Friend to testify in lottery scam trial

Defendent’s software picked numbers for games in several states

DES MOINES, Iowa — It took Texas businessman Robert Rhodes more than a year to turn against his “good old boy” best friend after he realized that Eddie Tipton would not do a deal and tell prosecutors about how he had created an elaborate system to rig lotteries in five states.

But despite fear for his safety, Rhodes is poised to give testimony at a trial scheduled for July 10 in Des Moines that prosecutors hope will finally put Tipton behind bars a decade after launching a scheme that netted $2 million in jackpots.

“Here is my best friend. And my best friend, he’s a big boy. And he’s a good old boy. And in Texas good old boys have lots of guns and they have pickup trucks,” Rhodes said in a deposition after he agreed to testify against Tipton. “A good old boy might get pissed off and come after you.”

Tipton’s job at the Urbandale, Iowa-based Multi-State Lottery Association was to write software designed to pick numbers for lottery computers used for games by 37 state and territories.

Rhodes told prosecutors that Tipton would visit him at his home in Texas and they’d sit in the backyard under a tree on outdoor furniture by a chiminea stove and talk. At one point, Rhodes said Tipton told him that he’d created computer code that allowed him to predict lottery numbers for certain games on certain dates.

“I think that would be, you know, rigging the system,” Rhodes told prosecutors.

Rhodes, who has known Tipton since the early 1990s when they were in business together in Texas, has entered plea agreements in Iowa and Wisconsin in which he promised to testify against Tipton.

Rhodes is prepared to explain how Tipton, the computer programmer’s brother Tommy Tipton, a former Texas judge, and Rhodes played a series of numbers on certain dates.

Investigators say Tipton installed software on the random number generators that worked as intended 362 days of the year, but directed them to produce predictable numbers May 27, Nov. 22 and Dec. 29 if the drawings also occurred on Wednesdays or Saturdays after 8 p.m. Even then, Tipton wouldn’t know the precise winning combinations but they’d be predictable.