Shaheen looks like a winner

On Tom Shaheen's first day running North Carolina's lottery, a rainy Monday in early December, he reported to a back-room suite in a dreary state building off Oberlin Road. He had three temporary workers, a few desks, some pens and a couple of trash cans.

On Tuesday, he briefed lottery commissioners on the current state of the games:

In less than four months, Shaheen and his staff have built an operation ready to sell tickets beginning at 6 a.m. Thursday at 5,000 outlets in each of the 100 counties. Each retailer has a computer terminal linked to a network in touch with a satellite. Regional offices are set to open in major cities, including a new headquarters on Yonkers Road in North Raleigh.

UPS trucks were delivering millions of scratch-off ticket games to retail outlets. Training sessions were wrapping up. Software had been tested; offices were outfitted.

Lottery chairman Charles Sanders, a former chief executive of drug maker Glaxo Inc., was impressed.

"What you've done with the team," Sanders told Shaheen, "is a little short of incredible."

And if all goes as expected, the games will rake in $1.2 billion in the coming fiscal year.

Problems might yet happen, especially with long lines expected for the first few days at stores, where tempers can flare and new equipment can malfunction. Lottery officials also want to make sure all stores get tickets, though they acknowledge that some probably will miss out by accident.

Even so, the building of North Carolina's lottery has had remarkably few problems.

Challenges

Three key areas pose the biggest challenges for a new lottery: recruiting retailers to sell the games, training store personnel, and getting the machinery installed in time.

The first was little trouble. More than 6,200 stores have applied to sell, and more than 5,000 were on time to be approved for opening day.

Based on industry standards, the state expected the lottery to have 5,000 to 7,000 outlets. Officials are especially pleased to reach that range by Day One.

Then there's the training: Outlets cannot sell tickets unless a manager or other store employee have learned about the games and how to operate the lottery's computer terminal. A license to sell is granted only after the training.

Shaheen, a past president of the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, said other states are lucky to have 70 percent of retailers show up for mandatory training before opening day. In North Carolina, attendance has been 99 percent.

"I have never seen anything like it," he said. "It's unheard-of."

Retailers will make 7 cents off every $1 in tickets they sell. Four instant-ticket games will be offered at first, with more rolled out in the coming days or weeks.

To offer the games, though, the state needed to have computer terminals installed at the outlets in time. That responsibility fell to lottery vendor GTECH Corp. of Rhode Island, which won bids to handle the instant-ticket printing and distribution as well as all aspects of the lotto pick 'em games, which won't begin until May 30.

GTECH says it has set records for the daily numbers of terminal installations at outlets.

And the company's work hasn't gone unnoticed, including by The Pantry, which will lead the state with more than 300 lottery outlets at its convenience stores.

The Pantry sells lottery tickets in eight other states.

"This work here is one of the very best," said Bob Reale, a Pantry vice president overseeing the chain's lottery efforts.

'I'm human'

Overseeing it all has been Shaheen, who last year quit as New Mexico's lottery director to head North Carolina's games.

When he took the job, state and federal investigators were already examining whether the lottery industry illegally influenced the games' creation here; those probes continue. One lottery commissioner had resigned amid scandal. Two of the other eight also quit.

A former state Supreme Court justice was working on a lawsuit that could have canceled the entire operation, and debate lingered about whether the state should even sponsor gambling.

"I'm human," Shaheen said in a recent interview. "Sure, I thought about all that stuff. I thought about it every day."

Shaheen said he also decided it was all out of his control. He came in large part because he wanted to start the games in the biggest state that still didn't have them. He will be paid $235,000 a year -- more than the governor and other top elected officials -- and stands to get a $50,000 bonus once the first ticket is sold, a reward for selling the games before April 5.

He has hired about 160 people, some of them also among the highest paid in state government.

Still, Shaheen admits there were times when he wasn't sure how it would all come together. "I had many scary days," he said.

On Tuesday, he was focused on getting the tickets packed and shipped. At his office, a countdown clock ticked closer to Thursday morning.