“I was sitting beside a guy at the wedding of a friend, and I was asking about what he did,” Ross Whitaker tells me. “I’m always thinking, Is there a documentary here? Ha ha!”
It transpired that the other guest worked in “big data”. He didn’t think there was much for Whitaker there.
“No, it’s not very interesting, Ross,” the chap deflected. “But do you remember the story of the time the syndicate tried to buy all the numbers in the lottery? You should do a documentary about that.”
Whitaker, director of such fine films as Katie and Between Land and Sea, describes a “media light bulb going off”. Like most of us who remember 1992, he had a vague grasp of the facts. But reports at the time were sketchy. Did they get away with it?
All is now answered in Whitaker’s Beat the Lotto. It is a fascinating yarn – packed full of oddballs and geniuses – that works up to the most gripping denouement of the season.
At its heart is a charming, articulate Cork man named Stefan Klincewicz. It was he who devised the plan to buy up every number for a bank-holiday draw that would, despite the enormous outlay, still (almost) guarantee significant profit. Without Klincewicz, Whitaker would not have a film. Yet one could easily understand if he didn’t want to revisit the controversy.
“Controversy? I never really thought about it. Because, for me at the time, it was no big deal,” Klincewicz says. “About a year before the project went ahead I approached the National Lottery. I won’t give you the name of the person, but he said to me, ‘I’ll get back to you on it.’ And he did. Within 10 minutes.”
All very civilised. All very upfront.
“I offered to bring in the full payment for buying all the combinations, give them the money and they just give us one ticket. But the response was, very simply, ‘No, we cannot accept that proposal. But if you mark all the cards, that’ll be okay.’ So I said to myself, ‘Right. That’s just what I am going to do.’”
My assumption is that the organisers were banking on nobody managing the logistical complications of getting nearly two million Lotto cards through machines up and down the State.
It was simple enough to calculate when, on a big rollover weekend, the mathematics would deliver a profit to someone who bought all the combinations (unless there was an unprecedented number of winners). But surely nobody could manage to pull off such an enormous operation.
“It wasn’t complicated to organise,” Klincewicz says with a chuckle. “For me it was a case of turning over the page. ‘Right, what’s next?’ Get it done. I never really thought about that. It is just something I set out to do. And I did it.”
Rarely has such a remarkable man seemed so convinced of his unremarkable nature. There are the makings of a book in his family story. His mother, a nurse from northwest Cork specialising in psychiatry, was attached to Gen Montgomery’s 21st Army Corps in the months after the second World War.
She found herself liaising with Klincewicz’s dad, a Polish paediatrician, and, after getting together romantically, they pondered where in world such a couple would find home. Most of the elder Klincewicz’s family made their way to the United States.
“Mum said to Dad, ‘Look, come to Ireland. We’ll go there. Try it for a year. And if you don’t like it we’ll go to Chicago.’ So, obviously, the rest is history. Dad loved Ireland, loved the people, and that’s how they came to be in Cork.”
Might we find clues to his interest in the mathematics of gambling from a legend about his grandparents, exiled to Siberia by the Bolsheviks?
“I could never get missing pieces of the jigsaw, but apparently they escaped as a result of the outcome of a game of chance,” he says. “I’m not sure if it was poker. I don’t know what card game it was, but they escaped with assistance based on the outcome of this card game.”
Klincewicz, who was in the rare-stamp business at the time of the Lotto project, makes no claims for academic standing.
“I have no PhDs, nothing whatsoever like that,” he says. “I would prefer to say I had no qualifications. Any papers that I do have are only diplomas or things like that – which are not major, not relevant.”
The lottery had already delivered Klincewicz a degree of fame. The documentary shows him promoting his bestselling book, Win the Lotto, on RTÉ television. One cannot overstate the impact of the National Lottery in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was a time of great hardship, and the lure of instant wealth proved an irresistible intoxicant. Then there were the community projects that the profits financed.
“It was seen as a really positive thing in a time that was, I suppose, quite dark,” Whitaker says. “We don’t want to go on and on about that, but that’s very much how people felt at the time. All you ever heard at school was the unemployment numbers going up.”
This explains the divided feelings about the syndicate at the time. A television audience shown in the film seems to be wishing for them to fail. Here were these cynics playing poker with the people’s dream machine. Yet, 33 years later, it is hard to watch Beat the Lotto without rooting for Klincewicz and his band of investors. They were breaking no laws. The flaw was in the system. And the plan involved a lot of hard work.
“I have heard of people coming out of screenings of the film arguing over which side they would be on,” Whitaker says. “And, in fact, some of the programmers in different cinemas have been relaying that back to us.”
Yet Beat the Lotto is structured like a heist movie, and everyone wants the plotters to succeed in such an entertainment. Right? All the more so if it’s strictly legal. Don’t the Irish pride themselves on enjoying the establishment being taken down a peg?
“You do lean a little bit into the tropes of the genre you’re in,” Whitaker says. “And, when it comes down to it, it wasn’t illegal to do what they did. It was an incredible undertaking. They spent over a year filling out those tickets by hand, which just feels like an insane thing for someone to do.”
So where did Klincewicz find the other members of the syndicate? For all the simplicity of the idea, you still need to gather a large number of people who are prepared to risk some unexpected glitch frustrating the mathematics.
“It would have been due to the formation of smaller syndicates prior to doing this and building up contacts through those circles,” he says, slightly cryptically. “So many diverse aspects of life. One of the people – and I don’t want to make the name public – was a major car dealer, a big name, the managing director of that company. I got to know him because I got my first car in Dublin from him. And stayed with them. So he was part of the syndicate.”
He reveals that the biggest single investment would have been £220,000.
“When the news got out, one person whom I knew very well arrived into my offices on the Thursday morning and said, ‘I want to invest in this.’ There was very little left at the time. I think there was probably around £10,000 needed to complete it – which would have been filled anyway. He handed £50 over for his share. Ha ha!”
The task of buying the tickets was shared out among members in impressively logical fashion.
“It wasn’t pro rata,” he says. “It was a case of [allocating] somebody who had the knowledge how to get, for example, £100,000 worth of tickets on. They had the ability to do it. They had the contacts to do it. They had the assistance to do it.”
It would be as well going into Beat the Lotto without knowing how the plan worked out. We certainly shan’t spoil that here, but inevitably a host of complications mount as we veer towards the fateful draw. Klincewicz seems genuinely puzzled when I ask if he would like to have done anything differently.
“Well, not really. No, no.”
No regrets? He still feels the plan itself was sound?
“It was, yeah, yeah, yeah … apart from the complications.”
Life is ever thus.
Beat the Lotto is in cinemas from Friday, July 4th
