My Last Eight Thousand Days by Lee Gutkind

Author:Lee Gutkind
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Three

FREDERICK WILLIAMS WAS NOT THE ONLY PITTSBURGHER MY mom and I joked about, although he was her favorite. Pittsburgh has changed a lot in many ways since then, but in the 1960s, 1970s and even early into the 1980s, the city seemed to be engulfed in weirdos doing outrageous things, mostly illegal, and for the most part getting away with their crimes—at least for a while. My mother loved these guys. It was all part of the Pittsburgh personality, we agreed, what made the city unique and more than a little peculiar.

Like that guy who went downtown on a bus. He was six feet tall, weighed more or less two hundred pounds, and wore a white shirt, no tie, zippered jacket, and a baseball cap, and quietly handed neatly printed notes to bank tellers demanding cash from their drawers. Sixteen robberies between 1961 and 1963 by this guy who, according to the FBI, would have been on their Ten Most Wanted List if they’d known his name. Pittsburgh embraced him. People all over the city were running around claiming to be him or accusing others of being the mysterious robber. He was cleverly branded by police and beloved by the media as the elusive, uncatchable, legendary “commuter bandit.”

Then there’s Nicholas Perry Katsafanas, a.k.a. Nick Perry. Unlike the commuter bandit, Perry was a dapper dresser with an ebullient personality, whose early evening local TV show, Bowling for Dollars, beat out the national prime-time evening news. Perry was tapped as host of the statewide Pennsylvania Daily Numbers drawing. The daily number was determined by three machines in which Ping-Pong balls numbered zero through nine were shot around a Plexiglas container by puffs of air. In sequence, one ball popped to the top of each of the machines when a trap door opened, and together the three balls formed the winning number. One day in April 1980, every ball except those numbered four or six was injected, by Perry and a cohort, with white latex paint so they would be too heavy to come to the surface and pop through the doors. The idea, for Perry and those few friends he confided in, was to bet on every combination containing only fours and sixes. The winning combination that day turned out to be 666. No fours at all, which was kind of unfortunate for Perry, for it made the authorities suspicious enough to investigate.

Perry was proven to be the culprit and sent to jail, but in Pittsburgh he has been lionized. In fact, two decades later a movie was made called Lucky Numbers, inspired by the infamous “Triple Six Fix.” John Travolta played the Nick Perry character, with Tim Roth and Lisa Kudrow as costars. Despite the excellent cast and the direction of a well-known comedic writer with deep Manhattan roots, Nora Ephron, it was a bust. But the movie continued the lasting legend and made Nick Perry immortal in his own hometown.

As Pittsburghers saw it, what Perry was doing was ripping off the state—so he was cool.

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