Lately I am kinda intrigued by the tragic life & death of Michael Larson
He would fit in perfectly with all the Coen Brothers heroes: Bernie Bernbaum, Jerry Lundegaard, Ed Crane and Osborne Cox, to name a few.
I don't know if any of you are familiar with his story but Larson was a dreamer from Lebanon, Ohio who was always looking for a way to make a fast buck.
Unemployed and down on his luck, he decided he would figure out a way to make money on daytime tv game shows.
He set up about 5 tv's and 3 vcr's and watched and taped every quiz show on tv until he found something on the "Press your Luck" gameboard. He noticed that the movement of the light used for the 18-square "Big Board" only had five patterns. He memorised the patterns by taping the show and studying the lights frame by frame.
Armed with this knowledge Larson went to Hollywood in June 1984, to audition for the show. Reluctant at first, the producers decided to give him a chance.
After a disappointing first round, Mike started raking in the money,
While Larson was running up the score, the producers contacted Michael Brockman, head of CBS's daytime programming department. He was later quoted saying:
"Something was very wrong. Here was this guy from nowhere, and he was hitting the bonus box every time. It was bedlam, I can tell you. And we couldn't stop this guy. He kept going around the board and hitting that box."
Brockman pressed the CBS lawyers to prove that what Larson had done was illegal. They couldn't. "What everyone finally was forced to acknowledge," says Robert Noak, a game-show executive, "was that what he did was legitimate. After all, nowhere in the rules did it say that you couldn't pay attention."
Larson ended up winning $110,237.
But wait there's more....
After returning to Ohio, he made some bad financial decisions and lost a great deal of his money as the victim of a ponzi scheme.
Larson then learned about a get-rich-quick scheme involving matching a one dollar bill's serial number with a random number read out on a local radio game show that promised a $30,000 jackpot. Larson withdrew his remaining gameshow winnings in one dollar bills daily, in hopes of winning the contest. He would examine each dollar carefully and upon discovering that he did not have the winning number, would place all the money back in his account, only to withdraw it again the next day and repeat the process all over again. Larson's wife at the time, Teresa Dinwitty, stated that this obsession consumed him.
At one point, Larson and Dinwitty left to attend a Christmas party, leaving approximately USD $40,000-50,000 in bagged one dollar bills in the house. Upon returning, they found that the house had been broken into, and the money stolen. Larson angrily accused Dinwitty of some involvement; Dinwitty, already fed up with Larson's antics, promptly left him.
Having lost most of his money, Larson called the producers of Press Your Luck, challenging them to put him back on the show and see if he could crack the board patterns again. The producers declined.
Shortly thereafter, Larson got involved with an illegal scheme to sell part of a nationwide lottery. As a result, Larson went on-the-run, leaving Ohio. His family was contacted by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but none knew his whereabouts.
He died of throat cancer in 1999 in Apopka, Florida.
Source:Wikipedia
Part 1 of the documentary: 'Big Bucks: the Press your Luck Scandal'
(bad quality but a fascinating watch; 12 parts mind you!)
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