Donald Trump and the Sweepstakes Scammers

In the eighties, an eclectic group of con artists dominated the market for promotional games, and rigged them—till it all came crashing down.
Man tossing promotional tickets while driving a red Cadillac Allante convertible.
Illustration by Lily Lambie-Kiernan 

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.

The following year, Jack discovered that Seidman, now thirty-four, was regularly stealing winning tickets, and a fistfight broke out. “He went to hit me. I blocked it,” Seidman later recalled. During the spat, Jack crumpled to the ground, cracking his ten-thousand-dollar Rolex. Seidman penned a poisonous letter to his father: “I will fight you with everything and anything I have with a promise to God that whatever happens, you will not walk away from this a very happy man.”

His first act of revenge was to purchase several VCRs and televisions on his father’s charge account, and sell them for cash. “He had no autonomy whatsoever,” Gross told me. “He felt like he was really under his father’s thumb.” Not long afterward, Seidman called Gross to pitch an idea. They would start their own sweepstakes company and beat his father at his own game.

One by one, Seidman lured away his father’s clients with ingenious pitches for new sweepstakes. (He had learned to hide his drug use, and to harness psychedelics for out-of-the-box thinking.) Having grown up coveting his father’s gaudy displays of wealth, he specialized in conceiving elaborate prizes. For Alpo, a dog-food brand, he suggested giving away a luxury holiday to one lucky winner—and forty-nine of their closest friends and family members. He leased a cramped office in the basement of an apartment building, and hired an assistant.

“That’s when we ended up getting company American Express cards,” Gross told me. “I started to see why his father couldn’t deal with him.” Seidman spent thousands of dollars on designer suits and purchased sixteen season tickets for Philadelphia Eagles games. He also opened a distribution arm of the company to handle mail-in promotions for brands. To run it, he hired two teen-agers he had met in the parking lot of a Wawa sandwich shop, Timothy Dagit and Louis Mazzio, and encouraged them to work for little money, calling it “sweat capital.” (Neither Dagit nor Mazzio agreed to an interview.)

Out from under Jack’s watchful eye, Seidman and Gross realized that they could pilfer some of the prizes. Gross conspired to rig a Royal Desserts competition to win ten supermarket-sweep trips to Toys R Us. At the time, there was little regulatory oversight for sweepstakes. No single set of laws governed contests, and the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission couldn’t make up their minds, or work together on enforcement. “To be honest, I looked at it as a victimless crime,” Gross told me. The brands still got their publicity.

Seidman encouraged Gross to buy a limousine so that the pair would “look successful” when they attended meetings. Soon, Seidman co-owned a company, called Ride in Style, that had three. (The limos looked new, but, under the hood, they were falling apart—someone had disconnected the odometers.) Seidman wore cowboy boots and got a Rolex, which he had “won” in a competition, to match his father’s. He had terrible credit; when he wanted a BMW with a portable phone inside, and a luxury Cadillac, Gross signed the leases. Seidman started carrying a .357 Magnum around the office in a holster.

By the mid-eighties, Jack and Spot-O-Gold were in trouble. Competitors had rendered Jack’s patent on the rub-off obsolete. “Somebody worked around it and did the scratch-off,” Fred Sorokin, who worked for Spot-O-Gold, and later for C.B.S., told me. “It’s a different process. I’m sure Jack was furious about it.” This unfortunate turn compounded the pain of losing his relationship with his son. “I think Jack probably had a broken heart,” Sorokin said. In May, 1986, during a walk in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, Jack collapsed and died of a heart attack. Without its charismatic owner, Spot-O-Gold shuttered and Seidman stole its remaining clients.

C.B.S. was taking off. It rented an office in the same luxury tower where Charles Barkley lived. Gross, who took smoke breaks by the pool, would see him lying in the sun. “I got kind of tight with Charles,” Gross told me. Dr. J and the rest of the 76ers often hung out in the lobby. Meanwhile, Seidman’s substance abuse accelerated. “I was on ten Valium pills or Xanax pills a day, and several tranquillizers,” he later recalled. In desperation, his wife, Susan, dialled a random hypnotherapist from the Yellow Pages. It was James Parker. “I get this phone call from this frantic woman,” Parker told me. “ ‘I need you here—it’s an emergency. My husband is on drugs or drinking. He’s so messed up. We are about to lose everything.’ ” Parker had started studying hypnosis after watching a carnival stage show when he was seven years old. (He bought a hypnosis book, hoping to control his parents.) By his early twenties, he dreamed of becoming a famous stage hypnotist. In May, 1987, he arrived at Seidman’s home. Parker put Seidman in a trance; when Seidman woke up, he announced that he was cured. (Susan declined my requests for an interview.)

Seidman promised to make Parker the most famous hypnotist in America. He said that he’d book him on Oprah and Johnny Carson, and even get his image on the front of a Wheaties box. But, before all that, Seidman had a favor to ask. He needed Parker to pose as the lucky winner for the Trump Plaza sweepstakes. According to Parker, Seidman assured him that the scheme, though “not the most ethical,” was completely legal.

Parker had no problem taking from Trump. In the seventies, Trump and his father, who owned an enormous portfolio of rental buildings in New York City, had been accused of refusing to lease apartments to Black people. Parker’s mother was part of an investigative team assembled by the city’s human-rights division to expose the practice. “They would send a Black couple into a Trump property to rent something,” he told me. When the couple were told that there were no vacancies, a white employee would soon follow, and would be welcomed with open arms. Gross also found a way to justify the sweepstakes scheme. He knew that Trump “was screwing over all these people who worked on the casinos, and put a number of small businesses out of business,” he told me. “He was a con man.” (Trump did not respond to numerous requests for comment.)

Seidman sent his mistress, a legal assistant he’d met at a TGI Fridays, to the casino to get the required stickers. “We had to obtain them at different times so that it didn’t look like somebody went in there four days in a row,” Gross explained. They gave the fixed ticket to Parker, but there was a snag—he had crashed his motorbike while performing a skid, and his leg was in plaster. Driving to Trump Plaza would be difficult. Seidman and Gross also worried that his stutter might make him seem nervous. “We told him to act excited, but not to go crazy like people on game shows do, you know, jumping and screaming,” Gross said.

Three days after Parker’s win, a catastrophic stock-market crash sent tremors through the American economy. Gross had instructed Parker to sell the Cadillac and open a new bank account to deposit the proceeds, but, after Black Monday, there were no buyers for a fifty-five-thousand-dollar luxury car, especially one featured in United Press International’s annual list of “ins and outs.” (Donald Trump was in; the Allanté was out.) Eventually, they sold it to a dealer for half off. Parker kept four thousand dollars, but, unbeknownst to him, he was on the hook for taxes on the entire prize value. He booked a flight to Paris, where he had a date with a touring opera singer.

In December, 1987, Seidman enlisted Parker to help rig another contest, the Coronet Great American Giveaway Game, for the paper manufacturer Georgia-Pacific, which offered winners Renaults and Jeep Cherokees. “I told him that there were eight cars to be won in the program,” Seidman later testified. He asked Parker to recruit eight people to agree to “win” and split the profits with C.B.S. That year, Seidman also persuaded Anthony Dandridge, who had once installed cable television in his home, to pose as the winner of a big-ticket contest for Alpo dog food. (Dandridge declined to comment for this story.) He didn’t even own a dog, but he had recently opened a kung-fu school in Richmond, Virginia, and Seidman vowed to make him the next Bruce Lee. If Dandridge “won” the two-hundred-thousand-dollar Alpo prize, he’d get to keep twenty-five thousand in seed money for a nationwide martial-arts academy. Seidman would pocket the rest.

C.B.S. had outgrown its tiny office, and filled a fancy new building with assistants, managers, and salespeople poached from Spot-O-Gold. But Gross and Seidman had started to argue about how much they stole, and how much Seidman drank. “You’re destroying yourself,” Gross warned him, as their trust disintegrated. And yet they couldn’t stop. Dandridge and Parker recruited a growing network of prize-winners, acquaintances who would pretend to win and give kickbacks to C.B.S. Seidman didn’t believe that there was any supervisory body monitoring sweepstakes—not even the I.R.S. He was almost right.

Around the time that James Parker was vacationing in Paris, a telephone rang on the second floor of Philadelphia’s Bulk Mail center, a large office that houses the oldest law-enforcement agency in the United States. When Agent Daniel (Carl) Smires took a job at the United States Postal Inspection Service, in 1970, the organization was nearly two hundred years old. Smires felt that people underestimated the U.S.P.I.S., confusing its agents with mail carriers. Few knew that he carried a gun.

On the telephone was someone from the Assistant U.S. Attorney’s office, who had heard from a woman claiming to be involved in a sweepstakes fraud. This piqued Smires’s interest. He loved to see his name in splashy newspaper articles that raised the profile of the U.S.P.I.S. Smires was a devout Methodist whose mother taught Sunday school for forty-five years; he wouldn’t have boasted about it at church, but he had recently won a medal for busting a series of supermarket-coupon frauds. He drove straight to the Assistant U.S. Attorney’s office, where he met Katherine Wojciechowicz, Louis Mazzio’s girlfriend.

She told Smires that Mazzio had arranged for her to win Alpo’s fiftieth-anniversary sweepstakes. “She was a young person who felt that she was aware of something that wasn’t right,” Smires told me. “Just concerned that she was involved in something that wasn’t on the up-and-up.” He agreed to investigate the company behind the promotion: C.B.S.

In his office, Smires studied entry forms for various contests and mailed subpoenas to brands. He had spent his early career auditing post offices in one-horse towns in the Midwest, and loved to lose himself in tedious tasks. “It’s kind of, like, a slow build,” Smires said. “Let’s see what we got.” He met Trump staffers involved with the Drive-In Dreamstakes—his first time setting foot inside a casino—and what he learned there was “eye-opening.” The gaming industry was fiercely regulated, yet these trips to Monte Carlo, the Cadillacs, the “Eternity of Vacations”—no one was making sure that the winners of these opulent prizes were legit.

Parker was running out of friends to turn into winners. He started to call random people he had met at a Tony Robbins seminar in Palm Springs. One of them was Renate Perelom, who worked as a pet psychic in Florida and was interested to hear about what Parker called a “financial business opportunity.” He had clients who had won sweepstakes, he told her, but who were “going through some transition period in their lives,” making it complicated to claim their prizes. Perelom, a sweepstakes nut, agreed to pose as a winner in several competitions. Months later, she won a Jeep Cherokee, but, when Parker called to pick up the car and split the profits, she claimed to have forgotten their conversation.

“I understand you want this car,” Parker told her. “You can purchase it, if you would like, for eight thousand seven hundred dollars. It’s worth at least fourteen thousand.” Gross called Perelom to try to smooth things over, but she kept the car. (Perelom could not be reached for comment.) Other winners were playing games, too. Parker persuaded an old college friend in South Carolina to “win” a contest and exchange the prize for a thousand bucks, but she shook him down for two thousand. Seidman’s bartender had recruited someone to win a car, but he refused to turn over any cash at all.

Seidman was unravelling. When Gross discovered that Seidman had removed him as a signer on the company accounts, he reinstated himself. “That’s when he really started threatening to kill me,” Gross said. Seidman turned up at Gross’s home. “He had gone off the deep end,” Gross said. “I sent my wife and two kids away. I kind of knew that Chuck wasn’t Chuck at that point.” He repossessed Seidman’s BMW and Cadillac, both of which were in his name. Gross wanted out, but the only money left in the company had been obtained illegally. Lawsuits were flying in from former employees and disgruntled clients. In March, 1988, Gross left C.B.S. and started his own promotions outfit. When he persuaded Louis Mazzio to join him, Seidman threatened Mazzio’s father, a live-in gardener on a sixty-seven-acre property that belonged to the Campbell’s Soup family.

Meanwhile, Dan Church, a former newspaper reporter now managing public relations for Alpo, was struggling to get people to pick up the phone. Part of his job was to conduct promotional interviews with sweepstakes winners, but one person, Katherine Wojciechowicz, had tersely refused to participate in any press. (Wojciechowicz died, in a plane crash, in 2002.) Another, Anthony Dandridge, was avoiding him. Then Church got a call. It was Agent Smires, of the U.S.P.I.S. He had reason to believe that the Alpo competitions had been compromised, he said. When Church finally reached Dandridge, Alpo relayed the responses to Smires.

In April, Smires travelled to Virginia to look for Dandridge, who had told Alpo that he planned to renovate his kung-fu academy using the two hundred thousand dollars in prize money from the dog-food contest. What Smires found didn’t look like much of a renovation. “It was an empty floor,” he said. “There was, like, a desk in there, maybe a chair, and maybe a couple mats. I was thinking, Wow, there’s not much going on here.” Dandridge told Smires that he had received only ten thousand dollars.

When Smires asked about C.B.S. and Seidman, Dandridge suddenly clammed up, and said that he feared for the safety of his family. Not long before, he had confronted Seidman about his broken promises, and Seidman had threatened him with Mafia connections. Smires promised Dandridge that the government would look after him. The kung-fu master had only one question: “Am I in any trouble?”

Next, Smires summoned Parker to the U.S.P.I.S. office. Parker thought that he might have tried to mail a letter with insufficient postage. Then Smires started talking about serious criminal charges. Parker was convinced that he hadn’t done anything illegal, and he offered to take a polygraph test, or to wear a wire. Smires turned him down. He had more than enough evidence.

A year and a half later, Seidman, Gross, Dandridge, Parker, and Mazzio were all charged with mail fraud. They faced sentences of up to thirty years. Gross and Seidman pleaded guilty, but the others decided to go to trial. In a diary entry read aloud to the court, Seidman blamed everything on Gross: “I was incredibly manipulated from the beginning when he came walking into my life, when I was strung out on drugs and alcohol, and he directed me to do this whole thing.” He had written that Gross was “the devil.” On the stand, however, Seidman had trouble defending his actions. (He also admitted to taking LSD four hundred times.) An opposing lawyer asked if he was the devil, and whether his “whole life has been a lie.” Seidman said yes.

Parker, Dandridge, and Mazzio were found guilty, sentenced to five years’ probation, and ordered to pay thousands of dollars in restitution. Parker and Dandridge also got a few months of house arrest, with exceptions made for going to work—performing stage hypnosis and practicing kung fu. “I made a mistake,” Mazzio told the court. “It has just been tough on me and everyone involved, and it is a great shame that I have to carry around.”Attorneys estimated that Seidman and Gross stole nearly two million dollars in cash and prizes. (That would be worth more than twice as much today.) They were ordered to pay more than a million dollars in restitution to the companies that they had ripped off, and both were sentenced to two years in prison. Seidman took a job serving inmates ice cream.

Seidman and Gross were banned for life from the sweepstakes industry, but Seidman couldn’t resist. By the time he was sent to prison, in 1990, he had already set up a new company, and he’d even brought back one of his old clients: Donald Trump. It is unclear how many competitions he ran for Trump, or how many were crooked. But, that year, before a Mike Tyson fight, Trump handed brand-new car keys to a lucky sweepstakes winner, Richard Surmick. Surmick was the president of LizRick tours, a bus company that Trump had used for an earlier contest, which involved picking up gamblers all over Pennsylvania and dropping them off at the casino in Atlantic City. Surmick later went to prison for running a three-million-dollar check-kiting scheme. He died in 2021.

After a string of scandals, public faith in promotional competitions waned. In 1989, Kraft had bungled its “Ready to Roll” promotion, printing five hundred thousand winning cards instead of one, resulting in four million dollars in compensation payments. The following year, the F.T.C. threatened to crack down on contests. Steven W. Kopp, a professor of marketing at the University of Arkansas, who studies sweepstake scandals, told me that the F.T.C. and state agencies implemented tighter regulations and amended existing laws to make it more difficult to pull off scams. In Florida, for example, promoters offering prizes valued at more than five thousand dollars have to provide a surety bond—a written agreement to abide by competition rules. The number of contests dropped, and, according to Kopp, many players switched to lottery scratch-offs, and later to online gambling and video games, for “that same little shot of dopamine.”

In March, I met Parker in Las Vegas. He arrived at a Cheesecake Factory in an orange Tesla with a vanity license plate that read “HYPNOS.” He said that Seidman had ruined his life, but also admitted that, “without Chuck, maybe I wouldn’t have become as successful as I am today.” (In the late nineties, he headlined his own hypnosis show on the Strip as Justin Tranz, which he has adopted as his legal name.) Using sleight of hand, he conjured a business card out of his cell-phone screen. In recent years, he has pivoted to hypnotizing N.B.A. players struggling with confidence problems. (He also hypnotizes EuroLeague players with the more acute confidence problem of not being good enough for the N.B.A.)

The last time Parker saw Gross, he was on TV as a guest on “The Jerry Springer Show,” telling a fake story about his love life. “I just did it for the experience,” Gross told me. By then, he was running Daydreams, a successful Philadelphia strip club. Dandridge has expanded his kung-fu academies to fifteen states.

During the first Internet boom, Seidman pivoted to online sweepstakes and pioneered the Web-based scratch-off game. The Philadelphia Business Journal described the concept: “The player holds down the button on his mouse and moves the cursor over the specified area, which disappears to the accompaniment of a scratching sound.” He partnered with Microsoft, hired a staff of ten, bought Prizes.com, and claimed to have earned seven-figure revenues annually from clients including Dunkin’ Donuts and Old Navy.

Gross told me that he had run into Seidman in late 1995 at a “not quite legal” strip club, where Gross was scouting for dancers. He was preparing for a fight, but, instead, Seidman tried to reconcile. “We kinda hugged it out,” Gross said. “I heard that he was driving a Porsche and he was doing well.” Seidman had put on weight, which Gross took as a sign of sobriety. (He had replaced booze with cigars.) In Gross’s recollection, Seidman apologized for how things had turned out, and mentioned wanting to get back into business together. They never managed to make it happen. Seidman died on August 10, 2009, from liver cancer.

By 2011, Trump had driven his Atlantic City casinos into the ground, but he didn’t give up running sweepstakes. On the campaign trail, he’s awarded more than a hundred prizes in fund-raising contests. Supporters typically donate five or ten bucks for the chance to win a trip, all expenses paid, to meet him. Recently, his political-action committee sent an e-mail with a new offer: “Contribute ANY AMOUNT RIGHT NOW to be automatically entered to have dinner with President Trump in New Orleans.” He probably raised a lot of money; according to the Washington Post, similar contests have brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the trip to New Orleans came and went, and no winner was announced. A representative for Trump explained that there had been an “administrative error.” ♦