99% Invisible - 268- El Gordo

Episode Date: July 25, 2017

In Spain, they do the lottery differently. First of all, it’s a country-wide obsession — about 75% of Spaniards buy a ticket. There’s more than one lottery in Spain, but the one that Spaniards are the most passionate about is … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Today we start out with something a little different. Love. The typical story. Love story. Kosti's Misa Takis says it's a typical love story, but it's not that typical. It began like this. In the early 2000s he was living in Greece, where he's from, when. I met a Spanish girl. Her name was Sandra Del Poso.

One thing brought the other, and we decided to, for me, I decided to give up everything and sell everything, and she decided also to give up her job. The two bought a small RV on eBay and started driving across Europe in the direction of Spain, where Sandra is from. She told me once, what do you think if we go to see my grandma? Sandra's grandmother lived in a small farming town in the northeast corner of Spain called Sodeto. Sodeto is one of about 300 little farming villages that the dictator Francisco Franco built in

Spain in the 1950s. He wanted to bring people and agriculture to some of the more desolate parts of the country. Producer Katie Mingle traveled to Sodeco, Spain recently. All the towns built during this time look similar and Sodeco is no exception. There's a church in the center of town and one bar, which is also the one restaurant, which is also the one place to hang out as far as I can tell.

There are about 200 people who live in Sodetto permanently. All in homes built from stone, the color of sand, with red tile roofs. You know, the, the, you always see at the front, the main housing at the back is, uh, the, for the animals. That's coast East giving me a tour of this little town. After he and Sandra came to visit her grandmother here, they ended up staying. Yeah, so that's Sandra's house.

On the right, we have Sandra's house. Oh, and Sandra and Coasties, they're not together anymore. They actually broke up years ago. That was Edu, which is the new boyfriend of Sandra, the daddy of the two girls. After Costi and Sandra broke up, they both stayed in San Eto, went on with their lives, and then something really incredible happened. Something that brought everyone in this small town into the streets to celebrate all day and all night, into the wee hours of the morning.

On December 22, 2011, almost everyone in this town went a piece of the biggest lottery jackpot in Spain. By chance, Kosti's Mitsotakis had found himself in the luckiest town in the world. I've never heard of an entire town winning the lottery. Maybe a group of friends or coworkers, but more often than not in the United States, the lottery winner is just one person. In Spain, though, they do lottery differently.

First of all, it's a country-wide obsession. The Spanish lottery is a really big deal. They are not completely crazy. If you are not from Spain, you cannot understand it. You are surprised by the... There are people that are taking the day off to watch the lottery. There's more than one lottery in Spain, but the one that Kostis is talking about

that people go nuts over. It's called La Loteria de Navidad, the Christmas lottery. And it has incredible buy-in from the population, about 75% of Spaniard's participate. The Christmas lottery is also the oldest running lottery in Spain, and one of the oldest in the world. The drawing has happened every single year since 1812.

This includes the years of the Spanish Civil War and all the way through the Franco dictatorship. For better or worse, lotteries have long been considered a useful way for governments to raise funds for things like infrastructure projects and public programs. Colonial America was basically built using lottery revenue. But in the early 1800s, opposition to the idea of lottery was growing all over the world,

especially in Europe. Lotteries were, and still are, by the way, thought to be a regressive tax on the poor. Churches found lottery play to be blasphemous and superstitious. And intellectuals like Carl Marx thought that public lottery were a sinister instrument of the capitalist state, designed to convince the proletariat that there was an easy way to escape poverty.

In 1826, the British outright banned the lottery for nearly 100 years. And in 1862, Spain responded to the opposition as well, by redesigning their national lottery so that it wouldn't take as much money from the poor. They decided to make the tickets very expensive. And what the rationale was that if these are an affordable, for people won't buy them.

That's Bertha Estavevillart. She's an economist at York University in Toronto who has studied Spain's Christmas lottery. She says the Spanish government figured that if they set the price of lottery tickets really high, only rich people would buy them. But that's not how it worked out. What happened is, instead of people not buying lottery anymore, they decided to turn to their networks and start a syndicate playing. People began syndicate playing or playing in groups, and the lottery became more popular than ever.

So people in the same neighborhood or family or friends, they would buy one ticket by putting together their money. together their money. The Christmas lottery works like this. There are 100,000 possible numbers, ranging from 0 to 99,999. When you go to the lottery office, they'll tell you what numbers are available in your area, and you pick one. But it's really expensive to own an entire number, like tens of thousands of euros.

What is much more common is that an organization will buy a share of a number and then sell off even smaller shares to individuals. Five-year-oh shares or two-year-oh shares, thousands of people may own small fractions of the same number. The smaller the share you have, the less you get of the total jackpot if your number should win. And one of the things that this has done is to turn this Christmas lottery into a huge social event.

Local organizations sell tickets at a markup for fundraisers, so your soccer team might be selling shares of a number. The school your kids go to may be selling shares of a different number. Most Spaniards have a stack of tickets, all different tiny shares of different numbers that they've been talked into buying by someone. The numbers go on sale in the summer, and then on December 22nd, all of Spain tunes in to watch the drawing. Every year has been done the same way in the same theater in Madrid. It starts out, I think, at 8 o'clock in the morning, and the TVs and the radios are always everywhere on, showing this thing.

If you turned on Spanish TV that morning, here's what you'd see. There's a stage, and on it are two giant golden orbs. One contains balls with all the possible lottery numbers printed on them. The other smaller orb has balls with the prize money amounts, while one orb spits out a number. The other drops down the corresponding prize amount. After the balls drop, a couple of Catholic school kids in their uniforms sing the numbers and prizes out loud in a kind of Gregorian chant. The whole thing goes on for several tedious hours. And the kids aren't particularly great singers. $14,426.

Me, sorry. I have to say that. $14,380. There are a bunch of small prize amounts that drop, but at some point the orbs spit out the biggest prize of the day and its corresponding number. This big prize is called El Gordo, the fat one. The total jackpot for El Gordo can be close to a billion dollars. I'm so happy to see you again! I'm so happy to see you again! I'm so happy to see you again!

I'm so happy to see you again! But it's almost certain that the winning number isn't held by a single individual. It's held by hundreds or even thousands of people who probably all live in the same geographic region of Spain. Reporters scrambled to find out where the winning number was sold. And on December 22nd, 2011, everyone looked to a little farming town in the northeast corner of the country. I got a phone call from a friend of mine that he was on the train. That's Coasties again. He was telling me that something is going on in Sardeto

because I'm in the train and everybody's on the phone talking on the phone and I hear all the time Sardeto, Sardeto, Sardeto. 58,268. That was the lottery number that had won El Gordo. The winning tickets had been sold all over Soretto by the Housewives Association, a group of women who host parties and activities in town. The association sold lottery tickets door-to-door for six euros, five euros for the lottery share and one euro for their fundraising. Hola, soy Maricarmen L'Ambéa.

Yo escogí el número de la lotería que tuve. Hi, I'm Maricarmen L'Ambéa, and I chose the winning number in Sodeto when I was the secretary of the Housewives Association. When Marie Carmen heard that their number had won El Gordo, she started calling friends. No one could believe it. On a PA system that the town normally only used to announce water shortages, El Gordo, she started calling friends. No one could believe it.

On a PA system that the town normally only used to announce water shortages, the mayor came on and said, Congratulations, Sodeto, we have just one military come to the plaza to celebrate. That experience, you can't really explain it. If you didn't live it, you can't imagine. If you had been there in the moment, you would have thought

these people have gone completely crazy. The residents of Sodato frantically searched for their tickets. Had they bought one from the housewives? Each six-year-old ticket, the housewives at Salt, was now worth 100,000 euros. How many did each person have? Soon the entire town was congregated in the fauna. People chanted their winning number as cars drove through the streets honking their horns. We are the best! We are the best! Yeah!

Anna, the bartender, had won. Paco, the farmer and his wife, Marisol, the hairdresser, had won. Rosa, the mayor of the town, had won. It seemed that every single resident of the small town of Sodeto had bought a lottery ticket from the housewives and won a piece of El Gordo. The whole village, everyone, everyone except one. Yet there was one person who didn't have a ticket.

And who was it? That was me. Coasties did not have a ticket. Coasties who had moved to the town for love and stayed even after he broke up with his Spanish girlfriend, Sandra. Who yes, had a ticket. Costies lived on the edge of town, and somehow the housewives had missed him when they went knocking on doors.

They drove everywhere except at my place, which they didn't do it on purpose. It just is the only one which is outside, you know, from the village, so they do feel a little bit guilty. The people of Sodeto were not the only ones to win on the number 58,268 in 2011. A few thousand other people also had small shares of the number, mostly scattered around in towns nearby. The total jackpot that year for El Gordo was about 750 million euros, but it was divided by thousands of people. And so De To, the people who bought more tickets, got more money, and everyone got at least 100,000 euros. Everyone except co-stees.

Ramil, what's up? Six years later, co-stees still lives in Saratdo. He and Sandra are good friends now. She lives in the center of town, and he just outside of it, in a barn that he's turned into a house that still feels kind of like a barn. He has a couple of big German shepherds. You can hear one of them jumping into my mic.

When I ask Cosius if he felt or still feels any regret or jealousy about not having a ticket, he laughs like it's a ridiculous question. No, nothing. For a while after Soetto's win, reporters swarmed the little town. They especially wanted to talk with Kostis, the one unlucky guy who was left out of the lottery. But Kostis doesn't feel unlucky.

In fact, if anything, he feels like he got something that day too. He's a filmmaker, and the day the town won the lottery, he grabbed his camera and went to the plaza. The moment that that happened, it was literally like somebody was giving me a script in my hands. He filmed all the celebrating, and he's been filming ever since. He says it's been really interesting to see what happens when a whole town gets wealth all at once. The whole thing is like a social experiment with really fast results to study and see what an event like this can do to people. He's not always for good.

Costa thinks the people in Sarato have become a little more insular since the win, more focused on the nuclear family and less on the town as a community. You do see how he's affecting how they have changed, how they have closed. Before that, all the doors were constantly open. The way he talks about it makes me wonder if the people in the town will like the film when they see it. But Coastie says he thinks they will, mostly. Maybe a few small things they might not like it, but that's reality.

One thing about Sarato, there are birds, a lot of them. Luckily this is also one of the things I'm able to say in Spanish. Pajados, sí. And yetchas. Another thing about Soretto, it's hot. Marie Carmen, the former secretary of the Housewives Association, tells me it's not usually this hot until later in the summer. This heat, she says, I just can't with this heat.

As we walk around, Sodeto, she's pointing out a few houses that have been fixed up with lottery money. But mostly Marie Carmen says, the town hasn't changed that much. So, that was a town of farmers and some of them installed new irrigation systems or bought new tractors. Some people made modest additions to their homes, but nothing that extravagant. Kielo, Vania, Terva. Unlike Costa's, Marie Carmen hasn't noticed the town being more closed off since the lottery. She thinks there have been some little jealousies here and there, not everyone won the same amount.

But overall, she thinks it's been an incredible thing for everyone in this little working-class town to live without the worry of debt. She's been battling cancer, which keeps going away and coming back, and the money's allowed her to stop working and not worry. For me personally, the lottery has just brought a sense of calm. I don't know, like, to have the day to day cover it, you know?

And that's the thing with this Syndicate-style lottery, unlike the Powerball Trackpot, which heaps hundreds of millions on one or two lonely winners. The money from the Christmas lottery gets divvied up among thousands of people, and they don't generally win enough to buy mansions and yachts. They win enough to pay off their debts, maybe buy a Honda Civic. The lottery brings wealth to a whole geographic area and distributes it relatively evenly, at least among those lucky enough to have a ticket. After a short walk, Marie Carmen and I arrive at the new office of the Housewives Association,

which now, to be more modern, is officially called the Women's Association, but everyone still seems to call it the Housewives Association. Back in 2011, when they were selling lottery tickets, the group kept for for themselves, which ended up winning them 400,000 euros. At the time, enough to cover their budget for the next 200 years. With all the new money, they fixed up an old school building in town and made it into their office slash community center. It has a nice kitchen for parties, a laundry room and a fitness center.

You see, all of this was made with lottery money. This living room was built, the kitchen, and the association gave coasties some money for his film. We gave him... I don't remember how much, if it was 15,000 euros or how much. I don't know, it was a good bit. But she also mentions that he hasn't finished it yet, and everyone is waiting.

No, it still hasn't come out in theaters or anything yet. The people here in the village are waiting, like, what's up, we gave you money. Marie Carmen isn't the only one to mention this to me. It actually seems to be the talk of the town. A little later that day I run into a group of older guys. When I tell them I met with Coasties, one of them says, The one who made the movie.

But he hasn't even come out with it yet. I tell him I think it'll be another year before the film is finished and he says, Okay, I'll take a mordinko. But it's already been five. Another guy chimed in and says, Coastist didn't win the lottery, but he's done quite well for himself. He says he's been getting paid for all the television interviews he's done.

Then they talk about how much he's been getting paid. Mucho dinero. Mucho. ¿A qué le dieron? Ah, no lo sabía. No, lo hago. For the record, Coastist told me he's never been paid for any interviews. Conspiracy theories aside, I got the feeling the people in Sardeto liked Coastist, the strange Greek artist who lives on the outskirts of town. But I also wondered if they see him as an outsider, and if the lottery has made this even more pronounced.

When I asked Marie Carmen about this, she says, no, he's one of us. We just wish he'd come out with that movie. Economists have long struggled to figure out why people play the lottery. It's not a rational investment of your money. The odds of winning are terrible, worse than Blackjack, worse than slot machines, worse odds than any other form of gambling, and yet it's the most popular form of gambling. But in Spain, it's pretty obvious why people play this lottery. It's a social thing to do.

You buy a ticket because the Housewives Association will pester you until you do it. You buy tickets because your friends are buying tickets. You buy because you don't want to be that one guy in town who doesn't win. You don't want to be coasties. The Housewives Association continues to choose a number each year for the Christmas lottery and sell tickets in Soretto and in the surrounding little towns. And while they used to knock on doors for months, they don't have to do that anymore. Now the people come to them and tickets sell out in a few days.

They were lucky once and they could be again, people say. And no one wants to be left out. 99% Invisible was produced this week by our senior producer Katie Mingle, Mix and Tech Production by Sharif Usif, the digital director is Kurt Colstead. The rest of the team includes Delaney Hall, Avery Trollman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taren Mazza, and me Roman Wars. Find out more about Coastie's movie, which he's working on with his film partner Laura Swarinson at KwondoToco.com.

We'll put a link on our website because I am not going to spell it for you. While you're there, check out some beautiful animations of this story by Benjamin Stark. Music in this episode was composed by Jenny Conley Driesos, John Newfeld, and Nate Query. They were a part of the team that also scored the Genie Chance story and toured live with us. They are the best. We had additional songs composed by our own, Sean Rial.

Carmen Vidal did the English voiceover from Marie Carmen. Special thanks to Roberto Garvia and Zach Frolic. We are a project of radio-topia and KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find the show in joint discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI Org. Or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you want to read Kurt's story about that time, we tested guided missiles for

postal delivery. That really happened. You can find out all about it on our website atepia.org