What Charges Did the Triple Six Fix Defendants Face?

Legal-use note: this is a charge-level prosecution digest, not legal advice. It separates accusation, plea, conviction, sentence, immunity, and appellate outcome because those words are not interchangeable in the Triple Six Fix record.

Last verified: July 30, 2026. Source note: direct public retrieval of the Pennsylvania Superior Court opinion in Commonwealth v. Katsafanas was blocked through the searched legal databases, so the appellate holding below is stated from accessible secondary accounts and should be checked against the published reporter by a licensed attorney before courtroom use. Wikipedia is useful for locating the case outline, but its own page flags citation gaps, so it is treated here as provisional rather than controlling authority. [1]

The practical answer is seven prosecution participants in the full record, with the recurring “six” figure coming from the initial grand jury presentment. The New York Times contemporaneously reported six persons named in the rigged Pennsylvania lottery matter in September 1980; later separate December 1980 charges involving Bock and Luman are the reason the fuller prosecution count is treated as seven in later charge summaries. [2][3]

Charge matrix: defendants, theories, outcomes, and confidence

This table uses seven prosecution slots because that is the count needed to reconcile the initial six-person presentment with the later December 1980 charging posture. Accessible secondary sources reliably fix the principal trial defendants, the immunity treatment of the Maragos brothers, and the guilty-plea treatment of Bock and Luman. They do not, by themselves, cleanly identify every first name and count label with reporter-level certainty.

The six criminal theories should not be blended into one “lottery fraud” label

The legal charges in the Triple Six Fix lottery scandal are often described as if they were one undifferentiated fraud case. That is convenient for a headline and hazardous for citation. The prosecution record, as summarized in the accessible sources, turns on distinct theories: criminal conspiracy under 18 Pa.C.S. § 903, theft by deception under § 3922, criminal mischief under § 3304, rigging a publicly exhibited contest under § 4109, perjury under § 4902, and accessory or co-conspirator liability reflected in plea outcomes. [1][3]

Conspiracy did not require the state to pretend that every participant touched every lottery ball or submitted every ticket. It supplied the group-liability frame: an agreement to corrupt the drawing, with acts taken to carry the plan forward. That is why the conviction record can be discussed as a prosecution structure rather than merely as a list of individual stunts.

Theft by deception carried the money theory. The lottery paid, or stood ready to pay, on results presented as random and legitimate. Accounts put conspirator winnings at about $1.18 million to $1.2 million, with most of the broader $1.8 million in fraudulently obtained winnings and uncashed tickets recovered. The $1.18 million and $1.2 million figures appear to be rounding variants, not a legally meaningful conflict in the charge record. [3][4]

Criminal mischief and rigging a publicly exhibited contest did different work. The lottery-ball tampering supplied the factual basis for treating the drawing itself as corrupted, while the contest-rigging count addressed the public exhibition of a supposedly fair drawing. The familiar detail—weighted balls arranged so that the number 666 could be drawn—matters legally only because it explains why the state had more than a money-loss theory. [5]

Perjury is the clean dividing line between Perry and Plevel in the conviction set. Perry was convicted of perjury in addition to the core conspiracy, theft, mischief, and contest-rigging counts; Plevel was convicted on the same principal set minus perjury. Treating both men as simply “convicted in the lottery scandal” loses a real difference in the verdict. [3]

Perry and Plevel anchor the prosecution’s severity

Nick Perry was the public face of the drawing, and later accounts naturally orbit him. For charge analysis, the more important point is that his legal name in the appellate caption appears as Nicholas Katsafanas, and his conviction set was the broadest: conspiracy, theft by deception, criminal mischief, rigging a publicly exhibited contest, and perjury. He received a 3–7 year sentence. [3][4]

That sentence is a small but persistent source of slippage. Some summaries say Perry received “seven years.” That is understandable in ordinary prose, but it is not the sentence structure a lawyer or risk reader should copy. The better statement is 3–7 years: three years minimum, seven years maximum. [3][5]

Edward Plevel’s sentence, 2–7 years, shows that the court did not treat him as a peripheral witness even though his conviction set was narrower than Perry’s. The absence of perjury from Plevel’s listed convictions matters, but it did not move him into the plea-or-immunity category occupied by other participants. [3]

Immunity and guilty pleas are outcomes, not lesser versions of the same conviction

The Maragos brothers are important because they keep the prosecution record from looking like a flat list of defendants who were all charged, tried, and sentenced alike. The accessible summaries identify them as receiving full immunity because they cooperated and testified for the state. That is not an acquittal, a plea, or a sentencing reduction; it is a different legal posture. [3]

Bock and Luman occupy another category. They were charged separately in December 1980 and entered guilty pleas with lighter sentences. The supplied materials support that general plea-and-lighter-sentence conclusion, but they do not provide enough count-by-count detail to state with confidence the exact statutory wording of each plea. [3]

For citation purposes, the safe formulation is narrow: Perry and Plevel were convicted after trial; the Maragos brothers received full immunity and testified; Bock and Luman pleaded guilty and received lighter sentences. Anything broader should be checked against the charging documents or the published appellate record.

Why the defendant count keeps drifting between six and seven

The six-versus-seven problem is not just trivia. A reader comparing charging structures could wrongly conclude that all material participants were in the original presentment, or that later plea defendants were part of the same initial charging event. The better chronology is more precise: the initial grand jury presentment named six persons; later December 1980 charges involving Bock and Luman brought the full prosecution record to seven. [2][3]

That chronology also explains why narrative accounts can be accurate within their own frame and still be unhelpful for a charge table. A September 1980 story saying six people were named is not necessarily denying the later seven-person prosecution record. It is describing an earlier procedural moment. [2]

The remaining difficulty is name-level completeness. The accessible packet used here reliably identifies Perry/Katsafanas, Plevel, the Maragos brothers as immunized witnesses, and Bock and Luman as plea defendants. It does not safely resolve every first name and count label needed for a reporter-grade seven-name table. That is a limitation of the accessible sources, not a reason to compress the prosecution back into the more famous six-person shorthand.

Procedural path, without the folklore

The prosecution path is short enough to state plainly. In September 1980, public reporting described a grand jury presentment naming six persons in the rigged Pennsylvania lottery case. In December 1980, separate charges involving Bock and Luman expanded the later prosecution record. In May 1981, Perry and Plevel were convicted in Dauphin County Court, with Perry receiving the broader conviction set because of the perjury count. [2][3]

Sentencing then split the participants by posture. Perry received 3–7 years; Plevel received 2–7 years; the Maragos brothers received full immunity for cooperation and testimony; Bock and Luman pleaded guilty and received lighter sentences. [3][4]

The mechanics of the drawing belong in the record only to the extent they explain the charges. The scheme is reported to have involved weighted lottery balls that made the 666 result possible, which is why the state could frame the matter not only as theft, but also as corruption of a publicly exhibited contest. [5]

Appellate status

Commonwealth v. Katsafanas is the appellate endpoint that keeps this from being merely a trial-court scandal record. Accessible summaries state that the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the convictions in 1983 and rejected challenges including sufficiency-of-evidence and jury-instruction arguments. Because direct crawled access to the opinion was blocked during preparation, that holding should be verified from the published reporter before the case is cited in a brief. [1][3]

On the available record, the legal disposition is this: Perry/Katsafanas and Plevel’s convictions stood on appeal; the principal trial sentences were 3–7 years and 2–7 years respectively; the Maragos brothers’ role was resolved through full immunity and testimony; and Bock and Luman resolved their exposure through guilty pleas with lighter sentences. The Triple Six Fix matters as a legal reference because, once the count and outcome labels are separated, it becomes an unusually clean example of a state fraud prosecution using multiple overlapping theories against a lottery-rigging scheme.

References

1. 1980 Pennsylvania Lottery scandal, Wikipedia
2. 6 Named in Rigged $1 Million Pennsylvania Lottery, The New York Times, September 20, 1980
3. Convicted bookie helped uncover “Triple Six Fix” Pa. lottery scandal 40 years ago, PennLive
4. Nick Perry, 86; Radio Star Jailed for Fixing Pennsylvania Lottery, Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2003
5. The local TV star who rigged the lottery, The Hustle