Inspired by the Pit thread, I wonder what Don Coleone would say (about the possibilitiy of selling losing tickets (guaranteed) to the suckers (public)?
I forsee the following dialogue:
(Don Coleone angrily dismissed Tataglia’s proposal to market heroin): “Mr. Tataglia, i will give you my answer, it must be no”!
Camera shifts to “Sonny” Coleone: “Pop, there’s a guy here who has a new proposal-we sell lottery tickets THAT CAN’T WIN A PRIZE-it’s the best thing since the harlem policy rackets!”
(Don Coleone): “You mean to tell me, we can sell LOSING tickets to the public?”
(Stranger)" yes, Don Coleone, and it is perfectly legal…its what the NJ lottery does"
(Don Corleone): “Santino, get this man a drink! I think we can do business”!
(Don Corleone) (to his lawyer son Tom hagen): “Tom, sell all of our rackets to the Tataglias…we have a new business that will make us all millionaires!”
I think you just set the record for repetitive misspelling in a single post. To make it worse, you got Corleone correct at the end.
Other than that, what was your point in this Op?
Um, the mob has a lottery. It’s called the ‘street number’, or ‘numbers’. It pays better than the state lottery, too. It uses some combination of a horse racing finish. If you hit the 3-digit street number, you get 600 to 1 instead of 500 to1.
Don’t be thinking the State invented the racket. It’s the State that wanted a piece of the mob’s racket and came out with the lottery.
At least with the mob’s game you had, apparently, a snowball’s chance in hell of winning something worthwhile.
Let’s be clear – the “losing tickets” being sold are those for games in which the top prize has already been awarded. You can still win $1, $2, $100, $1,000, or whatever short of the jackpot. They are not tickets that “can’t win a prize.”
They still do these? I remember them fondly from growing up in Brooklyn. These were very popular even when I left in the mid-80s and since there were usually several per borough(split up by neighborhood) you could always tell who’d won by the number of new “friends” a person had.
“Make me a coffer I can’t refuse.”
“Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.”
I believe Don Corleone would say something along the lines of:
Anyone who doesn’t bother to read the posted notice, which shows which prizes are still unawarded, deserves what they get.
In the states I know, you can find out, for each scratch ticket game, which prizes are still available. Only want to play one which has the big prize unawarded? Go look at the sheet and take your pick.
My (Italian) grandfather used to take numbers bets at his corner grocery store way back in the fifties and sixties. I remember my mom telling me stories about the times the cops almost caught him at it.
DC: " How can we compete with the State Lottery that is muscling in on our territory?’
Mob Flunky 1: " Heh, I got an idea, lets allow any bet from 1 cent to $1000"
Mob Flunky 2: " We’ll up the payouts to 60%"
Mob Flunky 1: " didn’t the state do that 5 years ago?"
Mob Flunky 3: " Nah, here’s what we do, we use the Lotteries winning numbers for our games, for the legitimacy of the numbers, allow any bet the player wants, not make them report any of the winnings over $600, and allow bet types that the State does not."
DC: “Make it so”
The scary thing is, this is not entirely made up.