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Before 1989 — and July 1990
The illegal game: For most of the twentieth century the everyday lottery of American cities was the numbers game — policy, as the older name ran — a three-digit daily wager banked by whoever would hold the bets, run in city after city out of barbershops, bars, and back rooms, at odds no state would later match for stinginess. Fort Wayne had the setting for it: the Crime section documents the tolerated gambling rooms and the roughly forty saloons of the Calhoun Street corridor, the semi-legal layer that sat on top of the city's saloon trade for decades. What the published and court record reached does not contain is a named Fort Wayne numbers bank of the documented Detroit or Harlem scale — no local policy king, no numbers grand-jury case, surfaces in print. The game here is documented at the level of the gambling room, and this entry prints it at that level rather than borrowing another city's racket.
The state takes the game: What legalization did, in July 1990, was put the state itself into the three-digit business. The Hoosier Lottery's Daily 3 — evening drawings from July 2, 1990 — and its companion Daily 4 are, in form, the numbers game with the state as the bank: pick your digits, wait for the daily drawing. Fort Wayne winners on the legal number are part of the ordinary winner record; the Lottery's own 2018 roundup of notable winners lists Jerry Starks of Fort Wayne, who won $50,000 playing Daily 4. The illegal game's history in this city ends, so far as the record shows, not with a famous prosecution but with the state opening a window and selling the same bet.
Sources:
- Crime History (this record) — the Calhoun Street saloons and tolerated gambling rooms; cross-referenced, not retold.
- Lottery Post results database, Indiana Daily 3 — evening drawings run from July 2, 1990; Daily 3 and Daily 4 both began in July 1990.
- Hoosier Lottery notable-winners summary for 2018, as carried in lottery trade summaries — Jerry Starks of Fort Wayne, $50,000 on Daily 4.