It was nighttime in Atlantic City. A man with a tight Afro and a broken ankle hobbled on crutches toward the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino. On the covered driveway, bathed in neon light, sat a Cadillac Allanté convertible—the grand prize in Trump’s 1987 Drive-In Dreamstakes. The contest had been designed by Charles (Chuck) Seidman, a gregarious, boundlessly enthusiastic pitchman who called his business C.B.S.—short for C. B. Seidman Marketing Group—in the hope that the television station would sue him, giving him free publicity.

By the late eighties, America was in the grip of a sweepstakes mania. The industry had grown to an estimated value of a billion dollars, and every company, from Toys R Us to Wonder Bread, seemed to be running giveaways and promotions. Even Harvard University’s alumni magazine was offering ten thousand dollars in Sony electronics. C.B.S. had a unique business proposition: it would come up with the promotion, print the entry forms, and even deliver the prizes. Brands hoping to capitalize on America’s obsession would pay C.B.S. one fee for a turnkey operation.

One of those brands was Donald Trump. To entice larger crowds to his flagship casino, he had built a thirty-million-dollar parking garage. But not enough people were using it. Seidman suggested printing half a million promotional parking tickets. If visitors collected enough validation stickers, in the right combination, they could win prizes, including Walkmans, cash, an “Eternity of Vacations,” or even a Cadillac.

The Allanté cost fifty-five thousand dollars, about as much as a family home in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, where James Parker, the man on crutches, lived. Parker was a hypnotist and a magician, and he spoke with a stutter. He greeted the parking attendant and handed over his ticket. “Look, why don’t you play?” the attendant said. “You only need one more sticker. Who knows. You might win!”

The attendant applied the final sticker, scratched off the gold coating, and offered his commiserations. Then he did a double take—Parker had won. He was ushered into a promotional booth, and, over the next twenty-four hours, Trump’s P.R. machine began to whir. The attendant reappeared wearing a tuxedo. A photographer from the Trump Today newspaper popped a flashbulb. Parker held up the key and tried not to overdo his excitement. Those were his orders.

Parker was no lucky winner. He was part of a staggering scam that involved some of the biggest brands of the eighties: Ford, Holiday Inn, Nabisco, Royal Desserts. If you entered a sweepstakes competition in those years, it was likely run by C.B.S. You had no chance of winning—Seidman had built a sprawling network of “paper winners,” including a kung-fu master and a pet psychic, who helped him steal millions of dollars in cash and prizes, pulling off the biggest sweepstakes fraud the country had ever seen.

Chuck Seidman got into sweepstakes because they were the family business. During the sixties, as a teen-ager, he went to work at his father’s promotions company, in Philadelphia. Jack Seidman had been a communications expert with the Army’s Signal Corps during the Second World War, and had pioneered the rub-off game card, using gold leaf to conceal a prize message. His company, Spot-O-Gold, created early lottery games for 7-Eleven and Kellogg’s, and swiftly dominated the sweepstakes market. He hoped to hand down his business to his son.

Chuck Seidman, who had been forced to leave four separate high schools for showing up to class on drugs, was not an ideal successor. He became addicted to heroin and once was arrested during a methamphetamine sale; Jack had to persuade a judge to let him off. “I was in seven detoxes and none of them worked,” Seidman later told a court. In desperation, Jack hired Steven Gross, a friend of Seidman’s in the grade above him, to come work at Spot-O-Gold. “Jack knew that I didn’t drink or do drugs,” Gross told me. “So he asked me if I wanted to come to work with him, to keep his son on the straight and narrow.” But that was impossible. “Chuck was the kind of narcissistic personality—you couldn’t tell him what to do,” Gross said. He added, “Chuck was fun to hang around.”

Gross, who was sixteen years old, discovered that he had a knack for promotions. When he wasn’t looking after Seidman, he worked in the development department, and pitched a “Cone-O-Gold” for Baskin-Robbins, among other campaigns. Spot-O-Gold delivered tamper-proof rub-off cards to supermarkets, in armored Brink’s trucks, but light-fingered Seidman stole piles of two-dollar winners. He spent the cash on the Atlantic City boardwalk, hitting on girls. Gross was his designated driver.

Gross eventually left for college, then sold lingerie, and later cars. Back home, Seidman’s addictions consumed him. By twenty-five, he was spending three hundred dollars a day on cocaine. Dealers at a local Lebanese restaurant blackmailed him to steal prizes. “I stole a thousand-dollar game ticket from my father’s company to pay that cocaine debt,” he later confessed. “That was the first time.” In 1984, Jack paid off sixty thousand dollars in drug debt for his son.

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