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Who Is Michael Larson? A Portrait of a Schemer
At 10:10 · chapter starts 7:25
To understand what kind of man could pull off the Press Your Luck heist, the host takes the listener back to Larson's Ohio upbringing. From a young age, Michael fixated on making a quick buck: selling candy to classmates at inflated prices in middle school, gaming bank promotional offers by opening and closing accounts under different names, and starting a business under a family member's name so he could hire and fire himself and collect unemployment checks [1] — Host "He's the kind of guy who works hard to find shortcuts in life. But hates doing hard work." 10:10 . His oldest brother James recognized the pattern early, describing Michael as someone whose desire to make money fast would doom him to self-destruction. None of these schemes were particularly sophisticated; what they shared was an almost paradoxical quality — Larson expended enormous energy finding ways to avoid real work. By 1983, approaching his mid-thirties, he is twice divorced, in a common-law marriage to a woman named Teresa, and still without any stable footing. Then, one late fall, he fills his living room with stacked television sets and begins watching game shows obsessively.
Larson's Press Your Luck con didn't come from nowhere. From middle school candy-bar schemes to gaming bank promotions and collecting fraudulent unemployment checks, he spent a lifetime working harder than most people to avoid doing actual work.
