Despite what they said at the Dew Drop Inn, Nick Perry always maintained he’d had nothing to do with what would become known as the Triple Six Fix.

Perry, a longtime Pittsburgh television personality and host of the nightly Pennsylvania Lottery drawing on WTAE-TV, was convicted in 1981 of helping to rig the April 24, 1980, Daily Number drawing. He would serve two years in prison, and though he would maintain his innocence for the next two decades, his career as a beloved announcer and TV host was over.

Perry would be convicted of theft and rigging a public exhibition, but for most of his career, he was known as a man who gave away money on television.

Born Nicholas Pericles Katsafanas in Pittsburgh in 1916, Perry served in the U.S. Navy during World War II before finding a career as a radio announcer, then as a television announcer.

In 1958, he joined WTAE-TV, based in Wilkinsburg, where he’d spend the next 22 years, serving as a sports reporter, announcer and host of multiple shows, including “Polka Party.”

Starting in 1973, Perry was the host of the Pittsburgh edition of “Bowling for Dollars.” The game show was nationally franchised, with many local markets hosting their own edition.

The show’s premise was right there in the title. A contestant would bowl and earn money for each pin knocked down.

If the bowler got two consecutive strikes, they’d have a chance at the jackpot, which started at $200.

He’d been the host of “Polka Party“ and other shows, but it was Perry’s work on ”Bowling for Dollars” that made him a true Pittsburgh celebrity.

In a news obituary for Perry in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2003, Joe Rovitto, who was the news director at WTAE-TV at the time, remembered what the show did.

“Nick became a local star with ‘Bowling for Dollars,’” Rovitto said. “That was his real breakthrough to the public. He did a beautiful job with it — he was very knowledgeable, a bowling enthusiast, he took it all very seriously. It was a big deal to him, and he was a conscientious guy as a reporter, anchor, host of that program.”

Each week a half dozen or more people would get the chance to come onto the In-Studio Lanes and have a short chat with Perry. He’d introduce the people in the audience who’d come to support the bowler, then the bowler would draw the name of a “Pin Pal,” a viewer who would earn the same amount as the bowler.

Then it was time to bowl.

In 1977, Perry became the host for the televised drawing of the Daily Number. Pennsylvania’s lottery was among the biggest in the nation, and Perry was its face.

Night after night he would welcome audience members at 6:59 p.m. He was the man with all the dollars. The kingpin himself.

The plan was far from simple, but there were a lot of moving parts to deal with, both literally and figuratively.

The basic idea was pure physics. The air-powered machines would spit a ball out when the person doing the drawing opened the top.

At trial, prosecutors told the jury Perry reasoned that if some of the balls were weighted, only the lighter ones would be drawn.

In the grand jury investigation and the subsequent trial, Perry was accused of working with lottery employee Edward Plevel to switch out the numbered balls used in the drawings with ones that had been weighted.

Perry recruited a co-worker at WTAE, Joseph Bock, to create duplicate numbered balls and to weigh down all but those with a 4 and a 6. That left eight possible three-digit combinations.

The final plan was to inject a small amount of white paint into all the balls except the 4s and 6s. That kept them at the bottom of the tank and ensured only a 4 or a 6 would rise to the top.

Another co-worker, stagehand Fred Luman, helped with the switch on the fateful day of April 24, 1980.

It wouldn’t do for the host of the lottery to buy a winning lottery ticket, so the grand jury investigation found that Perry enlisted the help of Peter and Jack Maragos, brothers who were members of the same church as Perry and also partners with him in a vending machine business, to handle the tickets.

At the Dew Drop Inn in Philadelphia, Peter Maragos and another brother, James Maragos, tied up one lottery terminal for hours. And it was from there that Peter Maragos called the WTAE-TV announcer’s booth, a detail that helped tie Perry to the scheme.

After rumors of the fix began circulating, the owner of the Dew Drop Inn called investigators to share the story of the customers who’d bought hundreds of tickets with combinations of 4s and 6s and made a strange phone call.

According to the indictment, that was just one stop in what was a very busy day for the Maragos brothers and some of their friends and family. They would end up with thousands upon thousands of lottery tickets.

Because of how the game had been rigged, no one knew exactly what combination would come up, but they knew it would be one of a handful of combinations.

Back in Wilkinsburg, prosecutors said, Perry put the plan in motion.

In September 1980, a grand jury would put his actions this way:

“Although WTAE announcer Nick Perry’s responsibility was to function only as the announcer, he had, as a result of his acquaintance and familiarity with lottery personnel, assumed a much more active role in the drawing itself.

“Even though not authorized to do so, on April 24, 1980, Nick Perry set up and arranged the balls in two of the three lottery machines used in preparation for the live drawing. This function was the sole and exclusive responsibility of the district manager. Furthermore, evidence has indicated that Perry has taken this responsibility upon himself on many occasions in the past.”

The end result was what seemed to some a very unsettling Daily Number: 666.

Perry signed off that night the way he’d always signed off the lottery drawing. “If you’ve got it, come and get it,” he said. “If not, better luck tomorrow.”

Perry and the Maragos had it — they ended up with 1,300 tickets with the winning 666 combination. When they tried to come and get it, though, their luck turned.

Almost immediately the drawing got attention. Triple numbers are always popular, but the April 24, 1980, drawing broke records.

As a Sept. 20, 1980, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about the indictment of Perry, Plevel, the Maragos brothers and the others, explained, players prefer triple numbers because the sequence doesn’t matter, ensuring the maximum payout of $500 for every $1 bet.

In the April 25, 1980, edition of the Butler Eagle, this short Associated Press item appeared on Page 2:

PITTSBURGH — The Pennsylvania Daily Lottery made a record $3,502,425 payoff Thursday, when the number 666 was drawn here.

The huge payout amounted to 338 percent of the $1,036,580 bet in the numbers game Thursday, said lottery spokesman Michael Keyser. Winners in the lottery are paid $500 on a $1 bet.

The previous record payment, $2.5 million, or 312 percent of the total amount bet, came in February 1979, when the number 888 was drawn, Keyser said.

That raised plenty of eyebrows statewide, but the thing that probably doomed the scheme was the fact the group hadn’t just bought lottery tickets. They’d also placed bets with underground numbers games.

In such games, a person bets on a three-digit number that will be drawn from an agreed-upon source. That could be the final digits of the take at a racetrack or the numbers drawn in a legitimate state lottery.

Peter Maragos had friends and family bet more than $3,000 with bookmakers for the drawing, according to the grand jury’s findings.

“In one instance, a bookmaker made a payment of $30,000 on Friday, April 25, 1980,” the grand jury presentment reads. “In all other instances the bookmakers indicated that a payoff would not be made. Peter Maragos at no time attempted to pressure the bookmakers to pay the money (which amounted to more than $250,000) that was owed, and at no time requested repayment of the monies which he had wagered.”

As the Post-Gazette article about the indictment noted, rumors that the drawing was fixed started almost immediately. Convicted bookmaker Anthony Grosso made the most noise. He also claimed that previous drawings, including the February 1979 drawing of 888, had been rigged.

While state officials at first called claims of a fix mere rumors, it wasn’t long before a grand jury was seated and less than six months later, the indictments came, though only for the 666 fix.

Perry and Plevel went to trial. Both were convicted and both served about two years in prison.

During the trial, the Maragos brothers testified in exchange for probation. Bock and Luhman both pleaded guilty in exchange for lighter sentences.

The amount of money at stake was massive in 1980 but seems almost paltry when compared to today. Between June 2023 and June 2024, the lottery made $4,798,169,321 in sales.

In that same period of time it gave out $3,215,389,380 in prize money and made $1,220,502,405.

In the wake of the fixed drawing the state moved the daily number pull to Harrisburg, where it remains to this day. Security measures also were stepped up.

According to a 2015 article by WESA, the balls are now made from foam and contain a microchip. The room where lottery drawing equipment is stored is secured with biometric locks and monitored with closed-circuit cameras.

Perry denied having anything to do with the fix. He didn’t testify at trial and would later blame his attorneys for not letting him present his side of the story.

In an obituary published on April 24, 2003 — 23 years to the day of the fateful drawing and two days after Perry’s death from Parkinson’s disease — the writer noted Perry told KDKA-TV’s Bill Burns days after his conviction: “It’s a nightmare. I can’t believe it. I wake up at night shaking my head. Why would I get involved in something like this? I was making good money. They were the best years of my life, actually. I had too many things going for me. I didn’t need this.”

And less than a decade later, he’d expand on that idea in an interview with the Post-Gazette.

“No one in my family and none of my close friends ever hit the three sixes,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I give it to them — my family, who could have used the money?”

In 1982, Perry’s son wrote a letter to the editor in which he said his father was being made a scapegoat to divert the public's attention.

“I am one of many who watched helplessly as the state manufactured a case to shift the publicity away from one of their own and on to another,” Chris Perry wrote. “Not just any scapegoat would suffice. This person would have to have a high profile. Someone who could corner the entire attention of the media. Someone who could transfer the public focus from political corruption and cover-up to a soap opera drama of a man’s life falling into ruin before the camera.”