A 1987 promotion offered by Trump Plaza was part of the biggest sweepstakes fraud the country had ever seen.
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 Seidman, a gregarious, boundlessly enthusiastic pitchman who called his business C.B.S.—short for C. B.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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