Ian Coss
speaker
45 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Ian Coss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is Planet Money from NPR. Joe's Market in Quincy is one of the biggest lottery retailers in Massachusetts. It's got all your convenience store staples, but the area behind the counter is dominated by scratch tickets. At least 50 different clear plastic boxes, all numbered and all dangling these colorful tickets. Could I ask you a few questions for the podcast?
This is ticket number seven for today. The other six are in the trash bucket already. Six $50 tickets.
We know that he lives nearby, that he works as a mechanic, which fits with the dark blue work pants and black t-shirt. He comes here on his lunch break, part of his daily routine.
Then there are a lot of states in the middle, California, Texas, Illinois, all in about the $300 range. Towards the top, you've got New York, Michigan, Georgia. They're all around $500 or $600 per adult per year.
On his next $50 ticket, number eight for the day, our anonymous mechanic catches a break. He wins 100 bucks. So what are you going to do with that $100?
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone. And I'm Ian Koss. And Ian, you are here today as the host of a special series from NPR member station GBH in Boston. That series is called Scratch and Win. It chronicles the history of lotteries in America. And Ian, you have brought us part of that series today, yes.
Today on the show, the unlikely story of how Massachusetts became the lottery capital of America. It's a tale of high-level mathematics, organized crime, and perhaps the single most important use of a can of Fresca in American history. The story of scratch-off lottery tickets begins with an apparently not very good board game.
So this company's business, the supermarket games, these were popular in the 1960s. Stores would give them out for free as a little treat to customers, and the prizes were fairly small. We're talking like as small as half a penny. But these games did use a kind of rub-off film. What the company was making was, in effect, proto-scratch tickets.
Yeah, so the way this particular game worked was there were 10 scratch-off spots on the game ticket, and each revealed a playing card, you know, like ace, king, queen, jack. So you scratch off three spots. If those match, you win. Again, mostly just small prizes like pennies.
So while still chipping away at his PhD, John started to work with this game company.
Still, you know, like having a chance to encounter those weaknesses, those vulnerabilities in a low stakes environment, it was kind of giving John the chance to beta test a method and work out all the bugs.
Yeah, so the idea was to take this ticket design that John had perfected in the form of a fun promotional gimmick and bring it into the big leagues of actual gambling. Like, instead of pennies, the ticket could offer up thousands of dollars if, that is, they could find a state willing to try this.
It was not the Pennsylvania lottery. Seared in your mind. Oh, for the rest of my life, that jingle will exist. Anyway, yes, in other words, the lottery was... Boring and slow, notably slow. You buy a ticket, you wait, which is definitely not like, I don't know, a slot machine where you pay and then you play and you get the adrenaline rush of finding out right away.
In fact, that was John's pitch, like instant gratification, excitement. That was the lottery of the future. And when states heard that pitch... Well, it apparently did not work, actually. It did not land.
Right. Credibility and integrity over innovation because of...
Lotteries, gambling, was a shadowy business that states were wading into cautiously. And any whiff of irregularity, a fixed drawing, a forged ticket, it would shatter the public's trust.
So yeah, organized crime may have been in the back of states' minds when they were not interested in John's flashy new lottery scratchers. However, ironically, the mob might also be the reason that Massachusetts decided to be less conservative about their lottery, which brings us to the tale of Fat Vinnie the Stool Pigeon.
And Vinny was also the informant, of course. And as an informant, Mr. the Stool Pigeon testified in court lots of times. And perhaps most notably for our story, he also testified in front of a United States Senate hearing about organized crime.
In fact, part of the reason state lotteries were popping up in the first place was to do just that, to offer a legal alternative and ideally put the mob out of business. And I mean also so that the states could have a little extra revenue stream, but, you know, whatever. Yes, put the mob out of business. But that was not working.
Yep, better odds, better payouts. Anonymity, I guess, and also the ability to bet on credit if you feel pretty good about your kneecaps.
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