What do you think about this?
Subject: What do you think about this?
From: Karen Lancaster <lancaster.karen@gmail.com>
Date: 12/26/11, 16:54
To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>

It was 1989 and for a suburban Texas kid with more time than money, the newly established neighborhood video arcade “Tilt” was the place to be. Situated in the area shopping mall, along a corridor connecting Sears and Macy’s, the middle-school mecca was a beehive of (incessant clangs and jingle noises from video games, sticky floors from spilled soft drinks mixed with stepped-on French fries). “Street Fighter 2” had just been released, adding to the air of excitement fueled by pre-pubescent hormones and bravado.

And here’s where a 13-year-old Gregg Housh found a place to come and kick some ass.

Then, his story about the Lotto Fun scam pasted in.

You could end the story with his quote at the end:  “That particular location finally went out of business. I can’t document  how much my actions contributed to that, but am assuming I made quite a dent. One thing’s for sure, though.  This is when I began to truly believe that the law did not apply to me.”>

 

Then Lotto Fun came out. Little ping pong balls. Pick out your six numbers, which would appear on the screen on the left. Every time you pushed a button, whichever ball closest falls in. The more numbers you got in order, the more you won. And it was a sliding scale, like a slot machine. If you put in four tokens and won, you’d get sixteen.

 

But there was a glitch. I’ve never been able to figure out if it was intentional or not, but it sure seemed like a programmer was cheating the system. There was a pixel that turned yellow. There was a lot of animation going on but it was that one specifically that looked funny to me. I figured it out on about my 4th time playing. So I kicked its ass and filled my pockets up.

 

It was about a week before class picture.

 

Not enough security. Watch the pattern they were assigned to walk. When someone comes up to the machine, you offer them more tokens than they’d get. I’d say, wait a minute, you’re only going to get four token for a dollar. And I’d put in to prove it. People started learning where to find me, and I started making decent money my first night.

 

That was an amazing amount of money for a 13-year-old from a poor family.

 

There were several of those games. So I taught a friend.

 

I hadn’t seen any of the mobster movies. I didn’t know anything about RICO or racketeering or any of those things But the fundamentals of crime are universal. He wasn’t as good as me but he could pull out $50 in a day and he paid me 25 percent of what was made. I bought myself a moped. Made about $400 a week for about six months.

 

I had a relatively large wad of cash such that I had a tennis ball cannister to store it. I came home one night and my mom was holding it. She asked where it had come from. I told her, no violence, no drugs, nothing stupid. Okay, she said, so how could you possibly pull this off? I explained the game to her and what I had done. She laughed and said, you probably can’t even get in trouble for that. It was a low form of theft, but they’d have a hard time prosecuting me for any of it. I don’t blame her for taking it that way, either. But looking back, that was the moment when I realized I could probably get away with some of these things.

 

But then one day I walked in to Tilt and an employee pulled me off to the side. A 25-year-old guy with a mustache and beard. “We need to walk,” he said.

 

“Am I in trouble?”

 

“No, no, no.”

 

“Are you calling security?”

 

“No, no.”

 

He took me off to the side and explained that he had been watching me. He knew what I was doing, he knew everything that I was doing, and he had a pretty good idea of how much money I was making. And he wanted in.

 

Being the dumb kid I was, I told him exactly how much I was making. And he ended up with about 25 percent of the overall take for every day I did this. He made sure I had a solid area each night when I wouldn’t get caught. And of all the cameras in the sky, he informed me, about five percent of them worked, and none of those were in our area.

 

But the place went out of business. I’m not sure how much I contributed to that, but I assume I made a dent. Began my belief that law no longer applied to me.

“That particular location finally went out of business. I can’t document  how much my actions contributed to that, but am assuming I made quite a dent. One thing’s for sure, though.  This is when I began to truly believe that the law did not apply to me.”