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BY JOSH FEIT, jfeit@wweek.com
Photos: LEAH G. NASH You can still get tickets to a show from Tickets & More, but you can't play the lottery there.The odds that the Oregon Lottery Commission made a big mistake are pretty high. On Oct. 3, the lottery gave the OK to JoAnne Lingo to sell lottery tickets at her Lloyd Center store. But last month, the lottery suspended her contract and asked the Oregon state police to investigate her company. Oregon Lottery spokesman David Hooper won't say why Lingo is under investigation, but Willamette Week has learned that her new business seems to be the reincarnation of Lloyd Center Tickets, a derelict retailer that the lottery shut down just five months earlier when it failed to pay the state $16,000 in lottery-ticket revenues. A simple name change seems to have been enough camouflage to put Lloyd Center Tickets back in business in the exact same location at Lloyd Center. The new business is called Tickets & More and also has a shop at Jantzen Beach. More than 3,000 shops sell lottery tickets, so it's not surprising that an estimated three ticket retailers per month lose their contract after bilking the state out of lottery proceeds. What is surprising, however, is how easy it was for Lloyd Center Tickets to get a new contract with the state. It appears that Lloyd Center Tickets simply changed its name to Tickets & More in July and reapplied for a contract to sell lottery tickets in August. By October it was back in business. Marv Leach, who owns Cellular Plus, the store next door to Tickets & More, says the ties between Lloyd Center Tickets and Tickets & More are clear. Leach should know. His company, a sub-tenant at Lloyd Center, pays its rent to Tickets & More. Leach says he sends his rent checks to Tickets & More at the same address he sent them to when Lloyd Center Tickets was his landlord. Moreover, Leach says the canceled checks from both businesses bear the same signature: Sharon Heintz Busse. Heintz Busse is Lingo's daughter. Finally, Leach says, Lingo's son, Steven Heintz, is active in the new business. This is significant because Heintz was the manager of Lloyd Center Tickets between July 1996 and May 1997, the period when the businessstarted short-changing the Oregon Lottery. Employees at Cellular Plus say Heintz negotiated the Lloyd Center lease for Tickets & More and dealt with everyone from electricians to lottery supervisors when setting up the new business. Finally, they say, he hired his girlfriend to manage the Lloyd Center store. Heintz currently works at the Jantzen Beach store. Neither Tickets & More's main offices nor its attorney, Mark Jacobsen,would comment about the investigation. "Some of the same people are involved in this business," lottery spokesman Hooper says. "But not the principals. The principals go through an extensive disclosure process." Despite that extensive process, however, the state failed to draw any connection between the Lloyd Center Tickets and its twin brother, Tickets & More. The state might never have realized it had given a contract to the same people it had terminated just months earlier if not for another gaffe. In June, after Lloyd Center Tickets got the boot, Cellular Plus applied to sell lottery tickets at the space vacated by Lloyd Center Tickets. The lottery gave Cellular Plus a contract, even though Tickets & More had been approved to sell tickets from the same spot. When lottery officials realized they had two contractors registered for the same location, they put both contracts on hold. "It became obvious at that point that something wasn't right," Hooper says. "No one is selling lottery tickets there now." |
