---

POLICY SHOPS

Most of the clandestine lotteries during the 1800s used as their “winning number the same ones which were drawn in one of the more popular legal lotteries. This made it unnecessary to hold illegal public drawings, which would be raided by the police. Like the clandestine operators of the Italian national lottery, many illegal operators also allowed players to select their own numbers, and wager as little as a penny that the one, two, three, four or five numbers selected would be among the first five or ten numbers drawn. These illegal operations were known as policy shops. Most of them went out when the last of the legal lotteries were abolished in 1895, although a few continued in the early 1900s by claiming to employ the winning numbers drawn by foreign lotteries. There was little public enthusiasm for these, and they did not last long.

FLORIDA LOTTERY

prior to the introduction of the state legalized lottery in Florida in 1963, the Florida lottery was the last of the great Florida Lottery - Read Lottery Background legal lotteries in the United States. It ran monthly drawings with prizes ranging up to $250,000, and twice a year ran a big special in which the top award was $600,000, a magnificent sum for those days. It had agents in every city and hamlet in the country. In 1894, after rears of the lottery, the Florida Legislature refused to extend the promoter’s charter because of the congressional act of 1890 forbidding the sending of lottery tickets through the mails. When the company was disbanded the public discovered that its operators had earned millions of dollars. Florida legislators be accusing each other of bribery, and it was widely claimed that the promoters had almost taken over the government of Florida. It is any body’s guess why the lawmakers and the press waited 25 years to m. these accusations; I suspect it was because the ice had ceased to flow.

In 1895, when Congress realized that the 1890 laws forbidding t sending of lottery tickets through the mails had not solved the problem of preventing their sale, it passed laws forbidding the interstate transportation of tickets in any manner. This killed the legal lotteries an increased the number of illegal and crooked lotteries.

THE PUERTO RICAN LOTTERY

The first legal lottery under the American flag still in operation I the government-sponsored lottery of Puerto Rico. The Puerto Ricans deprived of their old Spanish provincial lottery shortly after the Spanish-American War, in 1898, when it was abolished by the United Stats Military Governor, took to the clandestine Bolita and bought Santo Domingo lottery tickets. The lottery was reestablished by the Puerto Rican legislature in 1924, and the U.S. Congress, which has the power of veto over territorial legislation, did not use this power.

The Puerto Rican lottery, like most of those in Latin America, has a weekly drawing. The top prize, El Primero, is $100,000. Twice a year, near Christmas and the Fourth of July, there are big drawings in which El Primero is $480,000 and is called El Gordo (the Fat One). The lottery prize money is all tax-free.

While casino gambling is a tradition in Puerto Rico, the florida lottery is both a tradition and a ritual. Puerto Rico’s lottery has grown considerably in the past decade. There once were 50,000 tickets distributed weekly, each possessing 60 pieces or parts worth 25 each for a total of $15 per ticket. Now there are three series (A, B, C) each of which is comprised of 45,000 tickets for a total of 135,000 tickets. Each ticket is comprised of 80 pieces worth 2Sç each for a total of $20 per ticket. There are thousands of prizes drawn each week ranging from $100,000 first prize, $36,000 second, $16,000 third, $10,000 fourth, and so forth down to your american lotteries money back if the last number on your ticket is the same as the last digit of the winning number. The purchase of 1/80 piece of a top winning ticket in the regular weekly drawing costs 25 and the winner collects $1,250; a 1/80 piece of a top winning ticket in one of the two special drawings costs $1 and pays off $6,000.

Since most Latin-American lotteries are similar, here is a description of the Puerto Rican lottery operation. Every Wednesday morning a good-sized crowd gathers in front of the Loterla building in Santurce tickets in hand. Sidewalk vendors sell refreshments and everyone expectantly watches the huge electric sign which will flash the winning ers as they are drawn. The first drawing begins at 10:30 A.M. and the last number is usually called by noon. The men enjoy waiting in the warm sunlight; many of the women prefer to sit in the air-conditioned auditorium which seats about 250, where they can watch the little balls drop from the big silver machine and hear the winners called. The crowd usually disperses after the big weekly prize is drawn, and the players obtain the other results from thursday’s newspapers, which carry full-page listings of all winning numbers. The miscellaneous prize numbers are determined by number aproximation, sequence and relation of ending numbers to the first prize number. The drawing is made on the auditorium platform, where there is a large, electrically operated machine having one large and one much smaller mesh drum. The larger drum contains 45,000 balls somewhat larger than marbles, which possess five-digit numbers matching those on the the tickets sold. The small drum contains as many balls as there are prizes and the numbers on these indicate the value of the prize.

Both drums are rotated the same number of times and then one ball Is released from each lottery drum simultaneously. If the ball numbered 17187 drops from the large drum when ball number 1 drops from the small drum, then number 17187 wins the week’s big prize, El Primero. The drawing is continued until all the balls have been drawn from the small drum. On the Loteria’s second floor, among the offices, is a kind of farmers' cooperative - a bank from which the agentes, the top class of licensed ticket sellers, can borrow money. They buy their tickets from the government and often need money to tide them over until ticket lea pick up as the day of the drawing approaches. These loans are Nays repaid because, if not, the borrowers would immediately cease to be agentes.