well, you're accusing him of doing things that are illegal.

Uh, well, I think he really, uh, I am accusing him of doing things that are unethical,

or whatever. I think you've been very reckless with your accusations, Mrs. Hampers. Well, may I finish? Particularly, you are distorting the truth. You are distorting my record. It doesn't interfere in one single way with the job I do as State Treasurer.

MUSIC: Post

Ian Coss: But what you do see in that debate is an opening for a counterattack. Crane doesn't quite seize on it himself, but it's pretty clear that the thing Hampers does not want to talk about so much, is her own record.

ARCHIVAL: That's all we have time for. I'd love it if you would both come back for another half hour at the end of the election. Well, we need a lot more debates to go through all these things. We're going to have more debates. I'm here,

MUSIC: Fade

Ian Coss: At what point did you get involved?

William Galvin: in late September I was asked by him and by a couple of people very close to him, to get involved in his campaign.

Ian Coss: Around the time of that debate, Crane reached out for help from one of his younger allies: William Galvin, the man who occupied Crane's old seat in the state legislature.

William Galvin: To take on hampers more aggressively than he was capable of, it wasn't his personality to go after anybody. I was a little more aggressive and I was significantly younger.

Ian Coss: Crane's magic power was always charm. He was likable, gentlemanly. But this election was shaping up to be an all out brawl, and Crane needed someone who could hit back.

Ian Coss: So you were kind of the, uh, the attack dog.

William Galvin: I wouldn't agree with that term, but I certainly could reply to false statements and did.

Ian Coss: Galvin became the new campaign manager.

And in retrospect, we can see that he was just the man for the job. An opponent later dubbed Galvin the 'Prince of Darkness,' a nod to his skills in the darker arts of politics. Amazingly that name has stuck. Galvin is currently our Secretary of State, a job he has held for thirty years. And you can still find news articles that casually and unironically refer to him as the Prince of Darkness.

William Galvin: 1 of the things that emerged as a significant issue was in doing research on her record as revenue commissioner.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian Coss: Hampers had served as the Revenue Commissioner for the state in the early 1980s, so there was plenty of potential history to work with. One of her tax collectors had pleaded guilty to taking a bribe. And at one point Hampers herself had to pay tens of thousands of dollars in back-taxes to the IRS, pretty ironic for a revenue commissioner.

ARCHIVAL: maybe we should take a look at the dirty laundry behind her campaign.

Ian Coss: So Galvin and the Democrats began their counterattack. But at first, nothing seemed to gain traction. Some polling even showed that attacks on Hampers were only making her more popular and more sympathetic. It was, in the words of the Globe: "The Democratic establishment ganging up on a lone woman."

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: But then they found the signature.

Ian Coss: It first appears on October 2nd…

Ian Coss: Well it didn't start with a signature. It started with a fired lawyer at the Revenue Department.

Ian Coss: Yeah, so on, on October 2nd, you file this piece that is It's kind of complicated. There's this link between Joyce Hampers, the candidate, and this fired lawyer from the Revenue Department.

Frank Phillips: Joyce Hampers set up a law practice. Is this one?

Ian Coss: In this piece, reporter Frank Phillips revealed a suspicious connection. A lawyer in the department got fired. He then got a very generous settlement of $29,000 from Commissioner Hampers. And some time later the two wound up working together.

Frank Phillips: Who later collected a settlement that Hampers approved.

Ian Coss: The story appeared on the bottom of page 4. It's not especially exciting stuff; certainly not stirring up the animals. But it got interesting, when Hampers denied she ever signed off on that settlement.

Frank Phillips: The first story, it was complicated. This boiled it down, did she sign the letter or not

Ian Coss: It got even more interesting when the Crane campaign then got its hands on the original settlement document, with Hamper's signature. And Hampers continued to insist she did not sign it.

William Galvin: she denied that it was her signature on these documents, which we had.

Ian Coss: Again, William Galvin, Crane's campaign manager.

William Galvin: And she denied it and she denied it and she denied it. And I confronted her and confronted her and confronted her.

Frank Phillips: when she said she didn't sign the letter, you know, my ears picked up and I said we gotta find a, handwriting expert.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian Coss: The next day, Phillips landed a story on page one. It included a very serious looking image of the handwriting expert holding a document in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other.

Frank Phillips: paragraph out loud. Handwriting analyst yesterday shot down GOP state treasurer hopeful Joyce Hepper's claim that she didn't sign a controversial 1980 requesting a settlement for a fired revenue department lawyer.

Ian Coss: Within a week, the Crane campaign was running attack ads about what came to be known as 'Signaturegate.' And it was Hampers who was on the defensive. She soon reversed her stance, and admitted it was her signature.

ARCHIVAL: you know, I, I don't have 20 advisors and an old gang, uh, behind me. I'm just a woman running for office, and so in the heat of the campaign, yes, in retrospect, I should have taken the time to sit down, go over the file.

Frank Phillips: it was one of those things in a campaign, and I've seen it so many times before, little things get blown up into major, debates.

ARCHIVAL: Do you think in retrospect that it was a mistake not to have admitted that you, in the first place, that you'd signed the letter?

Well, joe, the letter, as I said,

Frank Phillips: We always know Bob had stuff going on. She was trying to make herself squeaky clean. But if you're going to be squeaky clean, you got to be squeaky clean.

William Galvin: Her credibility was damaged. And, you know, Off we went.

MUSIC: Post

ARCHIVAL: Bob Crane and the success of the lottery has helped my business and others like it for 15 years.

Ian Coss: Alongside those attacks, Crane also had a positive message to run on: I'm the guy who gave you the lottery.

ARCHIVAL: Crane is deliberately running on the lottery as one of his major accomplishments and the strategy is so effective that some voters worry that if he loses the election, the lottery will go too.

Ian Coss: And Crane could always count on his lottery for a little October boost. That month, the State Lottery distributed 200,000 copies of a newsletter with not one but two images of Crane on the cover. Then later the same month, the lottery mailed out coupons for free tickets to 1.8 million households, with Crane's name right there on the coupon. The Globe even reported that the Lottery's PR firm was paying a private investigator to help do opposition research on Hampers.

It was a full mobilization of the lottery machine to save the man who held that machine together.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: Good evening, I'm Joe Day. Tonight, the candidates for Massachusetts State Treasurer Debate.

Ian Coss: On October 20th, with about two weeks until election day, the candidates met for a second debate. And there were no niceties.

ARCHIVAL: How can the public have any confidence in you as Treasurer, when you can't even recall signing a letter

Ian Coss: The race had clearly devolved into something ugly, and pretty unusual for the low-profile job of State Treasurer. The Harvard Crimson called it "The dirtiest race in the commonwealth." You had two candidates, both with some questionable history, both on the attack, and both trying to claim the moral high ground.

Hampers was running out of time to change the narrative, to make the race about Crane and his shadowy outside income from the food broker. So that night she made a final gamble - a new accusation.

ARCHIVAL: Tonight, I'm going to give Mr. Crane a chance to answer me once and for all. I allege that Mr. Crane, in applying for a mortgage for a luxury condominium almost two years ago, listed income far above the 130,000 he has admitted to publicly. Mr. Crane, I ask you tonight. to produce those mortgage documents and disprove the allegation. If you do, and it shows nothing more than the 130, 000, I will withdraw from this race.

Ian Coss: No one knew where the information behind this accusation was coming from, but Hampers was ready to bet her campaign on it.

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: I will spend not another dime, and I will campaign not a minute longer. Let's see the facts, Mr. Crane. Let's throw away the ads, and let's set the record straight.

Ian Coss: Crane was clearly not prepared to respond, and simply moved on to his closing arguments.

ARCHIVAL: So tonight I would just like to

Ian Coss: Allowing the challenge to hang there in the blue-walled TV studio.

ARCHIVAL: Thank you both for being with me tonight. Thank you, in our audience, for watching.

MUSIC: Post

ARCHIVAL: Last night, Hampers charged that Crane made over 1984.

Ian Coss: But Crane could not ignore the challenge for long. The very next day, he held a press conference.

ARCHIVAL: I've been in the food business on and off for 30 years

This afternoon, Crane took what he called the unprecedented step of releasing his returns to the public.

Ian Coss: He released the documents Hampers was asking for, showing all his income. And Hampers would not be dropping out of the race, because just as she claimed, Crane did in fact make over $200,000 in outside income during some of his years as Treasurer.

ARCHIVAL: No one ever asked me how much money I made in 1984.

Ian Coss: He did have an explanation for all that income, and how he'd handled it. Still though, the whole press conference looked bad; how he'd been forced into it. At one point, a reporter asked bluntly: "Are you a millionaire, Bob?"

ARCHIVAL: It would appear that I have a net worth of, uh, over a million dollars.

Ian Coss: The response sounded like a confession.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: This press conference had all the makings of a 'signaturegate' moment, where the nitty gritty complexity of government is all swept away and voters can assess their candidate in stark terms of honesty, integrity: have they been straight with me? Suddenly, the campaign was back on the terrain that Hampers had wanted to fight on all along. That's what you'd think at least. But William Galvin, Crane's campaign manager, has a theory to explain what actually happened.

ARCHIVAL: We're going to the bottom of the third inning at Shea Stadium in New York. The Red Sox three, the Mets nothing.

Ian Coss: The Red Sox were in the World Series that week, playing the Mets in what would be a nailbiter of a series. The day of that awkward press conference, the Sox lost game three. The next day they lost game four. But the day after that, they came back to win game 5.

ARCHIVAL: And this is the epitome, the pinnacle of all baseball,

Ian Coss: The thing about politics as entertainment, politics as sport, politics as stirring up the animals in all of us...is that, when there is better entertainment to be had, there's not much reason to pay attention to a race for State Treasurer.

The candidates actually met for one last debate that year -- Hampers' final chance to make her case.

William Galvin: And the debate. It was a Sunday afternoon. It was at channel four and it happened to fall on the same day There was a Red Sox game

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: In comes Mazzilli. In comes

Ian Coss: that would be game six of the World Series.

William Galvin: the game was up against the debate,

Ian Coss: The Red Sox lost that one in perhaps the most mortifying three seconds of Boston sports history, when a simple ground ball rolled between the legs of our first basemen, giving the Mets the win.

ARCHIVAL: 3 2 Boston

Ian Coss: but if the Red Sox were cursed that year, Bob Crane was charmed.

William Galvin: And he later said, yeah, no, I was very lucky

MUSIC: Post

Ian Coss: In the end it wasn’t close. Crane won handily.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: Do you feel like the public cared about the allegations against Crane in that campaign? You know, about the patronage, about the, you know, whatever his dealings like, did people care?

Frank Phillips: Do you remember the, uh, Ayatollah and the, uh, what do they call the head of the Iran, uh, the Shah.

Ian Coss: Frank Phillips remembers a political cartoon that came out during that campaign, showing the candidates as the two leaders of Iran, before and after the Revolution. You had the corrupt and party loving Shah, then you had the corrupt and party stifling Ayatollah. You can guess who was who.

Frank Phillips: Crane has got a champagne bottle and laughing, and the Ayatollah's looking severe, and, uh, he said, you want the Ayatollah or the Shah? the Shaw having a good time. And it really sums up the campaign. And she came across as the Ayatollah, scolding. And it's, Perhaps a good deal sexist, but she was scolding a guy that everybody liked, you know.

Ian Coss: The night of the election, Hampers claimed a kind of moral victory. She said in her concession speech, quote: "Now questions are being asked and new standards being applied and an era of good old boys is being brought to a close."

And she was right about that.

ARCHIVAL: Am I allowed to sing a song to the Treasurer?

Sure. This man's been very, very good to me and to a lot of people,

Ian Coss: In one of Crane's final St. Patrick's Day Breakfasts as treasurer, he got a series of roasts and tributes, including from some of the younger politicians coming up on the scene.

ARCHIVAL: You made me No, you got the wrong key, Paul. Well, one of you has. Yeah. Well, sewer's

Ian Coss: And I gotta say, that new generation – that more reform minded generation -- they’re not the entertainers that Crane and his cohort were. The old guard really did know how to put on a good show.

ARCHIVAL: Mr. Treasurer. Happy St. Patrick's Day to all of you.

Ian Coss: I try not to be too nostalgic about the days of patronage and machine politics. It was flawed and exclusionary. But I do think it's worth looking closely at what was lost when relationships and party loyalty were swapped out for far more elusive qualities like ideology and 'merit.'

Justice Antonin Scalia, in one of those landmark patronage cases before the Supreme Court, delivered what I find to be a kind of intriguing dissent -- a defense of patronage. Scalia argues that as the political machines faded from New York and Chicago and Boston, one result is that parties lost their discipline, and politicians became more focused on special interest groups than they are on their own constituents.

He may be overstating the causality, but there is something prescient in what Scalia is arguing -- especially in our moment, when our politics are so polarized and our parties are so weak -- that maybe patronage was part of the glue of party politics all along, the thing that bound constituents to elected officials in a way that was material. It was in a strange way the ultimate form of accountability. You deliver for me; I deliver for you.

MUSIC: Post

Ian Coss: It’s worth noting that when you look at all the issues at play in this election, the lottery itself was not really one of them – not in a fundamental way. You don’t hear them debating the amount of lottery advertising, or whether the drawings should be televised. Once the very idea of a lottery was a bitter partisan issue, a moral issue. By 1986 it was a given, for the old gang and for the reformers, for the Democrats and Republicans. They had all accepted it as part of politics, part of life. It was just a question of who could run it better.

But Crane and the lottery's story is not over quite yet.

In our final episode, the vaudeville Treasurer gets one last term to cement his legacy as creator of the most successful lottery in America. And the game that does it -- the one that really seals the deal -- well it had been right in his hands the whole time.

ARCHIVAL: With the new Instant Game Wildcard, you can win up to 5, 000.

Ian Coss: Just waiting for the moment to make its comeback.

ARCHIVAL: So anyone who can scratch, can win.

Ian Coss: That's next time.

MUSIC: Theme

Ian Coss:

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 Christy George, former reporter for WGBH, not only for helping me understand this mad-cap era in state politics, but also for helping me find some of those news reports she filed about it. Thanks also to the Boston Public Library who helped me find all those Herald articles that Frank Phillips wrote. Get this, he wrote fifteen articles just about the treasurer’s race, just in the month of October 1986. Finally, thanks to political scientist Eitan Hersh (A-tahn Hersh) who pointed me towards that opinion Justice Scalia wrote.

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.