The Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes

In 1930 the Irish Dail, or Parliament, passed an act permitting the running of a sweepstakes for the benefit of Irish hospitals; since then Americans have been able to buy tickets in an honest Illinois lottery whose top prize has been well over a million dollars.

The Irish Free State government knew that a sweepstakes operation
limited to Ireland could not be successful and that tickets would also
 have to be sold in foreign countries, particularly the United States.

Since the government could not itself participate in violation of other countries’
anti-lottery laws, a private company, Hospitals Trust, Ltd., was  formed to operate the Sweepstakes, and John McGrath, a former Minister of Industry and Minister of Labor in the Free State government, was named managing director. His first partner was a professional bookie, Richard Duggan.

The Sweeps promoters set up their first headquarters at 13 Earls- ford Terrace in Dublin, and their clerical staff originally consisted of one typist Today, the Sweepstakes is easily Ireland’s largest and most profitable business enterprise. It has about 1,500 permanent employees and adds about 2,500 part-time employees during the drawings, which occur three times each year. The plush Sweeps headquarters with its teakwood floors is now one of the principal tourist sights in Ireland.

Since the Sweeps is legal only in Ireland, the operators cannot use paid advertising to promote ticket sales in other countries and have had to invent promotional gimmicks. One of the most effective, in the early days, was the floating ashore along our Atlantic coast of a great many fish-shaped bottles, each containing a paper entitling the finder to a drink of his choice at any tavern and asking him to drink to good luck in the Irish Sweepstakes.

Jack Dempsey honored some of these papers at the Eighth Avenue bar he then operated in New York City. The bottles created much talk and received a great amount of news- paper publicity because most people believed the bottles had floated all V the way across the Atlantic.

 Actually the Sweeps promoters had arranged to have them dumped by the thousands into our offshore coastal waters.
 
Then, in 1931, when the press reported that Emilio Scala, a London candy-store proprietor, had won $1,773,660 to become the biggest money winner in the history of the Irish Sweepstakes and, for that matter, in any Online lottery ever held, the American public began begging for Sweepstakes tickets.

Initially all correspondence and money transactions between ticket purchasers and the Dublin headquarters were conducted by mail.

Each year American ticket purchasers mailed millions of letters containing ticket stubs, checks, currency, money orders, bank drafts, etc., to the Irish Hospital’s Sweepstakes headquarters.

The U.S. Post Office made an attempt to stop these flagrant violations of our Federal anti-lottery laws in 1935, when they stopped nearly a million of these letters and returned them to the senders.

 About the same time the British Home Office banned all mail addressed to the Dublin Sweepstakes office.
The Sweeps promoters, hard hit by these actions, know that if they continued the Sweepstakes was doomed, and they took immediate steps to set up a smuggling operation.

Today they employ agents in the United States who receive smuggled shipments of tickets in bulk.

They have devised many ingenious smuggling methods, and naturally also pay considerable amounts of graft money to ensure safe delivery. Federal agents now and then find such shipments disguised as legitimate foreign imports.

The largest was confiscated in 1948, when 82 cartons containing over 2 million tickets were found aboard the transatlantic ocean liner America.

 The most recent big Federal confiscation of tickets was in 1950, when six men were arrested for bringing in over a million
Sweeps tickets.

Today, such seizures do not throw a monkey wrench into the ticket sales for that drawing, contrary to what one might think; the attempt to smuggle the tickets in is made months before the scheduled drawing so that there is time to replace any confiscated shipment. All the promoters lose is the manufacturing and shipping costs.

The trusted agents who receive these large shipments redistribute them to agents throughout the country, who, in turn, distribute to sub- agents and sellers in their territory.

 The ticket stubs and cash pass back through this organization setup to the major agents, who again smuggle the ticket stubs back to Dublin and send the money either by personal check or by means of some international money transaction which makes it impossible for U.S. postal or Customs authorities to confiscate the cash.