A True Story by Larry Cohen c 2025
Chapter 3
“3’s and 6’s”
I did play the three number game for a while but without any success. A winning number from 1000 numbers is a pretty hard task. But, it was legal and I didn’t have to deal with the dark shirts, only the vendor selling the tickets. At first, there were only a few vendors in my city but, like mushrooms, they sprouted up all over…gas stations, grocery stores, even in drug stores which I thought was sort of dark humor, drug stores selling medicine to the sick but at that time still selling cigarettes and now gambling tickets. Someone in the State of New York had a perverse sense of humor, I thought. Or, possibly, the State figured that making the game so ubiquitous that it would dampen the efforts in those quarters that wished to ban this type of state sponsored gambling. Those who objected to the wholesale distribution of these games lost out in a big way to the State since the games only grew and grew….and grew.
Eventually, I did figure out a pattern in the three number game. I divided up all of the numbers between those about 500 and those below 500. Then, I saw how close they came when placed on a sine wave. However, this realization did not turn losing into winning. Even the State realized that certain numbers came in more than others since one could bet on the total sum of the three numbers instead of the outcome of the numbers themselves. The State had some clever ways of removing money from one’s wallet during those early stages of State sponsored gambling.
Between the time I had graduated college and entered graduate school, I took a position that landed me in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. From Harrisburg I landed in South Philadelphia where the numbers “rackets” had been going on long before the State went into competition with the totally illegal rackets industry. What I learned in South Philadelphia was there was a “street” number, that is, a number that the mobsters controlled and ran and then there was the State number, or in this case, the Commonwealth number. The street number paid better than the State number and winnings were generally not reported by the winner. The street number had a morning number as well as an evening number. The state eventually got the same idea and ran their numbers twice a day, too.
I did play on and off if I had an extra dollar, an extra dollar being a rare event living in Philadelphia/ However,when I did take a chance on the “numbers”, I always figured the Commonwealth run numbers racket would be at least more honest than the numbers run by the mob, right? Wrong, again! The year I was living in Philadelphia, a crew of guys working at a TV station where the numbers were going to be drawn rigged the numbers game! Apparently, they figured out how to weigh down the ping-pong styled balls from which the winning numbers were drawn. In doing so, they knew that only the 3’s and 6’s would get blown to the top by what looked to be a redesigned popcorn popping machine.
The Commonwealth only found out that something was amiss from the payout. It seems as though someone was on to the scheme and spread the word around to certain “inside” people. I was not one of them. So, instead of the usual payout that day, the payout was over 1000 times that amount. That led to an investigation which led to some of the participants in the number rigging ending up in the Big House. The Secretary of the Treasury was forced to resign and that whole event ended my interest in numbers of that sort.
To be continued…