OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
Category: Archive

Swept under the rug

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Corruption, Irish style, has deep roots. It goes back to the very founding of the independent Irish state. The first clear indication that all was not so holy in holy Ireland did not emerge from the recent deliberations of a Mahon, or Flood, or Moriarty tribunal. It came, as it rightly should, in a story written in a newspaper by a reporter who sniffed something rotten and went after it with the tenacity of a bloodhound.
But not all stories have proper or happy endings. Even if they are true. Just ask Joe MacAnthony.
Back in the early 1970s, before America woke up to Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein, Joe MacAnthony was a young reporter working in an Ireland that yet harbored many dark and dubious secrets.
During the 1960s, MacAnthony had been involved in a housing organization that constructed homes for middle-income families. He had dabbled in public relations but found that he was drawn more to journalism. He wanted to write about social conditions in his hometown.
In 1968, MacAnthony got a job at the Irish Independent, the country’s largest-selling daily and a newspaper group then owned by the Murphy publishing family. By the early 1970s, he was writing for the company’s Sunday flagship, the Sunday Independent.
The “Sindo” has become something of a byword for a lesser Irish journalism in recent years. But in the early 1970s, it was a serious and at times hard-hitting broadsheet with an editor who had a strong claim on being Ireland’s version of the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee.
Conor O’Brien had been the youngest editor of an Irish national newspaper when he took the helm of the Evening Press in the 1950s. By the early 1970s, his position as one of the most influential journalists in Ireland had been firmly set.
His name was sometimes the cause of confusion. He was referred to as Conor “News” O’Brien when it became necessary to distinguish him from the politician, Conor Cruise O’Brien.
The combination of MacAnthony and O’Brien would result in the lid being blown off a national scandal that continues to dwarf, in pure money terms, anything that the recent planning tribunals have uncovered.
MacAnthony and O’Brien took on the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes, a veritable sacred cow that, as it turned out, was being milked for almost all its worth.
And most of the milk was coming from the United States and Canada.
The Irish Sweeps was rooted in the early years of the cash-strapped Irish Free State. The first public drawing in the lottery took place in 1930. The Sweeps had the approval of the Irish government and was not short of tear-jerking hook or two.
The very first ticket drawing, with uniformed nurses and the commissioner of the Irish police on hand, was made by blind children. It was no wonder that in the years that followed, countless people across the broad Atlantic felt they were doing something good for dear old Ireland, even as they indulged in a lottery that was illegal in both the U.S. and Canada.
The Sweeps was the ultimate nod-and-wink game. Not a few top politicians and officials in the U.S. turned a blind eye to the eastward flow of hard-earned dollars.
One of them, MacAnthony believes, was James Farley, United States Postmaster General during the FDR administration.
And of course, it wasn’t hard to justify going easy on the Sweeps. After all, the money went to fund Ireland’s hospitals and the cash prizes were given out to the winners.
It was only hard cases like Bobby Kennedy who took a dim view. As U.S. attorney general, he tried to crack down on the Irish Sweeps, viewing it as a potential Trojan Horse for organized crime.
Kennedy’s only mistake was that he was looking for the worst in the wrong place.
A decade after Kennedy took a swipe at the Sweeps, MacAnthony sat down with Conor O’Brien in the editor’s office to discuss stories. The term “investigative reporter” wasn’t exactly tip-of-the-tongue in the Ireland of 1971. But MacAnthony matched the description, or at least soon would.
“Conor suggested that I do a story on the Sweeps,” MacAnthony said recently from his home in Toronto.
It was not quite clear to MacAnthony what exactly was the germ of O’Brien’s Sweeps story idea. But O’Brien was a good judge of reporters, MacAnthony a good judge of editors. It would be up to MacAnthony to find dirt, if it existed at all.
“I think Conor had a whiff of something though he never said anything, or gave me anything,” MacAnthony.
And so began a year of dogged scratching by MacAnthony, one that began in puzzlement and ended in astonishment.

Small paper trail
The first thing that MacAnthony discovered was that for such a huge enterprise as the Hospitals Sweeps, there was a remarkably small paper trail.
Little or no documentation pointed to the participation of some of Ireland’s richest people in running what was a legal lottery in Ireland but an illegal enterprise in most other countries of the world, including the U.S.
“I went to New York and looked at old newspaper files, especially at the Daily News. I did the same in Canada. I dug up documents, talked to police investigators and postal people and it became evident that the Sweeps had been dealing in huge money,” MacAnthony said.
This was no great surprise in itself. But the amounts were so big that it was difficult to square them with the actual state of the Irish hospital system.
Quite simply, if the hospitals had been getting all, or close to the funds that the Sweeps numbers uncovered by MacAnthony were pointing to, every Irish hospital should have been giving the Mayo Clinic a run for its money.
A year after he started, MacAnthony found himself holding a story that told of graft on a colossal scale in the Irish Sweeps, this in the form of “expenses” and commissions for the handful of shareholders running the lottery on behalf of the Irish state.
The most shocking statistic of all was that Ireland’s hospitals were getting less than 10 percent of the value of tickets marketed worldwide in their name.
Worse, the hospitals were even having to pay tax on their tiny share because it had not been absorbed over the years by the shareholders, including the family of Ireland’s richest man, Joe McGrath, a co-founder of the Sweeps.
“Conor read the story and immediately passed it to the paper’s lawyers,” MacAnthony said. “The lawyers said we could run it if we were certain that we had all the facts straight.”
Some of the facts were shockers.
The Sweeps ran on a simple system. People would buy tickets from sellers in, say, New York, who took a commission. Overcharging for tickets was commonplace, a practice made easier by the fact that currency exchange rates were always fluctuating.
An initial win would result in a buyer’s ticket being pulled from a big drum in Dublin by young nurses flanked by a senior Garda officer. The winning ticket was assigned to a horse in an upcoming major horse race. Some of the horses drawn were favorites, some of them outsiders.
The ticket holders back in New York, or other U.S. locations, were then approached by a Sweeps agent. Holding the ticket was no guarantee of ultimate cash, but money would be offered up front for a share in the tickets. All the drawn tickets for the better horses were covered in this way. The shareholders were guaranteed money no matter what the result of the race.
The ultimate winner of the big cash prize would then be approached by a Sweeps agent. The winner would be told that it would take many months for the winnings to come through from Ireland. But the agent would offer cash on the spot — for a 5 percent commission.
“We had all this and more,” MacAnthony said. “We were planning to run the story over two Sundays, roughly 4,000 words in each story. But Conor said that we would never get the second part out. It would be stopped. So he decided the run the whole story at once.”

Fateful decision
The decision to print the whole story would be a fateful one for both men.
It hit the streets on Sunday, Jan. 21, 1973. When it did, MacAnthony wasn’t even in Dublin. He was on his way to Canada to be interviewed by Canadian television, which had caught its own whiff of a Sweeps scandal.
“All hell broke lose in Dublin, but I was on a plane,” MacAnthony said.
Little did he know, but this journey was a pointer to an unplanned future.
Ireland shuddered as a result of the Sweeps story. But nobody was charged or went to jail. In time, the Sweeps would die of natural causes, largely as a result of U.S. ticket money being sucked up by new, state-based, lotteries.
What particularly angers MacAnthony to this day is that many people who toiled away honestly at the Sweeps headquarters in Ballsbridge, a South Dublin suburb, ended up on pensions of just a few pounds a week. The few people who ran the lottery over its lifetime accumulated millions.
In the months after the story broke, MacAnthony continued to ply his trade as an investigative reporter. In time, he graduated to covering Northern Ireland’s Troubles, then in full, explosive flow.
“It was a great time at the Sunday Independent. We had a great rapport and we had no fear of anybody,” he recalled.
But a time bomb was ticking under Joe MacAnthony’s newspaper career. He had rattled a lot of influential cages; so too had Conor O’Brien. Their ultimate exile would take different forms, but each in its own way would be a journalistic Gulag.
“First I lost what was called merit money,” MacAnthony said. “It was the first clear signal that I had to get out of the newspaper. There were other signals and ultimately words of advice from Conor O’Brien that I should go and find my future elsewhere.”
Again, O’Brien seemed to know more than he was letting on. It would soon become apparent to MacAnthony. His was a famous name in Irish journalism, but also a marked one. He could not find any work.
On Oct. 1, 1974, Joe MacAnthony, his wife and four children boarded a plane for Canada. This time it would be a one-way ticket, along with a less-than-certain six-month contract with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television network.
Around the same time, O’Brien was “promoted” to the job of managing editor. It took him out of the decision-making process at the paper, this despite his stellar reputation among his peers and his knack of finding, and breaking, big stories. O’Brien died in 1985. He was just 57.
MacAnthony found himself in a different place, a new country. Ireland was well in his wake now.
“I really was in a journalistic Gulag,” he said. “Nobody ever contacted me, nobody ever called.”
MacAnthony might have been on new ground, but he had brought with him all his old work habits. Thus began a career for CBC television and a path to a story that would shake Canada even more than the Sweeps expos

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