A new podcast traces how state lotteries became big business : NPR
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Never in American history has it been so easy to gamble legally, from casinos to online poker and sports betting. All of that was made possible by state lotteries. Scratch And Win is a new GBH News podcast about how a bunch of Massachusetts state bureaucrats set out to beat the mob at its own game and ended up creating a $100 billion obsession. Host Ian Coss joins me now to talk about it. Hi, Ian.
IAN COSS, BYLINE: So good to be here.
SCHMITZ: So the show opens with you visiting a convenience store near Boston where you live and talking to a lottery player.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
COSS: So what are you playing right now?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I play a $50 every day.
COSS: Have you won yet?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Not yet. So far, I’ve only spent 300 bucks on the bucket. There’s nothing.
COSS: What this man is playing is the state’s brand-new $50 scratch ticket. He points at the serial number on the top right corner to show he’s keeping track. This is ticket number seven for today.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: This is number seven.
COSS: The other six are in the trash bucket already, six $50 tickets.
Oh, wow.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Going until I’m broke.
COSS: So why do you keep playing?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I’m dreaming to get the big one so I can retire. I’m 75 years old.
COSS: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I don’t have money in retirement. Too late to stop now because I already spent so much money – so maybe this one but end up getting broke and broke.
COSS: This man is happy to talk money. A couple times, he opens up his wallet and shows me exactly how much he has left, how much he’s spent. But he doesn’t want to say much about himself, including his name. I know that he lives nearby and that he works as a mechanic, which fits with the dark blue work pants and black T-shirt. He comes in here on his lunch break, part of his daily routine.
Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yesterday, I had 1,500. Count that. Only about 900 left, 600 already out. If the wife find out…
COSS: He looks at me and draws a hand across his throat.
You’re dead?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Done.
SCHMITZ: Wow, 75 years old, no money in retirement, and a very last-ditch effort to bank on the lottery – that is pretty stark. You know, Ian, how did you wind up in that convenience store talking to lottery players like this man?
COSS: So this started for me when I came across these sales figures for state lotteries. So every state that runs a lottery, which is most of them, you know, reports data on revenue. And I came across these stats, and they – there was something very stark about them, which is that Massachusetts, where I live, is kind of an outlier state. In most states, you know, the maybe average adult spends a few hundred dollars per year on lottery tickets. In Massachusetts, if you average out all the sales over the adult population, it is over $1,000 per adult.
SCHMITZ: Wow.
COSS: And that number – I mean, one thing, it just felt high…
SCHMITZ: Right.
COSS: …Especially when you factor in there are probably a few zeros, many zeros, averaged into that number. And it also just felt weird. Like, why Massachusetts of all places? And that kind of got me started on this question of, how did state lotteries get started, and how do these things operate?
SCHMITZ: OK, so let’s dig into this a little more. Tell me a little bit more about the history of the Massachusetts lottery. How did it begin? And how did it become so wildly successful and sell so many tickets?
COSS: Sure. So Massachusetts was one of the first generation of lottery states, along with New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire. And if you notice, all those states I’m listing are in the Northeast.
SCHMITZ: Right.
COSS: That is really where the lottery phenomenon starts. It starts in these sort of, you know, deindustrializing, heavily Catholic, actually, states, where there was a need for new sources of revenue. And there was also a population that was, you know, relatively tolerant of gambling. And so you get the Massachusetts lottery.
It starts in 1973, and it’s not all that successful right out of the gate. They’re doing – you know, at the time, you know, the most common game was basically a weekly drawing. And the sales – you know, there’s a little burst of excitement when it starts, but pretty quickly, sales go flat. And the lottery starts looking for ways to innovate.
And one of the first big innovations the state makes, and really what sets kind of the tone for everything that follows, is that Massachusetts becomes the first state to try an instant ticket, what we normally call a scratch ticket, right? And that is where the lottery’s fates really begin to change. And the scratch ticket becomes, ultimately, the most successful and important game to basically all state lotteries.
SCHMITZ: Now, you went back and looked at the history of the lottery. We just talked a little bit about that for the Massachusetts state lottery, but the mob is also – was also involved in this business. Can you talk a little bit about that?
COSS: Yeah. So in addition to raising money for the state, the other key rationale – and this was really important politically actually in getting these lotteries created – was to put the mob out of business. So if we go back to the 1960s, ’70s, when the lotteries are getting started, it’s not like there were no lotteries. There were just lotteries run by the Mafia. So you had what was called the numbers game, which was very popular, especially in Northern and East Coast American cities – New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston – and these were huge, huge businesses for the mob.
So the state – you know, in many ways, it’s a lot like drug policy later, where it’s like, well, you know, the demand is strong. It doesn’t seem like we can put this out of business entirely. Maybe we ought to simply legalize it and bring it in house, and hey, we can make some money from it while we’re at it.
SCHMITZ: (Laughter) Why don’t we make that money? So at…
COSS: Yeah.
SCHMITZ: …One point, you interviewed a notorious former mobster named Kevin Weeks about the state lottery, and he puts it pretty simply.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
KEVIN WEEKS: It’s the same old story. You know, the government sees money to be made. They get involved in it. You know, we’ll just put everybody else out of business. That’s what they did. They’re the biggest gang in the country.
SCHMITZ: The biggest gang in the country – you know, so, you know, is that why states got into the gambling business in the first place? It just came down to how much money they could make?
COSS: I think, you know, when you look at the politics across those early lottery states, yeah, the key driving force is revenue. It seems clear to me that the stuff about putting the mob out of business was very important rhetorically, but really the driving factor was revenue. This was a time where, you know, states were really hurting for money, and at the same time, there was a lot of resistance to increase taxes. The ’70s – and this is maybe even more true going into the ’80s and ’90s – nobody wanted to raise taxes. In fact, the very first state to create a lottery was New Hampshire, which is famously tax averse, right? There is…
SCHMITZ: Right.
COSS: …No income tax in New Hampshire. And so the lottery was seen as an alternative, another way to raise money that was more popular at the time.
SCHMITZ: So Ian, you know, how does all of this connect with the kind of gambling that we’re seeing today – you know, casinos, online poker? I feel like when I watch football, for example, I – every other commercial is a sports betting commercial. I mean…
COSS: Yeah.
SCHMITZ: …It’s basically anything goes at this point.
COSS: Yeah, it – the way I see it, lotteries really did kind of the slow cultural work of normalizing gambling and making everything that we see today possible. I think it’s easy to forget that if you go back to 1960, there were no casinos outside of the state of Nevada. There were no casinos in Atlantic City, right? There were no state lotteries, and there was, of course, no widespread legal sports betting. So we’ve seen, in the span of a couple generations, just a radical transformation in the way our country gambles.
And if you think about lotteries and the power of taking this thing that had been vice – right? – that had been really in the shadows and margins of society and putting the state’s stamp on it – right? – putting it at the corner convenience store, putting it on television – that did so much to kind of – to bring gambling out in the open and also to whet the state’s appetite. You know, once they realized that there was this – gambling revenue is possible, then it was very logical for the states to then start looking at casinos and to then start looking at sports betting, and really, everything we’ve seen since flows from that same logic.
SCHMITZ: Ian Coss is the host of the new GBH news podcast Scratch And Win. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks, Ian.
COSS: Thank you.
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
