Rob Sand
Appearances
Criminal
Hot Lotto
The day we started presenting evidence, CBS This Morning did a nationwide broadcast calling into question whether we had enough evidence to prove the case.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
I wasn't sure if the jury would understand our case, that he had rigged it. The defense counsel kept saying, you know, this is just, he wants you to imagine this stuff. He can't explain to you how it works. He just wants you to say that it happened.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
We got him on the first count because the evidence was pretty clear and inescapable.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
And we got him on the second count because at the end of the day, when you look around at all this mountain of circumstantial evidence, that this man's job is to write the program that picks the winning numbers, that he was in the draw room, that he had access to these machines in his office constantly and could have at any point installed different software.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
And I pick up the phone. Some guy says, this Rob Sand? I said, yeah. Do you all know Eddie Tipton's brother won the lottery about 10 years ago out west somewhere, maybe Colorado?
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Tommy Tipton, this justice of peace in Texas, has like half a million dollars of consecutively marked bills. And, of course, this makes the fireworks dealer suspicious.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
They closed their case because they say, well, that's weird. I don't fully understand why you're doing what you're doing, but... for someone to be laundering money, that money has to be dirty, and if you won this in the lottery, then it's not dirty money. And they closed their case.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
And say to them, hey, we have a very real reason to believe that this wasn't isolated in Iowa, and we need a lot of your data about your lottery winners all over the country.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Kahn is the last name, C-O-N-N, which is just too rich. So let's ask Oklahoma for that claim file. So we go back to Oklahoma. We say, hey, we want this file related to this Kyle Kahn who claimed this ticket here. And they say, all right, here you go.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
And I remember I'm sitting in my home, this is around the holidays, sitting in my parents' living room, just pulling up the phone number that is in the Kyle Kahn claim form and running that phone number through Eddie and Tommy's years upon years of phone records. And boom, there's a hit. So at some point we know Tommy Tipton had a phone call with Kyle Kahn.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
One of them, in fact, she and Eddie had met on a dating website. And they had gone on a date or two, and, you know, it didn't work out, but they stayed friends. And then she got engaged, and he presented this as an engagement gift.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
I was sitting at my desk, and David Moss from Wisconsin AG's office calls me. He says, hey, Rob. Are you at your computer? I said, yeah. He says, check your email. I check my email, open up an email from him, open up a PDF attached to it. And I had done a very small amount of HTML coding when I was in high school. And I was instantly able to recognize what I was looking at.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
What I was looking at was the code that Eddie had written to make these allegedly random numbers be actually predictable to him. I remember I said to David, do you guys hear that? It's the hallelujah chorus. It's playing in my head right now.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
The Iowa Lottery was out there saying on a regular basis, Hey folks, check your ticket. Somebody's got 16 million bucks. And it was sort of this mystery. Why hasn't anyone come forward?
Criminal
Hot Lotto
and the story that he tells in that interview is that you know he didn't necessarily set out to start the largest lottery rigging scheme in american history but that he sort of saw that he could do it and once he saw he could do it he decided to see if he would get caught and from having done that once he you know decided to do it again and Saw that it was a way to help friends.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
His friend Robert Rhodes was struggling. And did, frankly, what a lot of white-collar criminals do. Rationalize. Give you reasons why the stuff that they were doing wasn't really that big of a deal after all.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
I look at financial crime and I see people who are in a position of some privilege in life, right? Typically, they're able to commit financial crime because they have access to money. So that removes desperation from one of their motivators. Financial crimes are people who are in a good position in life who are abusing, choosing to abuse that position over and over and over again, typically.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
So when you talk to me about financial crime, what I hear is someone who is greedy, whose crimes are crimes of selfishness, whose crimes are the people, and frankly, who thinks they're smart enough to get away with it.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
So every few months, Terry Rich, the head of the Iowa Lottery, would have a press conference and remind people, hey, we owe somebody $16 million. Check your tickets, you know. We want to pay this money out. And no one came and no one came and no one came.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Philip Johnston... entered a cooperation agreement with the state of Iowa. There isn't really any reason to think that he actually knows the bigger truth or knew the bigger truth of what was going on at the time that he made the claim. And the same goes for Crawford Shaw. I think they certainly could have asked more questions of their clients if they wanted to.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
But they were asserting claims on behalf of a client, and there wouldn't be a good basis to charge them in the whole scheme of things.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
A lot of it was cash, a lot of it was spent, a lot of it Eddie put into his house here in Iowa. A lot of it they ended up paying back to their attorneys here in Iowa. But they also agreed to pay restitution. So every penny stolen from a lottery ticket is agreed upon between the two Tipton brothers and Robert Rhodes. to get repaid.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
And they've also agreed not to fight legal proceedings in order to seize land in Texas that they own to get those debts paid.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
They would try to say, hey, that was my ticket. I lost it. Okay. Can you do any better than that? No. That was my friend's ticket. That was my brother's ticket. So-and-so bought that and they died, but I'm just sure it was theirs. Those are their lucky numbers. They played those numbers all the time. All kinds of stuff like that.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Privately, one thing that the Iowa Lottery had that the public didn't know the lottery had was a video of the purchaser. So the Iowa Lottery is looking at this video and we know, okay, here's a very heavyset man in a big leather jacket with a very low voice who's walking up to claim these tickets.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
So Phoebe, if you had called in and said, hey, it's me, Phoebe, I bought that ticket, we would have said, no, you didn't. And you might've been confused as to how we knew you didn't, but we could use that to screen people who were trying to get that $16 million, but who we knew hadn't purchased the ticket. Now, of course, if we made that video public,
Criminal
Hot Lotto
It gets a lot harder to use it as a screen because then everybody nudges their heavyset middle-aged friend and says, hey, that could be you on that video. You should call them and tell them it's you. And so we had held that back.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
So finally, about a month to go before the deadline runs, somebody calls in who knows the serial number. Now, Mary checks the other piece. She's talking to the man and very wisely asks him, Whoa, that must have been a memorable day. You won $16 million. What were you wearing when you bought that ticket?
Criminal
Hot Lotto
And this man from Canada, Philip Johnston, says, well, probably what I normally wear, a sports coat and flannel pants. Of course, Mary has seen the video of the actual purchaser. The actual purchaser, again, is a very heavyset man, middle-aged, wearing a leather jacket. And Philip Johnson is describing himself to be not that man. So immediately there's some suspicion there about what's going on.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
So the Iowa lottery says, this has just gone from weird to double weird. We know this Philip Johnston guy isn't the actual purchaser. And we have our due diligence to do. So, hey, you need to tell us who bought this ticket and everyone who possessed it along the way, or we're not going to pay. they did not get a favorable response. The response was, pay us or we'll sue you.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
And then the Iowa Lottery, to their credit, said, go right ahead, sue us. Of course, the Iowa Lottery knew if this plaintiff files a lawsuit, they get to conduct discovery, which means they get to kind of find out who actually had possessed this ticket, or at least find out as much as the people trying to claim it knew.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Rather than disclosing the actual purchaser, decided it was worth $16 million to maintain that person's privacy. That is interesting.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
It was this curious little essentially dead end of a investigation with a $16 million lottery ticket.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
The big thing that we had left to do was releasing the video of the purchaser and asking the public for assistance. To make that video public and to say to people, hey, if you think you know who this is, we want to talk to them.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
In fact, Noel, one of his coworkers, walked into the office one day, walked into the muscle office. This is right after we released the video. And one of her coworkers says, hey, Noelle, come over here. And hands Noelle headphones and says, put these on. And then clicks a button. Noelle is just standing there, can't see the computer screen that she's looking at.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
And this person starts playing the video of the purchase. And Noelle says to this coworker without seeing the screen, why am I listening to a tape of Eddie talking?