His Winning Ways May Throw Company for Loss : When Georgian Deduced the Key to Contest Cards, He Scored $16 Million, a Canceled Game, a Lawsuit
If he lives to be 100, Frank Maggio will never forget the weekend he scratched off $10 million in winning contest entries. If Beatrice Companies Inc. has to pay off, it may never forget Frank Maggio.
“I’ve already learned that nothing is sacred, that money changes everything,” said Maggio, 23, a sales representative from Decatur, Ga. “I’ve also learned it’s easy to spend what you don’t have.”
What Maggio doesn’t have right now is any of the more than $16 million he claims he earned by breaking the pattern of the scratch-off cards in Beatrice’s “Monday Night Winning Line-up” contest and completing 4,018 winning entries.
Breaking the contest was the easy part; collecting on it could be tough. Beatrice canceled the contest two weeks ahead of schedule, triggering a lawsuit by Maggio.
“As soon as Mr. Maggio indicated he’d won millions and millions of dollars,” said Bill Blodgett, West Coast spokesman for Beatrice, “we knew we had a problem.”
Works for Competitor
Maggio, who works for Procter & Gamble Inc., Beatrice’s direct competitor, started playing the game in mid-October when he grabbed 50 cards off a Beatrice display rack at a grocery store.
Although he didn’t crack the contest design for another month, Maggio said he detected a pattern in that first batch within hours and won a color television set.
Beatrice canceled the contest Nov. 29, nearly two weeks before the Dec. 6 deadline set on the back of the game cards. The promotion offered prizes ranging from food coupons to a Super Bowl trip for eight in a private jet--or cash equivalents.
In a widely distributed newspaper advertisement, the Chicago-based food and home products conglomerate said “Line-up” was being canceled because the company had learned that it could be manipulated.
The revelation came from Maggio.
The game required players to scratch the cards’ surface to correctly pick the winners and the numbers of touchdowns and field goals in eight televised Monday night National Football League contests from Oct. 7 through Nov. 25. Three million game cards were to be distributed.
After detecting the handful of patterns in his first batch of cards, Maggio feverishly began collecting them, grabbing cards off display racks in stores, writing Beatrice for more and asking the company’s sales reps for leftovers.
By Nov. 11, he’d won three more TVs. The game had become an obsession.
On Nov. 16, Maggio had been out late and couldn’t sleep, so he began scratching game cards.
“Suddenly, it dawned on me. I was beginning to find more and more patterns that I’d seen somewhere else, on other cards,” he said.
Found 309 Patterns
Maggio eventually found 309 different “Line-up” card patterns, each carrying all eight NFL games. Using a completely scratched-off card as a master for each pattern, he could figure out which one he held by scratching clear the first game. Under Beatrice’s rules, unlike in other contests, cards were still eligible even with a losing game scratched off.
“It was like picking off sitting ducks,” Maggio recalled.
He and Jim Curl, his friend and a Procter & Gamble supervisor who has $4 million worth of winning game cards, filed a federal lawsuit Dec. 26, charging Beatrice with breach of contract.
At least one more lawsuit has been filed, by a Chicago-area woman, and lawyers in the cases indicate that there could be more.
If the case goes to trial, it promises an informative look at the multimillion-dollar games and sweepstakes industry.
And it could show how the omission of routine safeguards turned Beatrice’s advertising gimmick into what Richard Blashek of a New York contest planning service called “the biggest snafu ever.”
Blashek, executive vice president for Ventura Associates International, said Beatrice made two basic mistakes.
The first, he said, was creating a game that had a limited number of game-card patterns, rather than using a computer to create “an infinite variety.”
The second was omitting conventional language that would limit Beatrice’s liability, such as “No duplicate major prize winners,” or “One winner per household.”
The Lorsch Group, the Los Angeles-based firm that designed the promotion, and its lawyer, Don Kappelman, did not return repeated telephone calls.
Called Company
On Nov. 22, Maggio--calculating he’d won several million dollars--called Beatrice and the Lorsch Group. What he told them made the contest suddenly appear inappropriate.
“I told them what I had done, offered to show them how I’d done it and told them I wanted to negotiate for less money than I had at that point,” Maggio said.
“I think they believed me, but they kind of blew me off.”
The exchange set off a weekend of frantic scratching. Maggio added $10 million to his scratch-card fortune, signing contracts for shares of his winnings with friends who helped with the “scratch-off.”
Curl, 26, also was busy that weekend. He came up with 2,400 additional cards from Beatrice sales representatives in North Carolina.
Costly Weekend
“That weekend cost Beatrice over $10 million,” Maggio recalled. “They could have gotten out before then real cheap.”
On Monday, Nov. 25, Maggio and Curl hired attorney William Clineburg Jr. from a prestigious Atlanta law firm. Clineburg said that after investigation, “we determined they’d done things the American way and took the case.”
The next day, they met with attorneys for Beatrice and Lorsch.
Maggio “put down two cards right in front of them and scratched off two more winners. They sat down quick, scribbled some notes and left,” Curl said.
That night, Maggio and his girlfriend and Curl and his wife videotaped a scratching session, shipping off $3.6 million in winning game cards early Nov. 27.
In the midst of another scratch-off that evening, “there’s a knock at the door and this guy in a three-piece suit hands me a letter telling us the contest is canceled,” Maggio said.
The rest of the nation got the word two days later.
