"Every day, you'll take a little walk, lady, all the way to the cemetery to visit your dead children."
The above death threat, picked up by police surveillance, is not the sort of thing you expect to hear in the phone conversations of a senior civil servant's wife. However, the woman in question was Ms Loreta Torres, wife of Mr Giuseppe Alberti, a State Lottery official police claim is responsible for systematically fixing the "lotto" draws in Milan.
The lotto scandal broke last week, following the arrests of nine people, including Mr Alberti, two lottery officials and a police officer, all accused of involvement in a deceptively simple "sting" involving more than 100 people and untold millions worth of illegal winnings.
"Lotto" is a hugely popular game in gambling-mad Italy. It is also a game with a certain pedigree since the original "lotto" is believed to have been played in 16th century Genoa when punters would bet on the names of the five senators annually elected to hold office in the Republic of Genoa. The modern "lotto" game, still based on picking five numbers, is held twice weekly in 10 major Italian cities - Bari, Cagliari, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Rome, Turin and Venice.
The draw is nearly always performed by children, called on to extract five "winning" metal balls (each with a number) from a revolving steel basket containing 80 balls. In theory, the children are blindfolded to guarantee the honesty of the draw. In practice, the blindfold was so positioned that the children could see just enough to recognise "particular" balls that had been specially polished to give them a different feel and make them shine more brightly.
Events leading to last week's arrests began in 1993. It was in that year that Mr Alberti, who at the time ran a lottery booth in Milan, began to have his suspicions about a regular client called Mr Attilio Olmi. He noticed that Mr Olmi and his friends had an amazing success rate at lotto and he became curious.
Mr Alberti asked around and discovered that his suspicions were well-founded and that there were indeed lottery officials who would regularly "manipulate" the draw. By the end of the year, Mr Alberti had applied for and got a job at the Intendenza di Finanza, the organisation which, among other things, organises the twice-weekly lotto draw.
Mr Alberti was soon fixing the draw with the aid of polish, elbow grease and a variety of nephews, nieces and children of friends, all thoroughly "tutored" for the occasion. Not every draw was fixed, while there were usually seven "marked" balls in the basket of a fixed draw. It often happened, too, that the children failed to pull out five "marked" balls but that mattered little since lotto pays out on combinations of two, three, four and five winning numbers.
In a two-year period from 1996 to 1998, business boomed, with Mr Alberti, his relations and friends winning huge sums of money. Since the start of the inquiry, investigators have reportedly frozen £5.2 million registered in respective bank accounts of the Alberti "clan".
The party might have gone on for a long time, were it not for an anonymous letter sent to the ministries of finance and the interior as well as to the state prosecutor's office in both Rome and Milan early last year. In great detail, the letter explained exactly just how the "sting" was regularly pulled off, while naming Mr Alberti as the mastermind behind it all. Interviewed by investigating magistrates, Mr Alberti admitted his guilt and he is currently out on bail.
We do not know who wrote the informer's letter but we do know the Alberti family had come under pressure from organised crime in recent times. Word of the Alberti "sting" had obviously got around and by the beginning of 1997, men with Sicilian and Pugliese accents were regularly on the phone to Signora Alberti making the kind of unsavoury threat recorded above by way of asking for a little slice of the action and for the "winning numbers". Six of those arrested last week have connections to organised crime families in Puglia.
When investigators first started looking into this case, they imagined the fraud related to recent times, a three-year period between 1996 and 1998. As Mr Alberti's story reveals, however, word had been out on the "fixed" Milan lotto for a long time and investigators now believe some form of rigged lotto has been going on since 1982.
Remarkably, despite all the bad publicity, last Saturday night's nation-wide "lotto", called Super Enalotto, showed a 20 per cent increase on the previous week. Gamblers are indeed an eternally optimistic, or perhaps fatalistic, lot. Asked why he was playing the lotto last Saturday night, Mr Umberto Rosa, a bricklayer from the same area of Puglia as some of those arrested, told the daily La Repubblica: "Ah sure, we've always known that the lotto was fixed. When you go to the races, it isn't always the fastest horse that wins but often the one that the jockeys decide should win. But, all the same, it's still good fun having a go on fortune's wheel."
Fortune, at least in Milan these days, does not seem quite as blind as it once was.